Frank H. Laukien - Bruker Corp.
Management
Yeah. Very good questions. It's a confounding area, and there's a lot of dynamics going on. So first of all, with the MALDI Biotyper, we have of course one competitor, a formidable company in that space. Although we believe we're the market leader with MALDI, fast MALDI ID. We are also offering capabilities on top of our MALDI Biotyper primarily in Europe right now, but over time also elsewhere that go beyond what others have tried to do with these systems, mainly into the fast blood culture identification markets. And there we really think, their market is a little bit bifurcated. So there are some mostly molecular technologies, PCR, one flavor or another, sometimes also phenomic technologies that are really quite expensive, and I think some of them just don't have much traction yet, although they may be promising, and some of them may carve out certain niches, whereas we go much more after the cost effective, millions of years of identifications from blood culture type of mass markets that require a more cost effective, lower price point. So we think we are in the sweet spot for our markets, and even our Bologna workflow is very different from these molecular or technologies that you're seeing out there. I can't comment on each one of them. It's obviously a confounding field, and a lot's going on. Our Invasive Fungal Disease niche, you're right about that. That is a molecular technique. That is directly from specimen or from blood samples without any culture, very important, because a lot of it is Candida and Aspergillus, they just don't grow very much or very well, or only very slowly in culture. So there we're going after a certain niche where we think we actually, by doing it directly from blood where we have something unique, but that's still very early days for that. And yeah, I mean, a lot of the things that we're rolling out are just for a slightly different take on the market, much more mainstream, but at a lower price point and with slightly different characteristics than some of the other press releases and new products that you may have in mind, and that we're keeping an eye on.