by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | September 07, 2016
From the September 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Jeff Johnson, an analyst who follows Varian for Robert W. Baird & Co., says the split makes sense from a business perspective, as both divisions will want to make their own decisions about capital deployment. While there is some overlap between the two businesses from a research and development and product development standpoint, Johnson says there’s not significant overlap, and the businesses sell through different channels — to hospitals for the oncology business and to other manufacturers through the imaging components business. “I think management felt those businesses have been growing further apart,” Johnson says. “It would make sense to have two different management structures.”
A new face in tube manufacturing
As Varian goes through changes, another company is emerging as a competitor in the X-ray tube space. Recently, several employees left Philips subsidiary Dunlee and moved to Richardson Electronics, a longtime distributor of X-ray tubes for installed equipment. At the same time, the company has decided to make a major investment to get into the business of manufacturing X-ray tubes for Siemens, Philips and Toshiba equipment, and marketing them to independent and in-house service organizations.
The idea is to expand upon the mission of the company’s health care division to provide facilities service options that are an alternative to costly OEM service agreements, says Thomas Spees, vice president of sales at Richardson Healthcare, who moved to the company from Dunlee, where he served as director of sales for North America, in 2014. “The way to do this is to supply high quality replacement components, hence getting into manufacturing,” Spees says. “An OEM might charge $150,000 per year to maintain one piece of equipment. That’s a lot of money. Our goal is to enable alternative competition into that space.”
Spees acknowledges that there is a “major technical barrier” to manufacturing high-quality X-ray tubes, which requires working with metals with different melting points and making sure all gases and other materials are removed from the metal components to ensure there’s a solid vacuum. He says the work on the company’s new Illinois factory is 75 percent complete and that the company can currently do a recertification process and repairs on pre-owned tubes. Richardson plans to be ready to manufacture new tubes by the middle of 2017.
“We want our service channel partners to know that help is on the way,” Spees says. “For so long, they have been unable to compete in servicing some brands of OEM equipment because they don’t have the spare parts.”
