Agfa Healthcare sales continue to fall
- 29 July 2009
Agfa-Gavaert has announced that its healthcare sales have decreased by 5.8% from €313m to €295m for the second quarter of 2009.
The Belgium company has blamed the economic crisis, which has caused customers in the US and certain European countries, to cause care organisations to delay their investment in computed radiography equipment and imaging IT.
The results also show that enterprise IT, has continued to perform strongly. Agfa Healthcare’s Orbis hospital information systems is expanding in selected target markets, such as in France, where one of the largest hospital centres, Centre Hospitalier du Mans, recently selected the solution to support the implementation of a full electronic patient record.
A spokesperson for Agfa, told E-Health Europe: “Agfa-Gevaert is inclined to believe that the crisis-driven decline in its most important markets is bottoming out. However, it is still impossible to predict when the markets will pick up and when demand will recover.
“Meanwhile, Agfa-Gevaert continuously adapts the cost structures of its business groups to the situation in their respective markets in order to safeguard and strengthen their competitive positions.”
In the first half of 2009, Agfa also won a number of significant contracts across Europe for their IMPAX Picture Archiving Solution (PACS). This included a European wide-tender for a PACS solution put out by the University Hospital of Bonn in Germany.
Ziekenhuisnetwerk Antwerpen in Belgium also signed a contract with Agfa to install IMPAX to centralise the diagnostic and clinical imagining needs of its nine sites across the city of Antwerp.
Recently, Agfa released its sixth PACS version, IMPAX 6.4 after signing an agreement in May 2009, with Segami Corporation to integrate Oasis workstation software. The integration allows nuclear medicine physicians to review, process and report studies using advanced processing software on their IMPAX workstation.
However, the second quarter results state that the market for x-ray film evolved in line with expectations and that Agfa Healthcare was able to expand its market share for hardcopy film.
The company attributed these sales to the continuing market decline in the US, accelerated market decline in Western Europe and continued growth in emerging markets.
In March, Agfa released their full year results which showed that despite sales reaching €1.39 billion for 2008, the fourth quarter of year showed a substantial drop in sales by 13.1% year on year to €325m.
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