NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Bruker reported after the close of the market Thursday that revenues in the third quarter grew 7 percent year over year.
For the three months ended Sept. 30 total revenues rose to $466.6 million from $435.6 million in Q3 2017, beating the consensus Wall Street estimate of $451.7 million.
The company saw a 1.5 percent positive effect from acquisitions and a 1.4 percent negative effect from currency effects on the quarter.
On a conference call following release of the earnings results, Bruker President and CEO Frank Laukien said the company has seen solid organic growth in both its Bruker Scientific Instruments and BEST segments with good performance from its academic, applied, pharma, microbiology, and industrial research markets.
He added that the company's microbiology and life sciences mass spec businesses saw revenues up "meaningfully" year over year, with recently launched mass spec instruments including the timsTOF Pro and scimaX MRMS contributing to this performance and MALDI Biotyper instrumentation and consumable "up strongly versus the prior year."
Laukien also provided details on Bruker's acquisition of an 80 percent stake in Hain Diagnostics, which he said will further grow the company's microbiology portfolio by bringing in Hain's mycobacteria molecular diagnostic products as well as its Fluorocycler XT PCR platform, which he said could enable higher levels of multiplexing for applications like syndromic panel testing.
"The Hain portfolio is highly complementary to Bruker's market-leading MALDI Biotyper solution for microbiology," he said, adding that Hain is expected to provide between $6 million and $8 million in revenues in Q4 2018 and that the acquisition will be accretive to Bruker's 2019 non-GAAP EPS by $0.01 to $0.02.
Geographically, European revenues were up by low single digits in the quarter, while North American revenues were up high single digits, and Asia Pacific revenues were up mid to high single digits.
Gerald Herman, Bruker's chief financial officer, said on the call that the company had not seen significant impact from the US-China trade dispute, but that it was "working on supply chain and other measures to help minimize the impact of our operations in 2019 and beyond."
The Billerica, Massachusetts-based company reported a profit of $43.4 million, or $.28 per share, in the recently completed quarter compared to a profit of $37.0 million, or $.23 per share, a year ago. On a non-GAAP basis, Bruker had EPS of $.37, above the consensus Wall Street estimate of $.30.
Bruker's R&D costs were $41.8 million for the quarter, up 3 percent from $40.6 million in Q3 2017. Its SG&A spending was $106.5 million, up 4 percent from $102.7 million in the year-ago third quarter.
Bruker ended the quarter with $270.1 million in cash and cash equivalents.
Herman said the company was updating its full-year 2018 guidance and now expects full-year 2018 revenue growth of 6.5 percent to 7 percent and non-GAAP EPS of $1.36 to $1.40. It had previously predicted revenue growth of 6.5 percent and non-GAAP EPS of between $1.34 and $1.38.
In trading Friday morning on the Nasdaq Bruker shares were up 4 percent percent to $33.59.