Oxford Cryosystems: Selling to Judges Scientific PLC

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.

It's one sale of hardware or one system sale and you get paid for that. There's no consumable revenue or ongoing revenue or maintenance.

That's right. It was very much a hardware capital expense, there wasn't any extra. The other great thing about it was, back at that period in the 80s, 90s where physicists or people doing physical sciences, even amongst the biologists, a lot of them were very, very practical people. You had tool belts; you didn't have funding for extra. It was really easy for them to look after it; it was a very low-cost system to maintain, which again, made it very, very popular.

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.

What's the lifetime of the systems, roughly?

This is another very good question, because you could argue that they would just last forever, other than the pump, which you could replace. It became an investor's nightmare, as you can imagine. Having said that, you can argue that, as with all technology that does exist, what you do is you go aspirational. What else you can do to make it slightly better, and create a new one. And even scientists are susceptible to just 'new'. Actually, you could argue it suffered from not being a device that needed replacing very much. That was very much where we sat at the beginning. But the world moves on.

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.

What's the biggest challenge in selling to those university-type customers?

We grew up in that area of diffraction and so for us, the product was easy to sell, it wasn't very difficult. But if you're on the outside, it can be a difficult nut to crack. The diffraction crystallography market is a very, very, very niche technology and very niche market. Everybody's very small, everyone knows each other. It creates challenges when you're looking at trying to grow your business, because you're deep down a cul-de-sac of private people in a little world. If you say, I'm going to do something new, for the mainstream, on the main road, you have almost got to start again. You've almost got to say, with this money in the bank, do we acquire something else?

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.