I would like to take this opportunity to address the recent acquisition of Agilent’s XRD business by Rigaku Corporation and the subsequent creation of a new combined Rigaku Oxford Diffraction single crystal group.
Our decision to make this acquisition was based on a number of things, but key among those reasons was the synergy that we recognized between the two groups. Rigaku’s strength in the structural biology market and Oxford Diffraction’s strength in the field of chemical crystallography will be combined to create a stronger overall single crystal organization. As the boundaries between chemical crystallography and macromolecular crystallography continue to be reduced, synergistic use of our combined technologies will lead to better products for both sets of customers.
We felt it was particularly important to bring back the name of “Oxford Diffraction” as it is synonymous with innovative, leading edge hardware and software that has greatly expanded the capabilities of chemical crystallography over the last 15 years. During the same period, Rigaku was advancing the development of X-ray source technology and multilayer optics as applied to the expanded number of life science and structural genomics projects around the world. Thus our new name of “Rigaku Oxford Diffraction” symbolizes our continued commitment to further advance instrumentation technologies for all fields of single crystal analysis.
We now have factories in Japan and Poland that are involved in Rigaku Oxford Diffraction instrument production and single crystal products from these factories will be branded in the same way. Our R&D groups have already started working together and the overall integration process is progressing faster than we expected.