(Reuters) - Shares in Britain's Oxford Nanopore dropped nearly 12% on Tuesday, after the sensing technology company issued a revenue warning, citing a slowdown in China and the Middle East, along with staggered purchases from large clients.
The company, which specialises in technology used to comprehend the biology of humans, plants, animals, bacteria and diseases like cancer, said the recent U.S. trade rules have heightened regulation of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor sales. That has slowed growth in China and the Middle East, it added.
The London-listed firm, which was spun out from the University of Oxford and went public in 2021, expects full-year revenue for its Life Science Research Tools unit to be 169 million pounds ($215.2 million), falling short of the consensus expectation of 177 million pounds, according to brokerage Peel Hunt (LON:PEEL).
The company also flagged a hit to second-half underlying revenue due to delayed purchases by large customers.
Shares in the company fell as much as 11.9% to 178 pence on Tuesday, marking the biggest one-day drop in nearly two years.
"Management must be more disciplined in deploying capital – pursuing top-line growth at the expense of all else is vanity and risks the balance sheet," Peel Hunt analysts said.
($1 = 0.7854 pounds)
(This story has been corrected to say that the revenue forecast is for unit, not company, in paragraph 3 and fixes the tense to say 'delayed' in paragraph 4)