Waters Corporation
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| Type | Public (NYSE: WAT) |
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| Founded | 1958 |
| Headquarters |  Milford, Massachusetts, USA |
| Industry | Life Sciences |
| Revenue | ▲ US$ 1.2 billion (2005)[1] |
| Employees | ~5,000 |
| Website | www.waters.com |
Waters Corporation is a publicly traded laboratory analytical instrument and software company headquartered in Milford, Massachusetts. The company employs more than 5,000 people, with manufacturing facilities located in Milford, Taunton, Massachusetts; Wexford, Ireland; Manchester, England; and contract manufacturing in Singapore.
Waters markets to the laboratory-dependent organization in these market areas: liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, laboratory informatics and thermal analysis.
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[edit] History
Begun by James (Jim) Logan Waters as Waters Associates in an office in the basement of a police station in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1958.
Jim enrolled in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, an officer training program, and graduated from Columbia University as an ensign with a B.S. degree in Physics in 1946. After stints as a university math teacher, Naval officer, project engineer, and entrepreneur, Jim formed Waters Associates in 1958. The fledgling firm’s first offices were in the rented basement of the Framingham, Mass. police station. During these years, Waters Associates was what is now referred to as a research boutique. Companies would contract Jim and his five employees to build one-of-a-kind instruments for various purposes. Early products included a boiler feedwater flame photometer, a balloon hydrometer, a nerve gas detector, a lab refractometer and process control refractometers. While from its start the company had been self-financed, with proceeds from an earlier business sale, Jim opened Waters Associates to external ownership in 1962.
The company’s first major break came when Dow Chemical bought one of Waters’ first gel permeation chromatograph instruments, Dow Chemical made an additional investment of $400,000. By 1979, Dow Chemical had attained nearly 25 percent ownership in Waters.
In 1967, the ALC 100, the first Waters LC system, was brought to market. According to Leslie S. Ettre in a review about Jim Waters , the LC system was formally introduced at the 1968 Pittsburgh Conference. It was a benchtop system equipped with a Milton Roy [3] pump, syringe injection, and two detectors: a Waters differential refractometer and a UV detector from the Laboratory Data Control (LDC) Co.
In 1969, Dimitri D’Arbeloff, then president of Millipore Corporation, joined Waters’ board of directors. Millipore’s venture capital subsidiary made a $600,000 equity investment in Waters.
In 1972, Waters Associates appointed Frank Zenie president. A year later, headquarters moved from Framingham to a semi-rural 26 acre site in Milford, Massachusetts. Jim became chairman, and continued in that role until the company merged with Millipore in 1980, and was rechristened the Waters Chromatograph Division.
The sought-for synergies between the two companies never materialized, however. And, in 1993, Waters returned to independence under the leadership of Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer Douglas A. Berthiaume. In 1997 Waters entered mass spectrometry market with acquisition of Micromass for $176 million.
[edit] Products
Waters’ main product brands include: ACQUITY UPLC Systems, Synapt MS Systems, Synapt HDMS Systems, XTerra HPLC Columns, XBridge Columns, Alliance HPLC Systems, Empower Chromatography and MassLynx Mass Spectrometry Software, Oasis Sample Preparation Products, Premier Mass Spectrometry Systems and Alliance HPLC Systems.
[edit] Sources of Revenue
Nearly 70 percent of the company's revenue is derived from the life science market, a market comprised of drug discovery, drug development, quality control, and the emerging sciences of genomics and proteomics. Waters products are also sold into the food and beverage, environmental, fine chemical, personal care product, university, government, semiconductor, clinical and plastics markets sectors.
