Our market consists of 200 000 research and development labs around the world, of which 20 000 are directly targeted by our current products. The analytical instruments industry is a $ 30 billion business, in which we are a niche provider. Our main application segment, nanotechnology, is a high-growth niche of the market. The main geographical markets for us are North America, Western Europe and Japan. Emerging markets include China, India, Brazil and Russia.

The market for analytical instruments is generally non-cyclical. Customers in academic research have a large degree of public funding, which proves to be stable over time and not dependant on economy in general. Also research institutes tend to have a long-term funding structure, whether the funding is public or coming from the industrial sector. Customers in the industrial sector are more exposed to general economy, even if R&D are long-term activities within the very large corporations that are dominating in the customer structure.

Technology trends in analytical instruments tend to be very long-term. A general pattern is that novel analytical techniques are originated within academic research. Initially, they are also commercialized with customers doing academic research. It can take a long time before technologies find their use in the more systematic environment of industrial development and quality control.