Xconomy: PerkinElmer Sacrifices Short-Term Profit to Preserve R&D, Buy Technologies on the Cheap
Summary
So I was eager to hear Rob Friel, CEO of Waltham, MA-based PerkinElmer, explain why he thinks this strategy makes sense for his company, a giant maker of fancy picks and shovels for biomedical researchers.Most investors see, for example, that PerkinElmer (NYSE: PKI) has made a lot of money in the past selling a machine called Opera, a sophisticated cell-analysis tool for biotech, pharmaceutical, and academic researchers that prices out at $750,000.But thanks to PerkinElmer’s previous investment in continued R&D on the technology underlying the Opera system, Friel says, the company is already in the process of switching over customers to the next-generation tool it calls Operetta.Friel’s confident the new system stacks up well with competitors like Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Cellomics machine, and General Electric’s IN CELL Analyzer.And if PerkinElmer, a seven-decade old company, can catch a lucky break—like President Obama boosting the National Institutes of Health budget as part of an economic stimulus—then its strategy of continuing to invest in such advanced life sciences research tools might just end up being farsighted.
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