Grace Divests Laboratory Product Lines
US chemical company W.R. Grace has agreed to sell businesses associated with its chromatography instruments, columns and related laboratory products to companies in Germany, the UK and Singapore. Financial terms for the deals were not disclosed. The company said the product portfolios were not aligned with its growth plans which are focused on service lines for the pharmaceutical and nutraceutical industries.
Robert Gatte, vice president of Grace’s Discovery Sciences business, said the move meant Grace could concentrate on its core materials science and manufacturing capabilities.
Grace will continue to supply Vydac and Davisil media for process chromatography and Syloid FP excipients for drug formulations, as well as custom manufacture of regulatory starting materials and intermediates.
Switzerland’s Buchi Labortechnik is buying Grace’s flash chromatography and evaporative light scattering detector (ELSD) instrument business. The acquisition includes Reveleris purification systems, GraceResolv and Reveleris flash cartridges and Alltech ELSD 3300 instrumentation.
Dr. Maisch, a German specialist in high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), has agreed to purchase Grace’s line of analytical HPLC and preparative columns, as well as its packing equipment and services. The deal includes Exsil, Modsil and Exmere media, the Alltech HPLC column brands Adsorbosphere, Allsphere, Brava, Econosphere, GraceSmartTM, Platinum and VisionHT, and the Modcol brands which comprise Spring preparative column hardware and MultiPacker packing equipment and services.
Additional HPLC column brands, including Vydac, will be sold to the UK’s Hichrom which will also acquire Grace’s Alltima, AllsepTM, Apex, Apollo, Genesis and Prevail column products. The Grace and Alltech solid phase extraction cartridge brands – Maxi-Clean, Extract-Clean and Gracepure – will be sold to Singapore laboratory and scientific equipment supplier, S*Pure. This transaction also includes Grace’s manufacturing facility in Surat, India.
Grace said it would continue to supply media for all the product lines sold. The US company is currently buying BASF’s polyolefin catalysts business with completion due in the third quarter of 2016.
