Hello Dean, Mike and Fellow Board Members,
I have been reading this board and have been an investor in IMGG since October. I made a profile on investors hub just so I can talk to you fine people here on the IMGG board. I have really high hopes for this stock. Today I was looking through some old news on yahoo finance and found an article when I was looking at GE's headlines. I'll copy and paste it at the bottom. I thought it might be interesting for the people I've seen on this board hoping for a buyout of this wonderful IMGG technology. Siemens is also mentioned in this article for spending some of their big money also. Here's to many dollars later!!
Mergers And Acquisitions
GE Sees Future Of Diagnostics In IT
Matthew Herper, 01.19.07, 6:00 AM ET
General Electric's decision to spend $8 billion on Abbott Laboratories' diagnostic testing business signals big changes in what happens after a doctor draws your blood, as new innovations are driven not by discoveries but by robotics and information technology.
On Thursday, GE (nyse: GE - news - people ) announced that it will purchase Abbott's primary in-vitro and Point-of-Care diagnostics businesses for about $8 billion in cash. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2007.
In June, German electronics giant Siemens (nyse: SI - news - people ) bought Bayer's diagnostics unit for $4 billion. GE and Siemens compete tooth and nail in one of the biggest markets in medicine -- the sale of giant imaging machines like PET scanners and MRI Machines. There are more than 20,000 MRI machines operating in the world today.
There was a time when creating a new blood test or other diagnostic was mainly a matter of chemistry. But Joe Hogan, the president and chief executive of GE Healthcare, says that new horizons in medical tests is now a matter of having better information technology and robotics. And one of the chief reasons to be in the business is that the tests are what decide how patients are treated. Only 1% of the $1.1 trillion spent on health care in the U.S. goes to these tests, Hogan says, but two thirds of that spending happens because of the result of one of these cheap tests.
Now, GE will be able to sell hospitals everything they need for a litany of tests. A man might get a prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood test to try to detect prostate cancer early. If the PSA test came in high, a doctor would order up an ultrasound or a CT scan. In the future, even more information might be gleaned by using genetic tests that come out of GE's Amersham division, which it purchased in 2003 for $10 billion.
How does this soup-to-nuts array of diagnostic technologies help GE? After all, Genentech (nyse: DNA - news - people ) has a drug, Herceptin, that is paired with a genetic test, but it hasn't chosen a diagnostics business itself. But Hogan sees the potential for savings. For one thing, the GE service organization -- which ships 6,000 parts a day -- can maintain all these different types of machines. For another, GE's sales presence will allow it to better penetrate tough markets, like China.
But there will be other advantages, too, as GE can develop products that mesh well with moneymaking diagnostic tests. One example, Hogan says, is the Optison imaging agent, used to take pictures of the arteries in the neck with ultrasound. GE got the chemical, which is injected into the blood before an imaging test, when it bought Amersham. It had been a slow seller, but because GE also sells ultrasound machines, it was able to get cardiologists interested.
By combining diagnostics with information technology, Hogan says, he believes GE can create a world where diseases are caught earlier. Abbott, apparently, doesn't see itself as needing similar breadth. It is keeping its high-growth genetic test business even as it sells its blood-and-urine testing outfit to GE.