Beckman Coulter's Play for High Growth

With the Coulter integration successful, Beckman Coulter looks for high-growth opportunities outside of its traditional businesses. Beckman, through internal efforts in its life sciences business and a series of small alliances, is making a play in genomics and proteomics. In addition to building up near-term revenues, the aim is to find new "content" in the form of assays for its clinical business.

Beckman Coulter Inc. 's decision in March to reorganize into three businesses instead of two formalizes a strategy it has been talking about publicly for months, to provide a "continuum of testing" from research through transitional to clinical diagnostics. In practical terms, the move separates the company's much larger but slow-growth clinical diagnostics business from its smaller but buoyant life sciences/drug discovery unit, which is riding the boom in genomics and proteomics analytical tools. Moreover, it provides a pathway for new research techniques and tools to find their way to larger, more lucrative clinical markets—a source of innovation that Beckman hopes will address the challenge of finding high-growth opportunities when more than two-thirds of its $1.9 billion of revenues comes from a mature, commodity-like business. The scenario is quite different from a few years ago, when the life sciences unit was a drag on earnings. It is now not only the fastest growing part of Beckman Coulter, but also a key to the company's future hopes in clinical diagnostics.

Most of the top diagnostics companies have efforts underway in genomics and proteomics, but Beckman's strategy, based on a mix...

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