Waters Corporation
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| Waters Corporation | |
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| Type | Public (NYSE: WAT) |
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| Founded | 1958 |
| Headquarters |  Milford, Massachusetts, USA |
| Industry | Life Sciences |
| Revenue |  US$ 1.2 billion (2005)[1] |
| Employees | ~4,500 |
| Website | www.waters.com |
Waters Corporation is a publicly traded laboratory analytical instrument and software company headquartered in Milford, Massachusetts. The company employs more than 4,500 with manufacturing facilities located in Milford and Taunton, Massachusetts; Wexford, Ireland; Manchester, England; and Singapore.
Waters holds positions in three complementary analytical technologies - liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry and thermal analysis. These markets account for approximately $5 billion of the overall $20 - $25 billion analytical instrument market.
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[edit] History
What began as an office in the basement of a police station in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1958, has evolved into a $1.1 billion corporation serving tens of thousands of scientists all over the world. The story of Waters Corporation is largely the story of James (Jim) Logan Waters, an industry pioneer and entrepreneur.
With an aptitude for math and science, Jim enrolled in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, an officer training program, and graduated from Columbia University as an ensign with a B.S. degree in Physics in 1946. Having grown up in a family of successful businessmen, Jim strove to make his own way. After stints as a university math teacher, Naval officer, project engineer, and entrepreneur, Jim formed Waters Associates in 1958. His plan was to build instruments. The fledgling firm’s first offices were in the rented basement of the Framingham, Mass. police station.
During these formative years, Waters Associates was what is now referred to as a research boutique. Companies would contract Jim and his five employees to build one-of-a-kind instruments for various purposes. Early products included a boiler feedwater flame photometer, a balloon hydrometer, a nerve gas detector, a lab refractometer and process control refractometers. While from its start the company had been self-financed, with proceeds from an earlier business sale, Jim opened Waters Associates to external ownership in 1962.
The company’s first major break came when Dow Chemical visited and was impressed with the young firm’s progress. In addition to buying one of Waters’ first gel permeation chromatograph instruments, Dow Chemical made an additional investment of $400,000. By 1979, Dow Chemical had attained nearly 25 percent ownership in Waters.
In 1965, the technique of liquid chromatography (LC) was a mere curiosity. Most chemists who were proficient in LC worked in university and industrial research labs. That year, Waters Associates embarked on its first LC system project. And, in 1967, the ALC 100, the first Waters LC system, was born. According to Leslie S. Ettre in a review about Jim Waters , the LC system was formally introduced at the 1968 Pittsburgh Conference. It was a benchtop system equipped with a Milton Roy [3] pump, syringe injection, and two detectors: a Waters differential refractometer and a UV detector from the Laboratory Data Control (LDC) Co.
Still, LC was slow to catch on, in part because Waters had too many other irons in the fire—and had cast its lot with gel permeation chromatography. In fact, at the time, Waters cash flow was negative. So Jim made several critical decisions: to focus the company on LC, sell off its process instrument business, and bring specialists in research, manufacturing, finance and marketing on board.
In 1969, Jim asked Dimitri D’Arbeloff, then president of Millipore Corporation, to join Waters’ board of directors and to help steer the company back to profitability. Millipore’s venture capital subsidiary did its part by making a $600,000 equity investment in Waters. The expertise and funding came along at just the right time. After this, the company grew 40 percent a year for seven years.
In 1972, Waters Associates appointed Frank Zenie president. A year later, headquarters moved from Framingham to a semi-rural 26-acre site in Milford, Mass. Waters’ share of the LC market grew to 40 percent, five times larger than its nearest competitor. Jim became chairman, and continued in that role until the company merged with Millipore in 1980, and was rechristened the Waters Chromatograph Division.
The sought-for synergies between the two companies never materialized, however. And, in 1993, Waters returned to independence. Under the leadership of Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer Douglas A. Berthiaume, the company renewed its focus and regained its entrepreneurial spirit, ushering in a new era of record growth in sales and profits.
In 1997 Waters entered mass spectrometry market with acquisition of Micromass for $176 million.
[edit] Products
Waters’ main product brands include: ACQUITY UPLC™ Systems, Synapt™ High Definition MS™ System, XTerra® HPLC Columns, XBridge™ Columns, Alliance® HPLC Systems, Empower™ Chromatography and MassLynx™ Mass Spectrometry Software, Oasis® Sample Preparation Products, Premier Mass Spectrometry Systems and Alliance® HPLC Systems.
[edit] Sources of Revenue
Nearly 70 percent of the company's revenue is derived from the life science market, a market comprised of drug discovery, drug development, quality control, and the emerging sciences of genomics and proteomics. Waters products are also sold into the food and beverage, environmental, fine chemical, personal care product, university, government, semiconductor, clinical and plastics markets sectors.
[edit] Awards
In July of 2004, Standard and Poor's conferred on Waters its highest investment recommendation of five stars. Company stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol WAT. The company is a listed company of the Standard and Poor's 500 Index.
