A Spotty Outlook For Instruments
Marc S. Reisch · Chemical & Engineering News · 2013
Government spending restraints in the U.S. and Europe cast a shadow over the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry & Applied Spectroscopy (Pittcon), held last week in Philadelphia. Instrumentation sales executives attending the meeting were cautious about the outlook for 2013. In the U.S., the month-old sequestration of federal funds hasn’t yet had a direct effect on the buying behavior of government-backed researchers, Marc N. Casper, CEO of Thermo Fisher Scientific, told C&EN. However, if the program continues through the year, it could have a half-percent impact on sales. “That’s not huge, but it is material,” he said. Executives with small instrument makers, such as Douglas W. Later, president of Torion Technologies, are also concerned about federal budget cuts. About half of Torion’s sales of its portable gas chromatography/mass spectrometry instruments are through Smiths Detection, which provides them to the U.S. government for detection of chemical warfare agents and illicit drugs, ...