Mass spec business consolidated

A $1.1 billion deal announced today (Sept. 2) has brought an industry-leading joint venture in mass spectrometry instrumentation supply under the roof of a single manufacturing and technology company. Danaher Corporation will shell out more than $1 billion in cash for Applied Biosystems/MDS Sciex (AB SCIEX), a joint venture owned by life science tools suppliers Life Technologies and MDS Analytical Technologies. Life Technologies -- the company created by last year's merger of Invitrogen Corporation with Applied Biosystems, Inc. -- received $450 million in cash for its share of the mass spec business. Danaher paid MDS $650 million for its share of AB SCIEX, plus the former Molecular Devices Corporation, a bioresearch and analytical instrumentation company that MDS owned. "While a joint venture was once the right structure to combine corporate capabilities and launch this business, it is no longer the best approach to win in a more mature, competitive mass...