INDUSTRY NEWS
 |
Martin Madaus
|
“Our acquisition of Serologicals is transformational,” said Martin Madaus, chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Millipore. “This move will significantly increase our life sciences footprint and will advance many of our strategic objectives. Serologicals and Millipore are two of the fastest-growing companies in our sector, and our combination will create a company with very attractive growth and profitability. Serologicals participates in a number of high-growth market segments and brings a portfolio of innovative, higher-margin products that can be sold through our combined, global sales organization. With the addition of Serologicals’ research and development capabilities, we will also be able to pursue new markets and bring together the applications expertise of both companies to generate value for customers.”
Other Millipore officials echoed Madaus’s sentiments, that the opportunity to deliver more solutions by combining the technologies of both companies motivated Millipore to pursue this acquisition.
“The big thing is the complementary nature of the whole transaction,” said Alan Weiss, director of technology development at Millipore. “Synergies were a huge component of what drove the logic behind this merger, as well as value creation. It wasn’t anything related to consolidation or cost savings.”
The strategic combination of Millipore and Serologicals will significantly strengthen Millipore’s bioscience division by giving it leading positions in a broad range of high-growth segments such as drug discovery products and services, antibodies, cell biology reagents, and stem cell research. Millipore’s bioprocess division will gain a cell culture supplements offering that will facilitate its entry into the $1 billion upstream bioprocessing market. As a result, Millipore will be the only company in the life sciences industry that can offer both upstream cell culture and downstream separation offerings for biopharmaceutical production, further strengthening its relationships with biotechnology and pharmaceutical customers.
“Millipore’s bioscience division will advance our customers’ research by optimizing work flows from sample preparation, to developing and performing assays, to analyzing results,” said Madaus. “Meanwhile, our bioprocess division’s comprehensive offering will include process development and scale-up, upstream processing, downstream filtration, and ongoing compliance monitoring and testing.”
Specifically in the IVD arena, Millipore officials said that Serologicals will continue to bring its IVD products to the market without any change, from both its Chemicon and Celliance subsidiaries. In addition, Millipore will continue to market its membranes and other filtration media that are used in IVDs.
“But we have not thought about how to bring some combination in the IVD area,” said Weiss. “That’s open for future thoughts.”
While Serologicals officials declined to comment further on the merger, David A. Dodd, president and chief executive officer of Serologicals who will assist in the integration of the two companies and then depart, made the following statement:
“We are pleased with the company we built at Serologicals and are proud of our track record of achieving revenue growth, increasing profitability, and delivering value to our customers,” said Dodd. “We believe that our combination with Millipore represents an excellent opportunity to achieve attractive long-term growth, enhance product development, and develop a closer partnership with all of our customers in the life sciences and biopharmaceutical markets. Millipore is one of the most respected franchises in the life sciences industry, and joining an industry leader will create opportunities for Serologicals employees, as part of the larger, combined organization.”
