Monday, February 16, 2009

Millipore expands to Singapore

By Marc Songini

Life sciences firm Millipore Corp. has opened a new training and technical support facility in Singapore to support its Asian customers with what it claims will be state-of-the-art resources.
 
This week, the Billerica-based Millipore (NYSE:MIL) announced a 8,000-square foot Biomanufacturing Sciences and Training Center (BSTC). Millipore has provided support out of Singapore for 25 years, but in a statement, the company explained that many of its customers in biopharmaceutical manufacturing have begun to branch out into Asia in a significant way.
 
Thus, to offer “top notch expertise and high level support,” it needed an enhanced facility. The new BSTC, located in Science Park, is designed to allow local and regional customers to investigate and enhance separations, purifications and monitoring processes, with assistance from Millipore’s local and international experts. Millipore plans to offer a full set of training courses by March 2009, as well.
 
Millipore provides technologies, tools and services for bioscience research and biopharmaceutical manufacturing. It collaborates with customers on research, development and production processes. Earlier this month, the company announced plans to acquire Guava Technologies Inc., a California-based maker of bench top cell analysis systems. Millipore intended to pay $22.6 million to close the transaction with Guava, already a partner. The intention was for Millipore to provide its reagent kits with Guava’s instruments to offer a unified flow cytometry research tool to cell biologists.
 
For fiscal 2007, Millipore saw a profit of $136.47 million on revenue of $1.53 billion. It has more than 6,000 employees worldwide.