Moving the world Analytik Jena focuses on seven industrial segments in its strategic alignment. The following is an interview with Manuela Beil-Peter and Maik Schmidt on megatrends, working more closely with the industrial world, and Analytik Jena’s effect on the world.

Moving the world Analytik Jena focuses on seven industrial segments in its strategic alignment. The following is an interview with Manuela Beil-Peter and Maik Schmidt on megatrends, working more closely with the industrial world, and Analytik Jena’s effect on the world.

Analytik Jena has now placed its focus on seven industries with a particular emphasis on two of them. Can you explain this strategy?

Manuela Beil-Peter: By prioritizing Environment and Food & Agriculture, we are following the megatrends, those developments that will be shaping our future in all probability. This includes global population growth, which poses universal existential questions regarding clean water, food supplies, and health. This involves a great responsibility as well: providing our customers with the right products and reliable solutions.

Maik Schmidt: Especially when it comes to the environment, we have remained close to our roots in the academic and public sectors. We provide equipment to environmental agencies, water and wastewater treatment associations, waste disposal companies, and universities all around the world. And people who come to know and appreciate our equipment in their university years continue to prefer it afterwards in their careers in a wide variety of industries.

Working more closely with the industrial world is another important part of the strategy – not least in order to explore synergies with the Endress+Hauser parent company.

Maik Schmidt: Endress+Hauser plays a role whenever flow or pressure needs to be determined, while our own place remains in the lab. In the Oil & Gas segment, for example, we have increased our market share for elemental analysis instruments over the past several years, as has been the case in the fuel production and petrochemical industry in particular. And even if fossil fuels will be used less in the future, they will continue to be produced for decades to come and so their production needs to be monitored. With regard to the Power & Energy segment, energy supply regulations are becoming stricter and our technology helps monitor those requirements.

What about the technology itself? Are there still exciting new things to discover?

Maik Schmidt: All the time! New applications are emerging right now in Chemistry & Materials. Our ICP-OES is now being used in France to test the purity of salts used for industrial purposes. And it’s also used in the Geology, Mining & Metals segment to decide whether it’s worth exploring particular rare earth deposits, an indispensable raw material for electronic devices of all kinds. New applications often emerge in cooperation with our customers ...

… whose processes you have to understand as well.

Maik Schmidt: It’s of great importance to us to be able to communicate with customers on the same level. We need experts in the field who are able to play a part in shaping our customers’ processes, and who could, for example, also become active on standards committees. We go far based on our own capabilities such as our excellent command of ICP MS, one of the most powerful analytical measuring techniques around. That allows us to open new doors. Speaking of matters of sophistication, pharmaceutical research can also be quite demanding …

Manuela Beil-Peter: … and we’ve been providing equipment for research in Pharma & Life Science since the 1990s, helping our customers reach new scientific goals. New developments have come rapidly in the segment.

Speaking of matters of sophistication, pharmaceutical research can also be quite demanding …

Manuela Beil-Peter: … and we’ve been providing equipment for research in Pharma & Life Science since the 1990s, helping our customers reach new scientific goals. New developments have come rapidly in the segment.

How do you keep up?

Manuela Beil-Peter: We stay up-to-date with our customers. We provide equipment to the pharmaceutical industry, for example, for their high-volume search for active ingredients. The industry has been taking this broad approach towards developing new medicines since the 1990s, collecting millions of compounds as potential active ingredients. Our systems process 300,000 samples per day – and do so automatically. As medicine and science continue to advance, new biotechnological approaches emerge that require systems that can be adapted flexibly. We’ve been working to make this possible for customers such as DKMS, which uses stem-cell therapy to combat leukemia.

What does this expertise mean for pandemics such as COVID-19?

Manuela Beil-Peter: We knew right away what the market would need, ranging from automated tests to detect the virus and antibodies to testing wastewater for their viral loads. COVID-19 is of course not the first pandemic: 2002/03 SARS-CoV, the swine flu of 2009/10, MERS 2012, and the 2017/18 influenza wave, just to name a few, all alarmed the world and called for research to be conducted. While we were already familiar with those types of needs, the level of demand was new to us. And new tasks have emerged as well: we are now talking about mobile lab capacities to be able to test for the virus in remote locations. Our strength lies in speed, robustness, and having reproducible results.

A new worldwide awareness for global challenges and sustainability seems to be emerging now in general …

Maik Schmidt: … as we have now seen in India, where the government has introduced a program for cleaner air. Even though vehicles still need to catch up with fuel standards, it’s a place to start and reveals a new way of thinking. We can see this in other areas as well. It’s now a real selling point that our instruments, such as ICP-MS, do comparatively well when it comes to energy and gas consumption.

Analytik Jena won’t be able to solve the major existential questions facing humanity …

Manuela Beil-Peter: … and yet – we’re proud to play a considerable role in helping our customers to make the world a little better every day.

Maik Schmidt: And we don’t have that in mind often enough in our daily work.