Class action suit against Illumina?

[ottoblau]

Illumina repeatedly has problems to deliver chemistry for sequencers. As long as chemistry cannot be delivered, sequencers cannot be used. If you have a service contract for a sequencer this means that you pay for something useless during these weeks or months!

This means that the entire community of Illumina sequencer users is affected and pays service contracts for temporarily non-usable instruments. Since service contracts go by ten-thousands of $ or € per year, the big number of affected labs together loose a lot of money.

Does anybody know a lawyer who would be interested to see if we could recover some of the service contract money?

[pmiguel]

How many Illumina sequencers do you have ottoblau? (Just curious.)

Actually, Illumina seems par for the course reagent back-order-wise to me. (We also have a SOLiD and a 454). But I was somewhat irritated to see reports of high Illumina officials proclaiming to the media that their v3 chemistry basically created a sequence glut and that's why their profits were not what they were hoping last quarter.

Even though the delays for getting run chemistry have not been too bad (usually a week or two at most), it makes me wonder if Illumina bothers to account for the loss in sales that having their instruments idle due to reagent shortages represents?

I get the impression that a school of supply chain management that strongly favors low standing inventories has gained control of most of the major instrument reagent companies because it looks good on paper.

--
Phillip

[ECO]

In our experience, the louder you yell, the shorter the backorder time becomes...they clearly prioritize by who's the angriest.

[ottoblau]

Class Action Suit Illumina

You both are right, Philip and ECO, you have to yell at Illumina and the others are not better!
We pay over 40,000$ per year for a service contract, i.e. over 100$ per day. No chemistry, no sequencer. Class action should bring a good amount of money together and should be interesting for a lawyer?
Since you asked, Philip, we have one sequencer and this seems to be part of the problem. Small customers are not interesting at all for Illumina.