February 2012 - Life science and chemical instruments are used
extensively in research and development activities, laboratories being
one of the major users. Use of life science and chemical instruments
for disease diagnosis is on a rise; for example, flow cytometers are
used for diagnosis of all four types of leukemia.
Life science and chemical equipment market is growing at a rapid rate
due to the continuous requirement of these instruments in
pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Besides, the increase in
number of biotechnology firms worldwide, advances in life science
research and technology innovations with human genome mapping, and
emergence of proteomics have enabled industry growth; as such high-end
research projects require quality instruments with high throughput
capacity. All these factors are driving the global market of life
science and chemical instrumentation.
The global Life Science and chemical instrumentation market was
estimated to be $30.2 billion in the year 2011 and is expected to grow
at a CAGR of 8.4% from 2011 to 2016 to reach $45.2 billion.
Spectrometry segment has the largest share (33.8%) followed by
chromatography (22%) in the year 2011. The spectrometry market is
driven by the coupling of mass spectrometry with chromatography
techniques.
The U.S. holds the major share in this market across technologies; it
is closely followed by Europe. The European market is saturated in most
of the technologies, but has a lot of scope of expansion in lab
automation segment. The market is driven by high growth from Asian and
the LATAM countries, where demand is on a rise due to increased
outsourcing activities in the life technology field. Singapore is a
major region for life science instruments, as many companies are
establishing a manufacturing base in Singapore, due to the tax
incentives.
As the market is vast there are many players in the market, the major
players in this market include Affymetrix Inc. (U.S.), Illumina Inc.
(U.S.), Agilent Technologies Inc. (U.S.), Roche Diagnostics Inc.
(Switzerland), Bio-Rad Laboratories (U.S.), GE Healthcare (Sweden),
Life Technologies (U.S.), Perkin Elmer (U.S.), Caliper Life Sciences
(U.S.), Shimadzu Corporation (Japan), Abbott Laboratories (U.S.),
Hitachi High-technologies Corporation (Japan), and Siemens Healthcare
Diagnostics (Germany).