£50m shareholder boom as US firm agrees £60m for Oxford Instruments’ quantum business
In FY25, NanoScience generated approximately £59m of revenue and £1m of adjusted operating profit. Having returned the business to growth and profitability, this sale crystallises this value for shareholders, the Abingdon company says.
Non-recurring transaction-related costs are expected to be around £2m–£3m in FY2025/26. Following the sale, approximately £4m of cost which is currently allocated to the NanoScience business will remain within the Group. Oxford Instruments expects to start to mitigate this in FY2026/27.
It says the divestment will better enable Oxford Instruments to focus on its remaining businesses, which have growth and margin characteristics that will ensure the group is better placed to deliver value for shareholders.
A spokesperson said that, given the strength of the balance sheet, the expected cash proceeds from the sale, and in line with its capital allocation policy, the group plans to return up to £50 million to shareholders via a share buyback, starting soon.
Headquartered in California but with a global footprint, Quantum Design offers a range of products and services for scientific, academic and industrial research. The sale is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to complete in the third quarter of FY2025/26.
Oxford Instruments CEO Richard Tyson said: “The sale of our NanoScience quantum business is in line with our strategy to focus and invest in the best areas of opportunity to grow the Group and create value for shareholders, and supports progress towards our medium-term margin targets. It is also consistent with our focus on our three core markets: materials analysis, semiconductor, and healthcare and life science.”
For more than 40 years Quantum Design (QD) has been providing technology solutions to researchers in the fields of physics, chemistry, biotechnology, materials science and nanotechnology. Established in 1982 in San Diego, Quantum Design is acknowledged as the leading commercial source for automated materials characterisation systems offering a variety of measurement capabilities.
QD instruments are found in the world's leading research institutions and have become the reference standard for a variety of magnetic and physical property measurements. The instruments are cited in, and provide the data for, more scientific publications than any other instrument in the fields of magnetics and materials characterisation. This means that each year, literally hundreds of scientific publications, advancing the science of materials, use data generated from QD instruments.
Away from its US mother ship, QD has offices in Belgium, Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, and the UK.
