You might not guess from its stock chart, but a technology supplier to the biotech industry recently argued to Jim Cramer that it’s not pandemic driven.
Dr. Udit Batra, president and CEO of Waters Corp. (WAT) – Get Waters Corporation Report, explained to Jim Cramer on a recent episode of the Mad Money TV show that while the firm was involved in vaccine and therapeutic development, the vast majority of their earnings are not Covid-related.
Waters is an analytical instruments and software company for the healthcare industry. Batra explained that 80% of all the molecules submitted for approval to the FDA last year used Waters’ Empower software systems, which allows samples to be tested and have the data automatically submitted in a seamless process.
From September 2020 to July, 2021 shares of Waters rose 10 months in a row.
Real Money’s Bruce Kamich is cautious on the stock. “WAT may have a great fundamental story but the charts are discounting some disappointing news ahead,” Kamich wrote recently on Real Money. ”Shares look vulnerable to further declines,” he added.
Before joining Waters in September 2020, Batra served as CEO of the $7.7 billion life science business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, which operates as MilliporeSigma in the United States and Canada. In 2015, Udit led the formation of MilliporeSigma, with the largest merger in the life science tools industry at the time.
Waters recently announced it has acquired the technology assets and intellectual property rights of Megadalton Solutions Inc., an early-stage developer of Charge Detection Mass Spectrometry (CDMS) technology and services.
Megadalton Solutions has developed CDMS instrumentation that makes it possible to analyze extremely large proteins and protein complexes, such as those used in cell and gene therapies, that would otherwise be difficult to analyze with conventional mass spectrometry.
