This story originally ran on Jan. 26.

The CEO of Waters forecast an "exciting year" for mass spectrometry in the company this week in the midst of reporting a 3 percent climb in revenues for the fourth quarter of 2009.

For the three months ended Dec. 31, 2009, the company reported receipts of $428.8 million, up from $418.3 million a year ago. Profits rose to $104.1 million, or $1.08 per share, from $99.4 million, or $1.01 per share, from the year-ago period.

The earnings release comes on the heels of Waters' launch of its Acquity H-Class UPLC, a "bridge" technology to segue HPLC users to the Acquity UPLC platform [See related story this issue], and while company officials talked up the new instrument during a conference call, they also said that they anticipate 2010 shaping up to be a healthy one for the firm's mass spec product line.

Instrument sales for the quarter in the Waters division were flat, John Ornell, the company's chief financial officer, said. Nonetheless, Douglas Berthiaume, Waters' CEO, said that 2010 "should be an exciting year for Waters in mass spectrometry."

For one thing, during the fourth quarter, the company began shipping the Synapt G2, the second-generation iteration of its flagship Synapt HDMS instrument. Launched at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry conference in June, the instrument has had the strongest ramp-up of any high-end mass spec in the company's history [See PM 06/04/09].

This week, however, Berthiaume said that the G2 would not be "the last innovative mass spec that you're going to see from us in the next 12 months," and added that new instrument introductions "will push the performance envelope while broadening the attractiveness of MS technology to a wider base of customers."

In particular, Waters plans "some exciting things" around its quadrupole technology, which is the basis of Waters' Xevo Q-TOF and Xevo TQ mass specs. Earlier this month, the company announced that the Taiwan Bureau of Food and Drug Analysis had acquired nine Xevo TQ instruments, along with four Acquity UPLC systems, for food safety monitoring. Moving forward, the company continues to see that market as well as the applied markets as being especially robust, especially outside of the US.

In the US, though the prospect of creating new food-safety legislation is still up in the air, "we're hopeful that the conditions and the regulations [will] build momentum," which would open another sales channel for the Xevo technology.

While the general sense is that business in the mass spec space was down across the entire industry in 2009, it also survived the broader economic washout better than had been originally feared. In 2010, Waters anticipates the turnaround in the mass spec market to continue. For Waters, that rebound will be likely led by its G2, which Ornell said is "likely to move our mass spec growth a few points, perhaps, overall, as it continues to hopefully grow near double digits as we make our way across the quarter."

This year, a new player will be entering the space as Danaher moves to close on its proposed purchase of the Applied Biosystems/MDS mass spec joint venture. While others, including Thermo Fisher Scientific's CEO Marc Casper, have questioned the effect of the ownership change on the competitive landscape, Berthiaume said this week that it could create opportunities for his firm.

"As some industry participants work their way through new management structures and sort out new strategies, we plan to execute our established product-to-market plan," Berthiaume said.

"The technological playing field probably moves more attractively for us as we get through 2010. We've got a number of industry participants who are going through their own structural reassessments or merger activities [and] I think the competitive environment tilts in our favor a little bit more in 2010," he said.

And as stimulus funding from the National Institutes of Health begin reaching the vendors, that adds another reason for optimism in 2010, he said.

During the quarter, Waters saw no material effect from such funding, Berthiaume said, citing a number of reasons for the delay, such as administrative procedures that have resulted in some technologies getting funded while others have not.