By Puyaan Singh and Kunal Das
July 23 (Reuters) – Thermo Fisher Scientific raised its annual profit forecast after beating Wall Street estimates for second-quarter results on Thursday, as improving customer demand lifted sales across all its business segments, sending shares up 10%.
The life sciences tools market has shown signs of improvement as biotech and pharmaceutical companies increase spending on research and manufacturing after a prolonged post-pandemic slowdown. Thermo Fisher said customer activity across its markets continued to strengthen.
“Our end markets continue to strengthen and we’re making great progress enhancing our capabilities,” CEO Marc Casper said.
Casper said biotech customer activity had been picking up and was now translating into revenue.
The Waltham, Massachusetts-based company raised its 2026 adjusted per share profit view to $24.93 to $25.33, from $24.64 to $25.12 previously.
The company also returned to growth in its under-pressure academic and government segment and in China, though Casper cautioned that academic and government research demand in China remained “quite mute.”
The Trump administration has cut funding and frozen grants to universities and research bodies that buy Thermo Fisher products and services.
While the segment returned to growth in the U.S., finance chief Jim Meyer remained cautious, saying “the market is going through a stabilization period …[we] didn’t change [our] outlook for academic and government.”
Earlier this week, peer Danaher beat quarterly profit estimates and raised its annual profit outlook, though it cut its full-year core revenue growth outlook and reported lower-than-expected revenue in its biotechnology business.
The results should reassure investors that end markets for life-sciences tools are turning and that Danaher’s bioprocessing order delay was company-specific and not reflective of the industry, Evercore ISI analyst Vijay Kumar said.
Thermo Fisher posted second-quarter adjusted per share earnings of $6.03 on sales of $11.99 billion, above analysts’ average estimate of $5.71 on revenue of $11.70 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG.
(Reporting by Kunal Das and Puyaan Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid)
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