NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Caliper Life Sciences yesterday reiterated its expectation of organic 2009 revenue growth of between 4 percent and 7 percent and total revenues of between $125 million and $129 million.
The Hopkinton, Mass.-based firm provided the update during a Customer and Investor Open House at its headquarters, which also was webcast. Company officials said during the event that second-quarter revenues from research and imaging products were tracking ahead of expectations, offsetting weakness in the company's service business.
Caliper President and CEO Kevin Hrusovsky said that the firm also has an opportunity to shed smaller, non-core product lines to enhance its balance sheet and fund both organic and acquisition growth. "We're being very strategic on that because we don't want to create any EBITDA reduction as part o those divestitures," he said at the event. However, he did not elaborate on what products could potentially be divested.
Late last year, Caliper sold its Pharmaceutical Development & Quality Analysis product line to pharmaceutical testing firm Sotax in a deal worth around $15.8 million.
Earlier this year, the US Environmental Protection Agency has exercised an option to extend a contract with Caliper that had brought in revenues of around $3.5 million thus far. Caliper expects to bring in $3 million under the contract during the second half of this year, officials said yesterday.
The firm intends to launch two new platforms in 2010-2011 that it expects to help drive revenue growth. The first is a DNA fractionation platform for next-generation sequencing sample preparation, which could launch as early as the first quarter of 2010. The second product, planned for 2011, is a LabChip Western X platform for automating western blot techniques.
Caliper expects to finish the year with $20 million in cash, with $7 million in additional debt capacity. Hrusovsky also said that the firm has no current plans to raise additional cash, and that it has sufficient resources to fund operations through 2010.
In early Thursday trade on the Nasdaq, shares of Caliper were up 3 percent at $1.91.