The top executive of Danaher Corp.—which owns Brea-based medical laboratory instrument maker Beckman Coulter Inc. and Orange-based dental device maker Sybron Dental Specialties Inc.—said the two units are contributing to a corporate strategy shift.
Chief Executive H. Lawrence Culp said that the Washington, D.C.-based conglomerate has reduced what he called “niche positions” in various industries in order to increase its presence in higher-technology markets such as healthcare and life science research.
Culp made his remarks during a recent industrial conference put on by Milwaukee-based brokerage Robert W. Baird & Co.
Danaher, which has annual sales of about $16 billion, bought Beckman in 2011 for $6.8 billion. The device maker put itself up for sale in the wake of regulatory challenges with a key heart test.
That followed Danaher’s first foray into Orange County in 2006, when it spent $2 billion to buy Sybron, which had went public five years earlier.
Danaher tends to give its operating units a great deal of autonomy.
Culp devoted a good deal of his talk at the recent conference to Beckman, lauding the addition but leaving room for improvement.
“Certainly at Beckman Coulter, we are very pleased with a year-and-a-half of progress,” he said.
“But at a midteens operating margin, they are well south of our other diagnostics businesses; frankly, south of our expectations,” the chief executive said.
Danaher does expect to continue to see margins grow as Beckman implements the Danaher Business Systems management philosophy, Culp added.
He said that one of the key things that attracted Danaher to Beckman was its presence in Asia—although other markets shared the spotlight.
“They had a relatively lighter presence in Western Europe,” Culp said.
New products also are important.
Culp said that it has introduced the AU5800, a high-end analyzer, and credited it with helping Danaher drive emerging growth trends it sees in Beckman.
Culp said that Beckman gives Danaher a “recurring revenue business” based on the sale of reagents and chemicals that are used to operate its medical testing machines.
Danaher is making some moves to position itself toward what Culp called “high-growth markets over the next decade or two.” He said that Sybron and Charlotte, N.C.-based KaVo Dental, another Danaher unit, are part of that effort.
“So what we’ve been able to do there is really put those businesses together, put an outstanding team on the ground in China … and give them all the financial support possible to invest aggressively in sales and marketing, product localization and really everything required to get up off the ground,” Culp told attendees.
UCI Hosts Healthcare Conferences
February is coming up, and that means it’s time for the annual healthcare prognostication session, courtesy of the University of California, Irvine.
UC Irvine’s annual Health Care Forecast Conference is scheduled to run Feb. 21 and 22 at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academy of Sciences, which is adjacent to the university’s campus.
The UCI Paul Merage School of Business’ Health Care Management Program is presenting the conference.
The outlook on health policies and politics in President Barack Obama’s second term will be the center of much of the action. Keynote speaker Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar of Washington, D.C.-based think tank American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for the Capitol Hill publication Roll Call, will talk about how the Affordable Care Act is going to be implemented. Ornstein is making his 16th-straight appearance at the conference.
UCI last week hosted a symposium at the Beckman Center that covered new technologies and innovations in the fields of genetics and medical imaging.
The International Imaging Genetics Conference brought together national and international experts in neuroimaging, genetics, data mining, visualization and statistics. It’s aimed at doctors and scientific researchers.
“Given the known importance of both genetics and environment in brain function, and the role of neuroimaging in revealing brain dysfunction, the synergism of integrating genetics with brain imaging will fundamentally change our understanding of human brain function in disease,” a statement on the conference’s website read. “To fully realize the promise of this synergy, we must develop novel analytic, statistical and visualization techniques for this new field.”
Speakers included Michael Arbib, director of the University of Southern California Brain Project; John Blangero, director of the AT&T Genomics Computing Center; and several faculty members of UCI’s Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior.
Bits and Pieces
U.S. Healthcare Partners, an Irvine-based health information management company, said that it started a human capital management services division. The division is headed by Stephen Grant, and will offer a range of services, including executive search, and senior/executive-level interim and direct job placement. … Spectrum Pharmaceuticals Inc., a Henderson, Nev.-based drug maker with research and development operations in Irvine, said that the patent for the injectable form of its Fusilev cancer drug has been extended until 2022.
