NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Life Technologies today announced it has created a Global Instrument Center of Excellence in Singapore, making it the company's only internal instrument manufacturing facility outside the US.
The design and manufacturing of Life Tech's products — including its next-generation sequencers and molecular diagnostic instruments — for its customers within the region and outside of Asia-Pacific will be conducted at the new center, the Carlsbad, Calif.-based firm said.
The manufacture of Ion Torrent's Personal Genome Machine will also be moved to the Singapore center, a Life Tech spokesperson told GenomeWeb Daily News. The company has not made any announcements concerning the Ion Proton sequencer, she added.
Asia-Pacific is a key growth driver for the life science industry, and Life Tech said that its sales in the area, excluding Japan, grew more than 9 percent in 2011, while the volume of items shipped per day in the region has increased four-fold. The Asia-Pacific region is about 10 percent of Life Tech's total business, the spokesperson said.
Life Tech's presence in Asia has consisted of commercial offices in Singapore as well as India, Korea, and Australia, and dedicated distribution centers in Singapore, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Korea. Life Tech also conducts research in India.
"The scientific community in Asia Pacific is growing at a rapid rate," Mark
Smedley, President of Asia Pacific and Japan for Life Technologies, said in a statement. "By establishing the Instrument Center of Excellence in Singapore we are providing our global customers innovative technologies more efficiently, while helping them advance their research even faster."
Kevin Lai, director of the Biomedical Sciences Group for the Singapore Economic Development Board, added "This new Global Instrument Center of Excellence is an example of how leading life science instrumentation companies are increasingly looking to Singapore as an integrated location for complex analytical instrument manufacturing, research and development of next generation platforms, and Regional Headquarters for Asia."