NEW YORK — French diagnostics firm BioMérieux on Monday posted a roughly 1 percent year-over-year decline in first quarter revenues on lower sales from its molecular biology and immunoassay offerings.
For the three-month period ended March 31, BioMérieux's revenues dropped to €837.1 million ($911.0 million) from €844.6 million in the first quarter of 2021. Revenues for the quarter declined roughly 4.5 percent at constant exchange rates and scope of consolidation.
Revenues for the company's clinical applications segment fell more than 2 percent in Q1 2022 on a reported basis to €703.7 million from €721.8 million the year before. Within that segment, molecular biology sales slipped nearly 2 percent to €319.0 million from €324.5 million as BioMérieux was unable to fulfill a backlog of orders for its BioFire respiratory panels due to the impact of COVID-19 on its workforce. The company noted that its installed base of BioFire systems increased by 500 during the first quarter, bringing the total installed base to about 22,500.
Also within clinical applications, microbiology sales were up 8 percent to €266.8 million from €247.4 million with strong demand for Vitek automated ID/AST and BACT/ALERT blood culture reagents, while revenues from immunoassays were down 13 percent to €104.5 million from €120.2 million on lower sales of COVID-19-related reagents and procalcitonin assays in the US.
Industrial application sales during the first quarter rose 9 percent year over year to €133.4 million from €122.8 million on strong reagent sales in the food and healthcare segments.
"In a continued highly uncertain business environment, our first quarter performance is aligned with our outlook," BioMérieux Chairman and CEO Alexandre Mérieux said in a statement. "Sales growth was particularly solid in both microbiology and industrial applications, and in line with our expectations on molecular biology and immunoassays."
BioMérieux said that its business outlook for 2022 remains unchanged from previous guidance of a 3 percent to 7 percent year-over-year sales decline to between €3.2 billion to €3.3 billion for the year.