The Boston Globe

Date: 2015-05-30
EMD Millipore set for expansion with $17b takeover
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By Robert Weisman
BILLERICA — EMD Millipore, begun in 1954 as a local filtration company, is poised to
become a much larger player in the fast-growing business of supplying life sciences
equipment to drug makers and research labs worldwide.
The company is set to complete its $17 billion takeover of Sigma-Aldrich Corp. this summer.
The deal will boost the company's global sales more than 70 percent to about $6 billion
annually and double its global workforce to 20,000, including more than 1,000 in
Massachusetts.
At a time when suppliers are moving to sell customers suites of production and purification
products rather than individual machines, the giant deal will enable EMD Millipore to vastly
expand its portfolio to more than 300,000 products.
Among other things, St. Louis-based Sigma-Aldrich is a world leader in "cell culture media,"
pools of proteins, amino acids, and additives in which cell lines are grown into biotech drugs.
All that takes place in stainless steel tanks called bioreactors, which are sold by EMD
Millipore.
"This is a watershed moment," said Udit Batra, the 43-year-old chief executive of EMD
Millipore, which itself was acquired five years ago by German pharmaceutical and chemical
giant Merck KGaA. "It truly completes our [product] offering. Any time you need to do
anything in a lab, any time you need to synthesize something, you will run into us."
The purchase of Sigma-Aldrich, which had a larger North America market share than EMD
Millipore, will also make the combined company a more formidable competitor to Thermo
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Fisher Scientific Inc., the Waltham-based industry leader in lab supplies, which rang up $16.9
billion in annual sales last year.
Makers of lab research and production equipment have been gobbling up rivals in recent
years to offer a wider range of products to drug companies, biotechs, academic research
labs, and contract research and manufacturing companies, said Glen Giovannetti, the
Boston-based global life sciences leader at accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young.
He cited Thermo Fisher's $13.6 billion takeover of Life Technologies Corp. in 2013 as well as
other acquisitions that have strengthened PerkinElmer Inc. of Waltham and GE Healthcare,
which is expanding its life sciences business in Marlborough.
"You're seeing consolidation among the large players," Giovannetti said. "You want to be a
one-stop shop, more of a solutions provider that can fill the customer's needs."
At EMD Millipore's biomanufacturing sciences and training center here and eight others
around the world, the company hosts visiting customers looking for guidance in improving
their own drug production processes and, potentially, for more efficient equipment.
"This is where you can evaluate process-scale technology in a shirtsleeve environment," said
John Cyganowski, the manager of process development sciences.
Batra said EMD Millipore is likely to eliminate some overlapping functions at the two
companies after the Sigma-Aldrich merger is completed. But he said it was too early to
gauge the impact of the integration plan on Massachusetts, where EMD Millipore has five
sites, including a research lab in Bedford and a manufacturing plant in Danvers.
"We haven't done the math on our global footprint, but there will be a critical mass in
Massachusetts," said Batra.
"The advantages of Massachusetts are totally clear: the skills, the capabilities, the customers
are here. We'd be foolish to leave here."
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