NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Analytik Jena said on Wednesday that it reached an agreement to buy Bruker's inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry business for undisclosed terms.
In 2013, the business generated about $12 million in revenues and Bruker had said last month that it was in talks with a potential buyer for it as part of its reorganization of the Chemical and Applied Markets division. Bruker is restructuring and/or selling parts of CAM after determining the division would not be able to reach "acceptable financial performance" within the next two years.
The deal is expected to close next month, Analytik Jena said.
"With the acquisition of the ICP-MS business from Bruker, we expect to close an important technological gap and will be in position to offer our customers a much broader portfolio of elemental spectrometry systems," Analytik Jena CEO Klaus Berka said in a statement. "We see this planned acquisition as securing our market position in an exciting growth market."
The ICP-MS market is expected to be among the fastest growing spaces in spectroscopy with a growth rate of between 5 percent and 8 percent annually during the next five years, Analytik Jena said, noting in particular its potential in China, which according to the company, is its most import export market. Berka added that environmental analysis is considered to have the greatest growth potential for ICP-MS.
As part of the deal, Germany-based Analytik Jena is acquiring or licensing patents and licensing rights to the ICP-MS business, along with global research, development, and production capacities. It added that it anticipates hiring the majority of Bruker's ICP-MS employees, especially those working in technical support and service, as well as the sales and application teams.
The business will be integrated into Analytik Jena's analytical instrumentation business unit, which is the company's largest.
Bruker acquired the ICP-MS business in 2010 from Varian, which was being acquired by Agilent Technologies at the time. Varian had to sell certain of its businesses to parties other than Agilent as a condition for approval of that transaction from European Union regulators.