Agilent buys Varian

[skunked_once]

http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-agilent-buys-varian-instrumentation-072809.aspx

I think I'm not happy about this. It means less competition and one less choice of instruments for our work. I'm not knocking Agilent. They make excellent equipment but there are advantages to other brands also. With less competition, I fear that quality and/or service may decline in the future. Your thoughts?

[Ron]

I'm not sure that I see the point, many of the analytical instruments are redundant. There are some products that fill holes in the Agilent product line, for example AA and ICP-OES to go with the existing ICP-MS, but the chromatography products and most of the mass spec products don't really add anything to what Agilent already has. Most of the analysts seem to be focusing on the bioanalytical side of things, but to me that is a very amorphous definition. One analyst described the primary competitors as GE (Healthcare) and Siemans. If Agilent is headed in that direction that may mean real trouble for the traditional analytical products.

I'm going to take a "wait and see" position, there may be specific areas where Agilent has interest that aren't obvious yet. There is something that Agilent knows or thinks it knows to cause them to make such a generous offer. The deal has been in the works for a while because the deal is described as a definitive offer, not an agreement in principle.

[Peter Apps]

I've got a bad feeling about this ! The GC and GC-MS suppliers have been focussing more and more on operator - resistant instruments optimised for routine analyses using standard methods. Fair enough, this is where the big sales are. The leader in this trend has been Agilent - their instruments are great as long as you want to have them used by technicians doing routine analyses, but as soon as you want to develop some new hardware - say a different way of doing purge and trap, or an in-house 2D GC setup - their in-built monitoring which in a routine lab ensures that nobody can generate a result when the machine is not working right, shuts them down. You can buy add-ons from Agilent and their partners but they are very costly, and they do not cover everything. All of this makes perfect business sense of course, so from that point of view congratulations are in order. Varians have been easier to modify for special purposes, although each new model has been a bit more operator resistant than the last.

This merger / acquisition will result in less choice in the lab - I cannot see that it will make any kind of sense for Agilent to continue to market Varian GCs or GC-MSs, and how good is the after sales support on Varian's likely to be now ?

What about local support away from the big markets ? are Agilent going to keep the best people from both Agilent and Varian local suppliers, or just stick with the historical Agilent suppliers ?

There is a saying " When elephants fight the grass gets trampled".

Peter

[DR]

I suspect that service will continue to be available to all, but at the Agilent rates. There will (no doubt) be some shake-out of redundant products over time, hopefully, they will keep the best of both lines.

My concern is: will Agilent continue to keep the older names for the column lines that they've been acquiring over the years and do the same with those currently held by Varian?

I'd hate to see everyone rewriting methods as a result of new catalog numbers being applied across the board without adequate cross-referencing. So far, Agilent has been pretty good about this.

i also wonder about the future of Van-Kel/Varian/Agilent products and how much $ will be spent to improve them.

[Kostas Petritis]

There are several reasons that the acquisition make sense, although there is indeed a lot of redundancy in the products. Among other, Agilent will have now access to NMR units and become a stronger player in the metabolomics arena and structural elucidation in general (through LC-NMR-MS). It also "eliminates" someone that offered mass spectrometers in very competitive prices... Finally it gets its hands to some IP of interest. I would expect Varian products to continue to be supported but the name Varian will not be around for long...

Along with the acquisitions of Stratagene and Velocity 11, the purchase of Varian makes sense (although I have to say that I believed that it would have been Brucker instead of Varian).

Finally I wondered why Varian didn't have a presence this past PITTCON... maybe this acquisition had something to do with it...

[krickos]

My concern is: will Agilent continue to keep the older names for the column lines that they've been acquiring over the years and do the same with those currently held by Varian?

Hi

Well memory is fading abit but if one compare Agilents acqusition of J&W some years back, it would seem like Agilent at least in the past has kept those column worth keeping from J&W (in fact usually found most J&W GC columns better than old HPs).

However I would not count on catalogue numbers stays the same, but on the other hand if Varian is allowed to keep most of their product line (which I hope) it may not change.

A bit unsure on which laws that apply on this merger, got a news letter from Agilent (which i deleted unfourtunately)on this topic, that indicated that some goverment bodies (??) need to approve the deal.
Is it likely that some products from either side would need to be ended??

[Peter Apps]

Having slept on it I can see one possible glimmer of light.

I'm talking specifically about GC and GC-MS here, I could care less what they do with the "life science" products which seem from the press releases to be where the motivation lies.

