Analytical and Life Science Instrumentation market which is valued at $32,810 million in 2006 is set to generate revenues of $41, 105million in 2010 with a growth rate of 6 per cent. The Indian market is valued at $750 million and the growth is attributed to the increased pace of research; focus on exports and the emergence of contract research.

"The biggest advantage in the pharma biotech research is that instruments have revolutionized chemical analysis. It has replaced "wet chemistry" methods, provides higher sensitivity, accuracy, increased lab productivity due to automation, minimises operators, skill requirements and errors. Instrumentation is used in application across industrial pharmaceuticals, biotechnology chemicals, food, beverage, polymers, petrochemicals, electronics, semiconductors and aerospace," stated KV Venugoplan, president, Waters India.

The instrumentation market constitutes separation, life science instrumentation, mass spectrometry, molecular spectroscopy, atomic spectroscopy, surface science, materials characterization, lab automation and general lab instrumentation. While life science instrumentation constitutes the largest chunk with a 26 percent share of the total analytical instrumentation market, separation technology is 17 per cent and surface science has a 12 percent share, stated Venugoplan in his lucid presentation at the curtain raiser of Analytica Anacon the instrumentation event to be held in Bangalore.
Life science research has been a driving force behind analytical instrument market growth in India over the past several years, resulting in new products, applications, markets and companies, informed the Waters India chief.
"It is the growing demand for an efficient range of equipment that maintain the highest standards of specificity, sensitivity and selectivity which keeps the market on an upswing. When high technologies like High Performance Liquid Chromatography, (HPLC), increases the levels of sample throughput, sensitivity and resolution providing researchers the speed required to be productive for high throughput laboratory tasks", added Venugoplan.

Analytical instruments used across all sectors from labs in public sector enterprises, educational Institutions to government research centres for Quality assurance/quality control, process control, general analytical services, environmental testing, academic/teaching/research, separation techniques, mass spectrometry.

Global ranking of the top ten vendors in the instrumentation space are Applera Corp, Thermo Electron, Agilent Technologies, Waters Corporation, Perkin Elmer, Shimadzu, GE Healthcare, Bruker Group, Beckman Coulter and Varian.

In India, the leading analytical lab equipment majors include Waters, Thermo Electron, Lab India, Spinco Biotech, Becton Dickinson, Agilent Technologies, Shimadzu Analytical, Millipore, Sartorius and GE Healthcare.