Bruker: Mass Spectrometry & Thermo Fisher Competition

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Mass spectrometry is an important part of the business, accounting for about 11% of revenue. It's one of the higher growth areas, growing in low double digits. The flagship product is the timsTOF instrument, which has been a major growth driver. Thermo Fisher introduced competing products like Orbitrap or Astral, which led Bruker to compete more on price. Bruker released three new instruments at ASMS, the timsUltra AIP, the timsMetabo, and the timsOmni. We could break it down into a few parts, but how you think Bruker is competitively positioned within mass spectrometry? Also, if you have any thoughts on these new instruments, I'd be curious to hear them.

So just before 2020, around 2018 or 2019, Bruker released the mass spec timsTOF. Before that, Bruker was honestly struggling a bit in mass spectrometry. They were trying to survive, but when the timsTOF came out, it became really powerful with its scan speed. This means the instrument processes samples very quickly, which is critical. The faster it is, the more proteins we can detect and understand better. I don't want to go into too much detail, but the speed is impressive in mass spectrometry, and it generates a lot of information. Scientists can have less missing information, especially regarding proteins. Bruker's mass spectrometer became very popular around 2019 and continued to be so in 2020 and 2021. Before that, Thermo Fisher dominated the high-end mass spectrometry market. Then, about two or three years ago, Thermo Fisher released a new, extremely powerful and popular mass spectrometer. It's really fast, and that's the Ultra you mentioned. The Thermo Ultra became very popular, with a price of almost $2 million. The price has been continuously increasing, so I believe the profit should also be bigger. Even though I said close to $2 million or $1.5 million, the new Bruker mass spectrometer, like the latest one, is also around $1.4 million. All of them are quite expensive.

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Is software typically purchased alongside an instrument?

Software is another area to consider. Typically, there are two different models, a subscription model or a one time payment. But the mass spec companies don't make much money on the software. Several years ago, Thermo released a new software that was initially rather expensive, around $100,000 altogether, with the hardware, but I'm not sure how much the hardware cost. I know that Bruker doesn't really plan to make much money from software, they just want the software to support and help boost hardware sales. However the service contract is a big portion of the cost. That's expensive.

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