Danaher’s bioprocess biz bright with China and GE on horizon

With continued double-digit growth in China and the future addition of GE Healthcare’s Biopharma business, Danaher Corporation is poised to strengthen its position in the bioprocess space.

Danaher Corporation reported a robust first quarter last week, with 4% year-on-year sales growth across all businesses to $4.9 billion (€4.4 billion). Core revenue from Life Sciences grew 7%, which included contributions from Pall Corporation, a major vendor in the bioprocess space. The firm does not report financials from its individual businesses.

“In general, the life science end markets remain very good,” CEO Tom Joyce told investors. “This is a fourth straight quarter of a high single-digit growth across our life science businesses. And we’re making it happen organically through better innovation at each one of the businesses, more innovative new products launched on time, commercialized effectively, and some tremendous investments in taking our products to market in each one of the businesses.”

China a major driver for Danaher’s Life Sciences divisions. Image: iStock/liulolo

He attributed much of the high performance to the biopharma end market, citing Pall’s single use technologies. “The work that we’re doing around continuous bioprocessing has garnered tremendous interest in the end marketing, and we’re seeing sales continue to grow in those areas.”

He continued: “We have very good visibility to the product development pipelines of both large and small pharma customers and biotechs. We continue to work those early stage opportunities well.”

China and GE

Like in its other sectors, bioprocessing benefitted from strong growth in China which saw double-digit growth for its ninth consecutive quarter.

The market, according to Joyce, is poised to continue to be robust and for Danaher’s bioprocess offering will be boosted further when the acquisition of GE Healthcare’s Biopharma business comes on board.

Danaher agreed to pay $21.4 billion to buy the biopharma tools and equipment division in February and the deal is expected to pass in the fourth quarter this year.

“GE does a tremendous job in the China market as does our Pall business. The opportunities that those end customers see today are for really innovative solutions where we can bring a broader perspective to the overall bioproduction workflow, and work collaboratively with them to ensure that we meet not only their needs of today, but the needs that they’ll have as their capacity expands over time,” said Joyce.

“And as they evolve their processes, more towards single use technologies and more towards continuous bioprocessing capabilities, they see the combination of the broad set of tools that we bring at Danaher not just associated with Pall, but across the broader portfolio, and then inclusive of GE [brings] something really exciting.”