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A Quarter of a Century: Analytik Jena Celebrates Its 25-Year Anniversary with a Ceremony in the New Weimar Hall
Jena, Germany, August 31, 2015 – Analytik Jena AG looks back on a quarter century of successful corporate development. The Thuringian company, which has been part of the Swiss Endress+Hauser Group for two years, was founded in spring 1990 during the time of German reunification as a sales company and, with commercial register number 27, was one of the first companies founded in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall. With capital of 6,000 East German marks, the founders Klaus Berka and Jens Adomat, together with Walter Maul, who left at the end of 1990, started Analytik Jena GmbH as a “sales company for analytical instruments” for large multinational corporations in the new German states. Today the company is an internationally active group with more than 1,100 employees and revenue of more than EUR 120 million in the 2013/2014 financial year.
“There is no longer any relevant market in which we are not represented with our laboratory analytical instruments,” CEO Klaus Berka said. For years the Company has been well underway in its core segments around the globe. With an export share of approximately 75 percent, it sells its products in more than 90 countries today, a number that continues to grow.
The acquisition of the lab analysis technology division from Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH in December 1995 represented a turning point, and, from then on, the Company acted as a developer, manufacturer, and provider of innovative high-tech products, with which the Company has been able to survive and grow in the face of competition from large corporations in the global market. Success could by no means be taken for granted: “In our relatively short corporate history, we have already made enormous progress with only a few setbacks. Particularly at the beginning, we assumed large risks – primarily financial ones – including the risk of failure,” Klaus Berka recalls today.
Analytik Jena has positioned itself worldwide as a manufacturer of technically highly specialized laboratory analytical instruments for a wide range of applications. The portfolio includes analytical instruments to measure concentrations of elements and molecules, as well as systems for bioanalytical applications, spanning the entire life cycle of a sample from sample preparation to detection. “The market for our products grows by three to ten percent annually, depending on the product group. Analysis is done everywhere. Regardless of whether it is a matter of monitoring our environment for harmful substances, living up to customer and market demands for quality, providing premium products to scientists for their research, or offering new molecular diagnostic reagents or diagnostic processes,” Klaus Berka said. We expect that the need for corresponding high-technology products will continue to grow significantly in the next few years.
We took an important step forward last year expanding the portfolio by adding so-called ICP mass spectrometry, which was acquired from a US-based company. “With the integration of ICP mass spectrometry into our core business, we are now in a position to offer the entire portfolio of elemental trace spectrometry in atomic spectrometry,” Klaus Berka was pleased to explain. “This acquisition is the basis for further expanding our portfolio and brings us closer to large US competitors.” The acquisition is designed to penetrate new sales sectors, customer areas, and markets and to strengthen Analytik Jena's market position.
In recent years, Analytik Jena has repeatedly succeeded in positioning itself in the market with its innovative products against much larger competitors and in growing internationally. “Particularly through Analytik Jena’s integration into the Endress+Hauser family company, we look forward to the future with optimism. The shared goal is to continue to invest here in Thuringia and to achieve sustainable success. There is still no end in sight,” Klaus Berka said.
On September 1, 2015, Analytik Jena will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its founding. A total of 1,000 employees and guests are expected at the event in the New Weimar Hall congress center. Welcome speeches will be delivered by Wolfgang Tiefensee, Minister for Economics, Science, and Digital Society of the Free State of Thuringia; Dr. Albrecht Schröter, Mayor of the City of Jena; Prof. Dr. Klaus Dicke, former Rector at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena; and Matthias Altendorf as CEO of the parent company Endress+Hauser.