Bruker achieves strong revenue growth
The acquisition of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy expert Bruker BioSpin in February brought the entire Bruker group of companies under the ownership of Bruker Biosciences (now Bruker Corporation).
The newly combined company made a strong start, recording Q2 revenues of $311.5m, an increase of 31 per cent over the $238.3m recorded by Bruker Biosciences and Bruker BioSpin during the same period the prior year.
Operating income also increased over 30 per cent compared to the second quarter of 2007 to reach $28.4m during the period, with net income increasing 22.8 per cent to $21.7m. This helped increase the firm’s net income per share from $0.11 to $0.13.
"For the second quarter of 2008, we are very pleased with our strong revenue growth, as well as our sequential and year-over-year improvements in net income and EPS. In the first two quarters of 2008 we experienced significant quarterly fluctuations in our growth rates and margins, and we expect these fluctuations to continue going forward,” said Frank Laukien, CEO of Bruker Corporation,
“However, our adjusted operating margin as a percentage of revenue was essentially flat, and therefore, in the third quarter of 2008, we intend to reaccelerate our gross margin improvement programs and to implement various streamlining and expense cutting steps with the objective of obtaining better margin leverage from our top-line growth."
The company will surely attempt to reduce the cost of revenues which accounted for $182.8m, nearly 59 per cent of total revenues, leaving a gross profit margin of just over 41 per cent.
Research and development costs increased in line with revenue growth, reaching $36.5m, nearly 12 per cent of revenues – well above the industry average.
The importance the company places on bringing new products was recognised by this year’s R&D 100 awards, with the company receiving 2 awards for NMR products, the TCI Micro-CryoProbe and MRI Mouse Brain Quadrature Cryoprobe and one for its Smart X2S benchtop x-ray crystallography machine.
"While the present global market environment is more challenging than a year ago, we are optimistic that our various medium-term growth and margin initiatives will continue our positive profitability trends of the last three years,” said Bill Knight, Bruker's chief financial officer.
“Our goal remains to drive our margins towards and beyond industry standards, while maintaining rapid revenue growth."
Bruker Corporation repaid $158m of acquisition related debt during the quarter to leave the company with a net debt position of $110.4m.
