All right, that just about wraps it up. As you can see, were super excited about both of these
transactions and the year ahead. Signing a deal is obviously the easy part, although I am extraordinarily grateful to our team at Ginkgo for the immense amount of work that went into getting both of these deals done, particularly sort of at the same
time. And to both the Bayer and Zymergen teams who also did an enormous amount of work and were extremely good partners and candid throughout this process. But now were focused on the real job: planning, and after closing, executing a robust
integration. With that, I think were ready to open it up to questions. Mark and Anna Marie will join me for Q&A. Anna Marie, do you want to kick things off?
Anna Marie Wagner, SVP, Corporate Development, Ginkgo Bioworks:
Sure. Thanks, Jason. All right, Im going to go ahead and stop sharing here. Weve got a number of analysts on the line. And so if youd like to
ask a question, as usual, please just raise your hand and I will call on you and unmute your line. So I think first, this morning, weve got Tejas. Tejas, you should be able to speak now.
Tejas Savant, Morgan Stanley:
Hey guys, good morning,
and congrats on the deal here. A couple of, actually, quick ones for you, Jason. I mean, as you thought about sort of acquiring the talent from Zymergen versus acquiring the company itself, can you just sort of help us think through how you came
about this decision?
And then secondly, to your point around horizontal versus the vertical approach, were you tempted to keep some of these programs in-house, particularly the stuff theyre doing around screens, et cetera, which is the most mature and near-term opportunity? And is that sort of both the cost reduction targets that youve laid out, as
well as the potential evaluation of strategic alternatives for those commercial, or I guess, advanced pre-commercial programs, part of the framework here as you think about deal close? Any color on that would
be helpful.
Jason Kelly, Co-founder & CEO, Ginkgo Bioworks:
Yeah, happy to comment on that. So maybe Ill take them in turn. So you first asked about, how do we think about acquiring the whole company versus just
say hiring talent thats coming out of Zymergen as people are leaving, and that we were pointing out that we had sort of needs for a lot of these roles already at Ginkgo. So one of the reasons I wanted to point that out was really just about
incremental spending. In other words, we were planning to grow into a lot of these areas so having these folks come in, saved us a lot of recruiting effort, but also importantly, its sort of like a dollars and cents topic. When it comes to
acquiring the whole company, the magic is the people plus the technology theyve been spending the last decade building, right? So theres a lot of A: implicit value in that technology, but also the knowhow, the folks associated with it
really who understand the history of creating it are some of the best people to then build on that technology in the future.
So, really, we think the two
together are particularly important and we are very, very excited about the technology itself and using that to help continue Knights Law and driving down our costs at Ginkgo and increasing our scale for our customers. You also asked about,
hey, okay, I know Ive heard it. Ginkgos a platform business. You dont do end products, but Zymergen has some really cool product assets in areas
7