Pall CEO: ATMI deal doesn't rule out other acquisitions

21-Jan-2014 - Last updated on 21-Jan-2014 at 11:35 GMT

ATMI's bioreactors will fill gaps in Pall's end-to-end solutions

Buying ATMI will help Pall fill gaps in its up and downstream biomanufacturing tech offerings but the deal does not rule out other acquisitions says CEO, Larry Kingsley

Late December, ATMI sold its Life Science business to Pall Corporation for $185m (€135m) following a strategic review. At the time, Director of Investor Relations Troy Dewar told Biopharma-Reporter.com the business was being placed in the hands of a strategic owner who would accelerate the growth of the business.

However, at last week’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, Pall’s CEO Larry Kingsley said though the ATMI assets were growing organically, the deal - expected to close in the next fiscal quarter – would help consolidate Pall’s dominance in upstream and downstream disposable technologies.

“With ATMI we pick up bioreactors, mixers, biocontainers, other connector technologies, a lot of the really important ingredients to the manufacturer, and slightly upstream elements to what we had already been participating in in the field of single-use,” he said.

He continued, telling investors this allows Pall to combine these systems with its core consumables business in order to aid clients’ development and get their products to market faster and more effectively, as the bioprocess world “moves from conventional manufacturing methodologies to single-use disposable technologies.”

With the advent of transition to single-use, he continued, “[ATMI] brings to the table enough girth, enough capability, enough of the product basket that we can be more of an advisor, and bring more to the party, than just as a product supplier.”

End-to-end solutions?

Kingsley also complimented the job ATMI had done assembling its single-use technologies, and spoke of how this tech would be combined with Pall’s incumbent product and single-use systems - acquired in July 2013 when Pall bought Dutch firm Medistad - to bolster processes including its upstream bioreactors, cell separation and clarification processes, as well as mixing technologies in downstream chromatography and ultrafiltration.

“There is some productisation that’s left to be done, to get it to the point of being more easily produced, and there’s certainly a selling effort required to get it specced and to get it to a more end-to-end process solution” he said. , combining this with the Pall .

However, Kingsley said there are “a number of key pieces still missing from this picture” and even with last year’s purchases, Pall “will definitely be adding to [its] portfolio by way of acquisition.”