If companies are competing they both have to target the high sales areas - in GC and GC-MS this is the routine labs running standard methods under restrictive QC systems. Method development in these labs is limited to finding which commercially available hardware can be used under which conditions to generate the results that they need in a way that satisfies the regulators. Instruments are optimised for low LOQ and high throughput, maximum automation and minimum operator skill. Control and data handlng systems allow only a subset of the potential settings of the hardware, and have extra features for tracking and auditing. All the big companies produce GC and GC-MS systems for this market segment, each has its strengths and weaknesses. As far as I know Agilent had the biggest sales.

The problem that has arisen is that instruments have become not only optimised for routine application, but actually specialised for it, and this has compromised their versatility and made them more difficult to use outside the routine arena - in areas where commercial hardware for e.g. sampling or experimental detectors does not exist and has to be developed in-house, or where budgets do not run to the high cost of commercial hardware and substitutes have to be put together in the lab.

The glimmer of light is that the new A+V already has a huge chunk of the routine market (Agilent X890 - 697X) and has just acquired a product line (Varian 3800 - 450 - ?) that could form the basis of a hardware development GC. The market for the latter would be comparatively tiny but would be a niche with little competition. Since one company owns both lines they can afford to specialise both lines without losing total market share. The huge benefit from where I stand is that I could get a GC that would do whatever I told it, and could have extra experimental bits added without it going into a sulk and refusing to start a run.

Lest anyone in a routine lab wonders why it is important that there are instruments on the market that can be tinkered with, just remember that all the hardware that you now use started life as a crude experimental protoype put together out of bits of pipe, a handfull of Swageloks, some heater wire and a selection of bits and bobs. If we lose the capability to try out new ideas, development in GC-MS will grind to a halt. If GCs become so specialised that they can only do standard methods there is vitally important analytical work that will become way more difficult than it needs to be. If GCs will only run with commerically available add-ons, a huge number of academic and research labs will be unable to use that technology becuase the costs are too high.


Peter

[Ron]

Kostas, I agree that Bruker would be my choice instead of Varian for NMR, but the Bruker family still holds the majority of the stock and wants the family name on the company and hands on the controls. Varian has skipped Pittcon in the past when their sales were down, I think it was about 1998 when they got a new general manager from Great Britain and he decided to save the money and skip Pittcon that year.

Peter, I think the glimmer of light may be a train entering the tunnel. I was at an open house at the Agilent Center of Excellience in Wilimington, DE a few months ago, and there was almost no space devoted to GC and GCMS. There were multiple rooms and in the entire space there was one 7890. one 5975, and one 7000. There was much more space devoted to ICP-MS and DNA analysis than there was to GC and GCMS. The chromatography section was almost entirely devoted to LCMS. In Europe last year LCMS, LC, and GC were down for Agilent, while LCMS was up. I'm not sure if the emphasis is on LCMS since the other products were down, or if the other products are down because the emphasis is on LCMS, but that is the priority product for Agilent.

I don't think Agilent has any interest in a system that can easily be modified, when the 6890 was introduced one of the goals was to make it difficult to add non-HP equipment to the system. I worked for an HP Channel Partner at the time, and there were a lot of things that were done to lock other companies out.

[Peter Apps]

Ron, you have confirmed my bad feelings, and a long-held suspicion about design philosophy.

Maybe if the giants a looking in the direction of LC-MS someone small could sneak into the niche for a versatile rugged GC - MS instrument.

Here's hoping

Peter

[GasMan]

An update on the Agilent/Varian aquisition


http://www.marketwatch.com/story/agilen ... iteid=nbsh

Gasman

[Bruce Hamilton]

Interesting, now all Agilent has to do is find a buyer for the four units who isn't capable of competing with them in projected growth markets ( Asia and ? ).
That requirement probably rules out most other large global instrument suppliers.

Bruce Hamilton

[Ron]

Most of the other large global instrument suppliers also have these products, so the same anti-trust issues would come into play with them as well. The only major chromatography companies that I can think of that don't have a presence in GC are Waters and Dionex. After the Waters GC disaster of the 1980s I seriously doubt that they would try again. Junping into the GC market would be a big stretch for Dionex, it is very different from what they do and they would have to retain a lot of the Varian people. Geographically that shouldn 't be too difficult, not that far from Walnut Creek to Sunnyvale, but a very different corporate culture.

Maybe an Asian company wanting to expand into the field? China is a huge potential market, but most of the business is going to foreign companies. Most of the major players already manufacture instruments in China, maybe the government will urge a native company to enter the business and keep the profits at home. That could be interesting.

[CE Instruments]

Management buy out ?

Those involved in the Micromass buy out are very happy, they made $M when later bought by Waters

[Ron]

I would assume that anyone above a certain level in Varian working in the affected product lines leaving the company would have to sign a non-compete agreement, pretty much ruling out a management buyout. I have wondered if any of the Chrompack principals might have some interest.

[WK]

Things have moved on a stage here in Europe.....