The $100 Genome

For years, reading DNA at scale meant buying from one company. Illumina held roughly 80% of the global sequencing market, a near-monopoly on the machines that decode genomes.^[3] A Chinese challenger has cracked it, and did so first in an American courtroom.

MGI, an offshoot of the genomics giant BGI, fought Illumina through the US courts on patents; in 2022 a Delaware jury awarded its Complete Genomics subsidiary about $334 million, and Illumina settled the wider dispute for $325 million, with cross-licences.^[1] With the legal path cleared, MGI entered the US market and went after the one thing that decides the field: price.

Illumina had 80% of the market and set the price of reading a genome. Then a Chinese rival read one for under $100.

The price war

MGI’s flagship machine can sequence a human genome for under $100, a threshold the industry had chased for years, and its reagent pricing undercuts Illumina by a third to a half, according to genomics centres that have compared them.^[3] The commercial effect is visible: MGI installed about 1,270 sequencers worldwide in 2024, up roughly 49% on the year, on revenue near $414 million.^[4] Illumina still leads globally, but its share has begun to slip.

The geopolitics cut the other way. In March 2023 the US placed several BGI affiliates on the Entity List, citing risks that their genetic-data collection could aid Chinese state surveillance and military programs, a reminder that in genomics the strategic worry is not only the machine but the data it reads.^[2] One precise caveat: it was specific BGI affiliates that were listed; MGI Tech, the instrument maker, was not itself on that March 2023 list, and the market-share figures are respected analyst estimates rather than audited data.

Reading it as an investor

Genomics compresses the whole China deep-tech thesis into one industry: a Western near-monopoly broken by a cheaper, litigation-hardened Chinese challenger, shadowed by a data-security backlash that fragments the market along geopolitical lines. The investable reading is two-sided. MGI’s cost advantage is real and its share is rising where it is allowed to compete, which is most of the world outside the United States; but the same national-security logic that put BGI affiliates on the Entity List will keep the American market partly walled off. The price of reading a genome is collapsing regardless; the open question is how cleanly the sequencing world splits into a Chinese-cost and a Western-trusted hemisphere.