A rebound in its mass-spectrometry division, especially in its FTMS product line, helped Bruker Biosciences post a 9-percent increase in total revenue during the second quarter, the company said this week.
Bruker said that revenues for the quarter ended June 30 grew to $77.8 million from $71.4 million a year ago while earnings climbed 69 percent to $480,000 from $284,000 during the year-ago period.
Earnings for the 2006 second quarter included $200,000 in stock-based compensation expense and $1.2 million in acquisition-related charges.
The figures exclude results from the company’s acquisition of Bruker Optics, which closed on the first day of the third quarter. Including those results, revenues would have climbed 12.5 percent to $100.5 million.
The company no longer breaks out results for its individual divisions, but in a conference call President and CEO Frank Laukien said its Daltonics division, which manufactures mass spectrometry instruments, grew in the “high single-digits” for the second quarter.
Laukien said the growth in Bruker Daltonics “is roughly the growth rate of the mass spec market at this point.”
Sales growth in Bruker AXS, which manufactures advanced X-ray technology, was in the double digits, Laukien said, while Bruker Optics had the fastest growth rate of all the company’s divisions.He did not provide specific numbers.
Within its mass-spec product line, Laukien cited its micrOTOF ESI-TOF mass spec and its ultrOTOF-Q ESI-Q-q-TOF mass spec as the company’s fastest growers [See PM, 03/04/05].
However, because the instruments are relatively new additions to Bruker’s offerings, Laukien cautioned against reading too much into their sales trends.
“We started at a low level and it’s been growing rather rapidly in the last two years but from a small base,” Laukien said. “I don’t know that that’s necessarily the market trend.”
Sales growth of the company’s FTMS and MALDI-TOF products was moderate in the quarter, and Bruker continued to see improvement in FTMS products to the point where “it’s now a healthy business again,” he said. Competition forced sales in its FTMS line to dip in 2004, but revenue and new order bookings for the products began to rebound last year to levels more in line with past sales performances, Laukien said.
Bruker spent $10.6 million on R&D during the quarter. As of June 30, the company had $96.6 million in cash and short-term investments.
Bruker to Help Isis’ Ibis Fly?
Separately this week, Bruker Daltonics announced a deal with Isis Pharmaceuticals under which Bruker will be the exclusive worldwide manufacturer of Isis’ Ibis T5000 biosensor system which incorporates the micrOTOF ESI-TOF mass spectrometer.
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“We started at a low level and it’s been growing rather rapidly in the last two years but from a small base. I don’t know that that’s necessarily the market trend.” |
The T5000 is a universal biosensor system that can simultaneously identify thousands of types of infectious organisms in a sample without the need for prior knowledge of what is present in the sample.
Bruker will be responsible for order processing, system installations and service of the T5000 system in North America, Europe, and the Middle East as part of the agreement.
In Europe and the Middle East, Bruker will also have exclusive rights to sell the T5000 system and Ibis infectious organism-identification kits for various government applications. Bruker will have non-exclusive right to sell to all other customers including clinical, pharmaceutical and academic researchers for all applications other than diagnostics.
“We hope this will further the quality of this already excellent product. … It’s a fantastic fundamental design and so we’re very optimistic this will become a better and better product,” Laukien said.
The company this week also reached an agreement with Health Discovery for use of its Support Vector Machine technology in Bruker’s ClinProTools clinical proteomic line.
HDC will receive an up-front fee and royalties based on sales as part of the deal. Other financial terms were not disclosed.