Company Announcements

For the fiscal half year ending September 2015, Oxford Instruments sales fell 5.8%, down 2.8% organically, to £164.8 million ($253.5 million) (see IBO 11/15/15). Growth was hampered by weak global Industrial Analysis sales within the Industrial Products segment, which fell 7.9% organically. While organic growth for the Nanotechnology Tools segment was marginally lower, product and service revenues within the NanoCharacterisation division expanded. Adjusted operating profit grew 7.0% to £20.0 million ($30.8 million) primarily due to acquisitions.

In February, Oxford Instruments appointed Mary Waldner, Group FD of Ultra Electronics, to its Board.

William H. Rastetter, PhD, resigned as chairman of Illumina in January. He will serve as an Illumina representative on the board of GRAIL (see IBO 1/15/16).

BD announced a collaborative relationship with Singularity University to address global healthcare challenges, initially under the theme of digital health. Singularity University’s mission is to educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies towards solving humanity’s grand challenges. BD also hired an entrepreneur in residence.

In January, Pharma Test, a provider of test devices and systems for QC of pharma physical dosage–form properties, announced the acquisition of J&M Analytik, a supplier of UV-Vis and NIR spectroscopy systems for lab and process applications. J&M will remain a distinct company.

In its fourth quarter 2015 conference call, GE announced that, excluding currency, Life Sciences revenue rose 6%. Orders grew 2%, or 8% excluding currency effects, with Bioprocess orders up 16%.

Corning Life Science 2015 revenue declined 4.8% to $821 million (see IBO 1/31/16), or 9% of company sales. Labware sales declined 4.5% and Cell Culture Product sales fell 5.2% to make up 62% and 38% of Life Sciences sales, respectively. Two customers accounted for 46% of segment sales.

Frank W. Cahouet will retire from the Board of Teledyne Technologies in April. The company’s fixed number of directors will decline to 10.

Illumina named Dr. Frances Arnold, director of the Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center at the California Institute of Technology, to its Board in January. Her lab focuses on protein engineering by directed evolution.

Xylem’s fourth quarter 2015 Test sales rose 4%, with growth in Europe and China. Year-end sales declined 7.6% to $291 million to make up 13% of Water Infrastructure revenue.

Sales/Orders of Note

Illumina announced in February that it signed biobanking deals with Vanderbilt University, the University of Colorado at Denver, Partners Healthcare and Montreal Heart Institute.