Financial Astrology of Millipore Corporation

FINANCIAL ASTROLOGY

First Trade Date for Millipore Corporation

Company Name	First Trade Date (yyyy-mm-dd)
Millipore Corporation	1987-12-23

Company Name	Symbol
Millipore Corporation	MIL
History and Business of Company (this information may include date of incorporation)
Millipore Corporation was incorporated under the laws of Massachusetts on May 3, 1954. Our corporate headquarters are in Billerica, Massachusetts. Millipore is a multinational bioscience company that provides technologies, tools and services for the discovery, development and production of therapeutic drugs and for other purposes. We serve customers in the worldwide biotechnology, life science research and other bioscience markets with a variety of products and services used in the purification, separation and analysis of fluids. Our products are based on a variety of enabling technologies, including our membrane filtration and chromatography technologies. We are a multinational company with more than 60% of our 2003 sales outside the United States and 49% of our long-lived assets outside the United States at December 31, 2003. We have three operating segments: BioPharmaceutical, Laboratory Water and Life Sciences. These three operating segments are aggregated into one reporting segment for financial statement purposes. Segment and geographic information is discussed in Note 18 to our Consolidated Financial Statements. Millipore sells over 5,000 standard products, not including spare parts, which are listed in our catalogs and are sold as standard systems or devices. We also sell custom products, primarily our process scale filtration and chromatography systems and columns. We manufacture the majority of our products in our manufacturing facilities described in Item 2 of this Form 10-K. In addition, we purchase some products from third-party manufacturers for resale. We sell consumables, hardware and services. Consumables sales, in local currencies, represent approximately 78% of our 2003 sales. Our wide range of consumable products include handheld laboratory sample preparation and screening devices and kits in various low and high throughput formats, specialty membranes, chromatography media and large process scale cartridges used to filter thousands of liters of fluid. Hardware sales, in local currencies, represent approximately 18% of our 2003 sales and include products ranging from small benchtop laboratory water purification systems and cartridge integrity testers to large stainless steel process scale filtration and chromatography systems and columns with selling prices that can be greater than a million dollars. Services, in local currencies, represent approximately 4% of our 2003 sales and include field services for the maintenance of laboratory water systems and validation services offered to biopharmaceutical customers. The principal technologies utilized by our products are based on membrane filtration and chromatography. Membranes use size exclusion to filter either the wanted or the unwanted particulate or bacterial, molecular or viral entities from fluids. Some of our membrane materials also use affinity, ion-exchange or electrical charge mechanisms to effect the desired separation. Microfiltration and ultrafiltration membranes are incorporated into devices, cartridges and modules of different configurations to address a variety of customer purification and separation needs. Chromatography media is used to purify or separate biopharmaceutical compounds or to remove contaminants from these compounds by adsorption. Our laboratory water purification products combine membrane, resin and other separations technologies. Certain of our sample preparation products use both membranes and chromatographic separation techniques. In the past several years, we have also developed and/or acquired rights to certain products and technologies designed to simplify and to reduce the time and expense of certain steps in the downstream and final fill processes of biotechnology and other pharmaceutical manufacturing primarily by replacing stainless steel hardware with disposable plastic products. These "disposable manufacturing" products include disposable filling systems for sterile fill and finish operations and disposable valves for connecting sterile disposable components. Our products are used in biopharmaceutical manufacturing and research operations to isolate and purify specific components of fluid streams for analysis, to concentrate identified compounds for further processing and to purify or sterilize small and large volumes of critical fluids. Customers also use our products to gain knowledge about a molecule, compound or microorganism by detecting, identifying and quantifying the relevant components of a fluid sample. Our laboratory water purification products are used by customers to provide ultrapure water for critical laboratory analysis and for clinical testing. In addition, products based on our proprietary size exclusion membrane technology have been introduced to improve speed, automation and cost-effectiveness of a number of separations for DNA sequencing, plasmid prep, PCR, diagnostic and microarray applications. These novel technologies are also being used for new applications in the drug discovery markets for the screening of potential drug compounds and for sample preparation. During the past several years, we have launched a series of kits based on these technologies that are intended for a variety of protein and genomics applications. Our newer disposable manufacturing products are expected to be used in a variety of applications in downstream and final fill processes of pharmaceutical manufacturing.

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