Bio-Rad’s revenues and profits soar
The company recorded revenues of $452.3m (€303.6m) for the second quarter of 2008, compared with $339.1m during the same period in 2007.
Norman Schwartz, Bio-Rad’s CEO, attributed $65m of the $113m increase in revenue to the company’s acquisition of DiaMed last year and $27m to favourable foreign currency exchanges.
Operating income soared to $59.7m an increase of over 67 per cent compared to the same period last year. Net income grew a staggering 69 per cent to $43.3m, up from the $25.6m recorded during the second quarter of 2007.
Costs of sales increased inline with revenues to $203.9m accounting for nearly 55 per cent of revenues.
Research and development costs fell slightly as a percentage of revenues from 10.2 per cent last year to 9.3 per cent this year, although in monetary terms this amounted to an increase from $34.7m to $42.0m.
According to Schwartz, “the growth in R&D expense for both life science and diagnostic segments was inline with their respective growth rates”.
The life science segment reported quarterly sales of $161.6m, an increase of nearly 11 per cent compared to the $146m, reported for the same period in the prior year.
“In life science, we continue to do well in many areas, particularly in process chromatography, protein identification and expression. I think the release earlier this year of a series of gene amplification instruments also contributed to the second quarter growth,” said Schwartz.
Sales from the company’s clinical diagnostics group rose 51.4 per cent to $287.4m, with $65m of the increase being attributed to addition of DiaMed to the group.
While the clinical diagnostics group saw its biggest growth in North America an Europe, the life science segments largest growth markets were North America, Asian and Latin America.
Despite the strong growth achieved by the life science segment, the company noted that capital instrument sales were down slightly during the quarter and attributed this to a “general softness in the market resulting from reduced spending by both academic and bio-pharmaceutical customers.”
This is a trend that has been noted by many companies selling into the laboratory sector and is leading to vendors concentrating more heavily on sales of consumables that are not as affected by downturns in investment by pharma firms and grant awarding bodies.
According to Brad Crutchfield, vice president of Bio-Rad and group manager for the life science segment, this ‘softness’ affected “less than 25 per cent of our business … but it is relatively big dollars, specifically around some of our Bio-Plex instruments, the life science version and our new protein interaction instrument which sells for near $0.25m.”
