Which mass spec supplier is hot on Thermo’s heels?
Back in March we released our mass spectrometer data, and outlined that Thermo Scientific (part of Thermo Fisher) claim the largest share of citations with 45 per cent.
Today we’re going to take a deeper look at trends in this interesting market, and look at what the top three suppliers are, what their citation share is now and how it has changed over the last ten years.
We catch up with CiteAb product manager Rebecca Sadler who has been compiling this data.
Rebecca, we know Thermo Scientific is a major player in the mass spectrometry market. Which other companies should we be watching?
In addition to Thermo Scientific, the other main players in this market are Waters and Bruker. I’ve been looking at over 17,600 citations for research carried out over the past ten years, and these companies consistently appear at the forefront.
What are the current market shares held by each of these three?
Well Thermo Scientific is really doing well – their total share for 2018 was 54 per cent. In comparison, Waters has about 12 per cent of all citations for 2018, and Bruker has ten per cent.
Has this always been the case, or is the market changing?
No, absolutely this is a new situation and there has been a fair bit of change in how this market has been shared out over the past ten years. For example, Thermo Scientific has had year on year increases between 2009 and 2019 – resulting in significant growth in market share. The company has gone from around 16 per cent to over half of the total global market in that time.
It appears that the bulk of Thermo’s growth has been claimed from market previously dominated by Bruker. Back in 2009 Bruker was responsible for around half of all citations, to around ten per cent today. Thats a significant loss and I am sure the company is looking closely at what its competitor is doing to be pushing it out of this space so effectively.
While this battle has been happening, what has been going on with Waters?
Well Waters has seen less dramatic changes over the past ten years. It has lost some share, but had less than Bruker in the first place. In 2009 Waters claimed 21 per cent of citations for mass spectrometry use, this dropped off between then and 2013, although things have levelled out since then with a share similar to today’s 12 per cent.
Interestingly, the company has seen a very small increase in market share over the past year. This could just be a blip, but potentially its on the up and we’ll be watching the data closely to see what happens.
Is there anyone else in this market worth keeping an eye on?
Absolutely – this is actually a very diverse market with a lot of smaller suppliers that are vying for share, meaning no one company can really afford to rest on its laurels for too long. We have nine suppliers in our mass spectrometry database – it will be interesting to see whether Thermo Scientific can maintain its upward trend, or whether Waters starts to claim some share back, or potentially even one of the smaller players such as SCIEX, which has made quite fast gains from three per cent in 2009 to ten per cent today.
If you’d like to receive free data showing the citation share year on year for the top three suppliers – Thermo Scientific, Waters and Bruker, over the past ten years, sign up below and it will be delivered direct to your inbox.
We’ll be looking at this data again in the near future, exploring some of the other suppliers that are rising through the ranks, and looking at the mass spectrometers themselves. If you’d like to discuss any part of this data with Rebecca please do contact her and she’ll be more than happy to answer your questions.
– Rhys and the CiteAb team
