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NEW YORK, July 8 - Bruker Daltonics said today that "on-going uncertain economic conditions" has forced it to lay off roughly 10 percent of its workforce in the United States and Germany.
"As demand in several customer segments is experiencing slower growth, we are taking decisive action to reduce our cost structure," said Frank Laukien, president and CEO. "Once fully implemented, we expect cost savings of about $2.5 million next year."
Calling the move "aggressive," Bruker said the lay offs come at a time when the company faces slowed bookings among pharma, biotech, and chemical customers. Bruker, which posted 22-percent growth in second-quarter year-over-year bookings, also blamed the decrease on the departure of distributor companies like Variagenics and Perkin-Elmer.
However, Bruker said booking have grown among universities, medical schools, governments, and nonprofit groups, and the company said it expects "strategic sales" to grow for the rest of the year through Agilent and Sequenom.
"Fundamentally, our life-science research and pharma/biotech markets have healthy long-term trends, and we see strong funding for our life-science systems based on mass spectrometry, due to their enabling role in critical fields like genotyping, proteomics and metabolomics," said Laukien.