Danaher merging Cytiva and Pall to create $7.5bn bioprocess juggernaut

Combining Cytiva and Pall will create the “broadest” and “deepest” bioprocess product portfolio in the industry, says Danaher Corporation.

The decision to create ‘The Biotechnology Group’ by merging Danaher’s two bioprocess businesses was announced at the firm’s 2022 Investor & Analyst event last week.

Introducing the combined entity, Danaher CEO Rainer Blair told stakeholders the decision represents the third phase in his company’s acquisitional strategy in the bioprocess space, having first acquired and “carved out” the two businesses – Pall in 2015 for $13.8 billion, Cytiva (then known as GE Healthcare Life Sciences) for $21 billion in 2020 – and then allowed the brands to “stand up and be successful.”

Image: DepositPhotos/bruesw

Financial growth

Danaher historically does not separate out its individual business results in its quarterly financial calls, but during the presentation Rainer gave some color as to how the brands have grown under the Danaher umbrella.

“We’re bringing together Cytiva – and that $6 billion franchise – with Pall Life Sciences – that $2.5 billion franchise – to give you an $8.5 billion growth juggernaut, with $7.5 billion of that revenue being in bioprocessing.”

For Pall, the return on invested capital (ROIC) has seen more than $1 billion in cumulative additional operating product between 2016 and 2021, while the unit’s operating margin has increased by more than 1,000 basis points.

Cytiva, meanwhile, “has exceeded expectations on all fronts” since its integration in early 2020, Rainer said, doubling revenue from $3 billion to $6 billion in just two-and-a-half years, with high-single-digit growth expected in the long-term.

Broad and deep

Under the Biotechnology Group banner, Rainer said Danaher will create both the “broadest” and “deepest” product portfolio in the bioprocessing sector.

“When I say the broadest, you can get to any points solution you need in the context of a bioprocessing workflow, or you can get the entire end-to-end workflow. An entire factory including the cleanroom, the shell, the building, the attachments; everything from the combination of Cytiva and Pall Life Sciences.”

This includes a leading position in upstream and downstream applications, and a combined single-use technology portfolio that pulled in over $1 billion in 2021. The full end-to-end biologics workflow looks like this:

Taken from Danaher’s Investor Day at Cytiva

“When I talk about depth of the portfolio, this combination can do that not just for monoclonal antibodies but for cell and gene therapies [CGTs], for mRNA, for oligonucleotides, for CRISPR-Cas9. You name your therapeutic biologic modality and this combination can deliver it for you.”

The combined group will also bring together “the largest global, commercial, technical service team in the industry,” he added.

“This is a team that can deliver these solutions and support our customers with the value proposition – I’ll call it zero headaches – best in class customer experience. Helping you whether you are still in the development stage of your biologic molecule or whether you are walking that molecule through the entire journey the clinical trial phase all the way through to commercialization, we can go on that walk with our customers, and they are doing it increasingly every day.

“With the inside insight we have gained through this combination we are able to focus our innovation on what matters most to our customers: quality. Quality means purity, purity means less side effects.”