Yokogawa Life Innovation Business (LIB) Europe continues to expand
Most of us and most likely the historians of the future will look at the year 2020 as the year of COVID-19. With this global pandemic, the Life Science field, its researchers, and market players suddenly gained new and rarely seen attention. With that, and for many more reasons, the year 2020 was also for the Yokogawa business in Europe the year of Life Science.
Outlook: What to expect for our Life Innovation Business (LIB) in Europe?
As stated in an earlier article, a great part of our Life Innovation Business (LIB) are our Confocal Scanner Units (CSU) which are supporting researchers and microscopy users to obtain high-resolution live cell images. Even though part of our European portfolio, most of the actual sales processes and tasks were managed by our headquarter in Japan. With the new Yokogawa fiscal year – starting April 2021 – those processes will be managed with gaining involvement by our European LIB team based in Germany so our people can move closer to the market and our customers.
Single-Cell Analysis (SCA) Applications
Additionally, we are expecting the launch of two products for Single-Cell Analysis (SCA) applications either using nano-scale (SU-10) or micro-scale (SS2000) technology. Stay tuned for a soon-to-come article further introducing these two new thrilling technologies and their products.
Yokogawa Fluid Imaging Technologies
Through the acquisition of the US company Fluid Imaging Technologies, Inc. Yokogawa complemented its imaging portfolio towards particle analysis and suspension cell analysis. The newly founded Yokogawa Fluid Imaging Technology (YFT) brand and business will be incorporated into the LIB Europe team. We will introduce our new partnerships in the European market in regard to YFT very soon on this platform as well.
And the bioreactor?
For completeness reasons, we’d like to update the community about the recent news regarding our bioreactor business. The bioreactor is using some of our core product technologies like near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to closely regulate glucose concentration respectively consumption. Unfortunately, the first generation lab-scale bioreactor will not be launched in Europe in the next years. We hope in Europe we will have a newly developed lab-scale as well as a larger production scale version of the next generation bioreactor in about three years’ time.
What are the imminent consequences of this greatly expanding product portfolio?
The immediate consequence is a lot more work for our small LIB team, but we reacted extremely quickly to the foreseeable business needs. Even in the challenging times of COVID-19 related restrictions and impacted travel schedules, we managed to hire new talents in our team. Starting February 1st, a new Product Manager and on March 1st, a new Imaging Application Scientist will join our European LIB team. We are also streamlining internally some of our processes to react as fast as possible to our customer requests and needs providing first-class quality service.
LIB – Continuing what went well in 2020
In 2020, we started new collaborations with external partners like InSphero. We strongly believe in these kinds of scientific partnerships. Our intentions are to extend those collaborations to further partners and new business fields. We will continue implementing new business models for our customers and enhancing our service offerings oriented to customer needs. A last year’s highlight was that our CSU products made it into the daily news and our CQ1 bench-top instrument helped to address the COVID-19 health pandemic.
In summary, the Yokogawa LIB Europe hopes to leave with its coming 2021 actions an even bigger footprint in the Life Science market. Even though the past year was already pathing the ground for our current business it is now time to execute on our planned actions.
