Medical firm Cepheid buys plastics molder

Medical diagnostics firm Cepheid plans to buy a plastics molder to overcome supply constraints for cartridges it relies on for its systems, according to a news report.

GenomeWeb News reported Sept. 27 that Cepheid President and CEO John Bishop told analysts that the firm’s diagnostic systems sales were hurt in the third quarter by “intermittent interruptions in the supply of Xpert cartridge parts.”

Bishop did not identify the current molder of its cartridge parts or which molder it is targeting to acquire. Cepheid CFO Andrew Miller reportedly told analysts the price of the acquisition would be in the mid-teens of millions of dollars. Cepheid would move the molding operating into a new facility, buy new equipment to boost molding volumes and also eventually set up a molding operation in Cepheid’s facility in Sweden.

Sunnyvale-based Cepheid has developed a compact, fast, automated molecular diagnostic workstation system called GeneXpert. The system relies on patented cartridges.

Cepheid officials told analysts that its third quarter revenue would be in the $79 million to $81 million range, below its target and below analyst’s expectations. They blamed the shortfall on a shortage of cartridges as Cepheid was developing higher capacity production tooling and processes.

Cepheid systems are employed in clinics around the world to check on infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. The firm had sold 3,350 systems globally by the end of its second quarter, June 30. Its second quarter sales was $81 million and net profit, $1.1 million.

Eighteen months ago, and just two weeks after Merivale supremo Justin Hemmes' latest restaurant, the Asian mash-up Ms. G's, was rammed with the glamorous and the gluttonous, Hemmes called in the restaurant's new executive chef, Dan Hong, to talk about the future. The young chef had barely drawn breath as his kitchen heaved under the strain of a manic kitchen, but Hemmes was in no mood for pausing. He asked the then 28-year-old Hong, a Vietnamese-Australian who trained at Tetsuya's, if he would run a new Mexican cantina that Hemmes had in mind. Easy enough. Then came the kicker: Hemmes also wanted Hong to head up a modern Chinese restaurant he was planning to build in his Tank nightclub space. "Justin's always coming up with crazy, visionary ideas but this was pretty daunting," says Hong, who took a week to get back to Hemmes.

"I knew just how massively huge Tank was."

Now that Mr. Wong has opened, Hong must be wondering if he really understood just how massive an undertaking it would be. The head chefs are doing eye-bleeding, six-day-a-week double shifts to cater for daily covers that can top 850 in the 240-seater, spectacularly fitted-out space. There are two kitchens - including one dedicated solely to dim sum, headed up by dumpling guru Eric Koh, headhunted from the Michelin-starred Hakkasan in London - as well as a three-tonne duck oven that empties faster than they can fill it. The glass-encased two-storey wine cage holds 5500 bottles. At times, the laneway off Bridge Street almost isn't long enough for the queues that snake from the restaurant's front door.