Thermo Fisher 'Ruthlessly' Focused on Winning in Mass-Spec...

Thermo Fisher 'Ruthlessly' Focused on Winning in Mass-Spec Space, CEO Tells Investors

Thermo Fisher Scientific's chief executive, speaking at the annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference this week, challenged his competitors in the mass-spec space to better his company's technology and to capture more market share, and said Danaher's recent entry into the market is a non-factor.

"Our competitors launch products every year and they say we look long in the tooth and we look tired," Thermo Fisher CEO Marc Casper said in a webcast question-and-answer session following his presentation at the conference, which was held in San Francisco. "And we love the challenge. We love to hear that people are trying to challenge us because at the end of the day, we are confident in our technology, we are confident in our scientists, and we are ruthlessly focused on winning in that space."

Casper also took aim at a new rival. In an earlier presentation at the JP Morgan event, Danaher CEO Larry Culp talked about his firm's acquisition of the ABI/MDS mass-spec joint venture and said that with the business under Danaher's sole control — rather than being split between two companies — it would become "rejuvenated."

Culp said a turnaround would follow the closing of Danaher's purchase, still slated for the first quarter. "We see potential to take advantage of some of the things [ABI and MDS have] done both clinically and in some of the applied markets and increase our investment levels there," he said, adding that the business will be "a long-time contributor" to Danaher.

Casper, however, saw it differently. While he called Danaher a "fine company," he said the erstwhile ABI/MDS joint venture has lost a "reasonable amount of share" in the mass spec space in recent years to Thermo Fisher. He said driving this were breakthroughs in Thermo's technology, such as its Orbitrap platform.

"We feel good about our market position … and a change in [ABI/MDS'] ownership doesn't change very much the competitive landscape from that perspective," Casper said. "We went from a business that [did] ballpark $100 million in 2001 to a ballpark $500 million business today, really just through constant innovation."

At the American Society for Mass Spectrometry conference last spring, Thermo Fisher launched the Velos and LTQ Velos platforms. This week, Casper said the tools have been "incredibly well received" by the market and have contributed to the company's strong organic growth in its life science mass-spec business.

In 2010, he added, the company anticipates seeing "incremental growth opportunity" in mass specs.

Bruker's 'Pretty Good Year'

If there was one theme at this year's JP Morgan conference among the mass spec vendors it was that the economic meltdown wasn't as bad as originally feared — though there were significant challenges during the year.

With 2010 just begun, officials from these firms were optimistic that the improvement in the broader economy would continue into 2010 and raise their own businesses. Officials from presenting proteomics-directed firms said the companies will continue on their growth trajectory.

The most optimistic look-back on 2009 came from Bruker president and CEO Frank Laukien, who said the year "really did turn out to be a pretty good year for us."

New product introductions more than anything else "cushioned" Bruker against the effects of the recession, he said. In preliminary results, he said that company-wide revenues for the fourth quarter of 2009 are projected to be $340 million, up 8 percent from $315 million in the year-ago period. He added that revenues for full-year 2009 are anticipated to be flat compared to 2008.

For full-year 2010, the business is forecast to grow in the high single digits to 10-percent range, Laukien said.

Bruker Daltonics, the business that houses Bruker's mass spec business, was the fastest growing division in terms of revenue, orders, and margin improvement, Laukien said, without elaborating. In 2009, the company launched a number of mass spec platforms with proteomics applications, including the ultrafleXtreme MALDI-TOF/TOF, solariX FTMS, Edmass, and Lucid Proteomics.

Mass-spec orders in the US and Canada with life science applications, Laukien said, grew by more than 50 percent last year. While he attributed some of that to stimulus funding, especially from Europe and Asia, "I think the biggest driver was the strength of our product line."

NIH stimulus funds have been slow to reach researchers and vendors such as Bruker, he added.

Waters' 'Conservative' Year

Meanwhile, Waters President and CEO Douglas Berthiaume said that the uncertainty of the global economy forced his firm to approach its business like fiscal hawks in 2009.

"We set our budgets conservatively [and] we certainly managed conservatively," he said in a webcast of his presentation. The only area in which company officials did not want to skimp was new product development.