Danaher set to buy purification consumables firm Phenomenex
Phenomenex, based in Torrence, California, offers separations and purification consumables for liquid and gas chromatography applications and is set to become a standalone company within Danaher, the firms announced today.
“We are thrilled to have Phenomenex join Danaher’s life sciences portfolio of businesses, which include SCIEX, Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, Pall, Leica Microsystems and Molecular Devices,” Danaher’s EVP Dan Daniel said.
Financial details were not revealed, but Phenomenex’ portfolio of 7,000 products and its 700 staff are expected to move over to Danaher by the end of the year.
However, Evercore ISI analyst Ross Muken said in a note the firm may have paid upwards of $700m for Phenomenex, and its foray into “a high growth life science consumable business” came as no surprise.
“This was certainly a deal chosen on culture/fit and not just price paid as multiples are well below what an asset like this would fetch in a full blown auction,” he noted, adding the acquisition is this is “one of the great consumable assets that remained in Life Sci Tools.”
With Phenomenex’s product lines including Kinetix, Aeris, and Gemini HPLC/UHPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography/Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography), Muken added Danaher would now be competing directly against Agilent and Waters in the small molecule chromatography space.
Danaher already has an established presence in the bioprocessing downstream space, through the $14bn acquisition of filtration, separation and purification firm Pall Corporation completed in September 2015.
Terrell Mathews, a Phenomenex spokesperson, confirmed it will be a standalone company within Danaher’s Lifesciences portfolio and added there will be no cross duplication of key technologies between Phenomenex and Pall.
However we were told that "in the future, Phenomenex may be able to be a sales channel for Pall consumable items."
