Pittcon, an analytical instrument conference and trade show, met in Boston this week. The event convenes scientists and vendors in the biopharmaceutical, chemical manufacturing, oil and gas, water quality, and food and beverage industries, along with service providers that cross industries, such as vendors of lab furniture and software.
A more common topic of discussion on the expo floor was the US market and the government’s cuts to science funding. There, vendors’ concern seemed to correlate with their degree of exposure to federal funding.
“The government industry, obviously, is a little sticky right now,” says Robert Voelkner, vice president of sales and marketing at LabVantage, a company that sells laboratory information systems and related software. “They’ve gone kind of dark and quiet, so things are very unsettling there.” Yet Voelkner says that while funding for clients in forensic laboratories and grant-supported university labs in the US is a concern, business in other sectors has not been affected.
In an uncertain US market, instrument companies may choose to prioritize industries with better prospects. “Our strategy has been focusing on the higher-growth sectors that are more robust in this type of environment,” such as batteries, defense, aerospace, and robotics, says Yu Cheng, a vice president of product solutions and R&D in the TA Instruments division at Waters. Cheng says that Waters hopes to sell versatile, modular instruments to maximize customers’ investments.
Vendors who sell instruments for the life and environmental sciences as well as those that sell equipment used in teaching labs also mentioned concerns about specific product lines, although none were willing to speak on the record.