For Q2 2014, Thermo Fisher’s Life Sciences Solutions business revenues shot up 500% year-on-year to $1.1bn (€820m) due primarily to the incorporation of Life Technologies, which the firm acquired for $13.6bn in February this year.
The integration process is going well with “synergies tracking ahead of plan,” the company said.
The Life Sciences Solutions unit now accounts for just over 25% of the company’s total revenue and growing demand for biopharma services has led to a slight increase in Thermo Fisher’s growth outlook for the full-year, CEO Marc Casper said in a conference call.
“Biopharma service is a great business,” he told investors (transcript here). “It’s been doing great for a long period of time, and continues to do well,” with pharma firms continuing to outsource to Thermo Fisher as “the low-cost, high-quality provider.”
When asked about the penetration rate of the biopharma business, Casper said it was hard to give a figure as both Thermo Fisher’s customer base and its service offerings are expanding.
“We continue to add service lines but we’ve had customers say you do this so well, we like you to do syringe work with us, where we might have been doing other types of outsourcing works,” he said. “We just did our strategic plan review, which is a five year outlook for that business, and growth prospects look fabulous.”
When pushed as to how much the biopharma business could grow, Casper described the firm as at “the end of the first quarter with three quarters to go” in a nod to the upcoming American Football season.
The quarter also saw the company commence expansion at its Centres of Excellence in Vilnius, Lithuania and Bremen, Germany, adding manufacturing capacity to support growth of molecular biology products for life sciences and diagnostics.