Sale of MDS Analytical Technologies is completed

Toronto, ON & Washington, DC – MDS Inc and Danaher Corporation announced today that they have finalized the sale of the Analytical Technologies division of MDS to Danaher for $650 million in cash.

“The divestiture of the MDS Analytical Technologies business marks a significant milestone in the company’s repositioning strategy and enables a substantial return of proceeds from the sale to shareholders,” said Steve West, MDS Inc’s chief executive officer.

MDS Analytical Technologies division includes a 50% ownership position in the Applied Biosystems/MDS Sciex joint venture (AB Sciex), which is a designer and manufacturer of mass spectrometers, and Molecular Devices, acquired by MDS in 2007, which supplies high-performance bio-analytical instrumentation systems and consumables.

Danaher reported last fall that it had acquired the other 50% share of AB Sciex from Life Technologies Corporation.

Danaher is a $11.2-billion company that designs and manufactures instruments and other products and services to customers in a number of markets including environmental, test and measurement, medical techologies and robotics. MDS Inc provides products and services used in the development of drugs and the diagnosis and treatment of disease. The company has two remaining units: MDS Nordion business, which provides medical isotopes for molecular and diagnostic imaging, radiotherapeutics and sterilization technologies, and pharmaceutical contract research division MDS Pharma Services.

The sale is the result of a strategic repositioning that MDS announced last September, in which it also indicated that it plans to sell its MDS Pharma Services division in order to focus on the MDS Noridion business.