Sapphire, Upchurch Merge Under Scivex

Sapphire Engineering, Inc. (SEI) of Pocasset, MA, joined forces May 2 with Upchurch Scientific of Oak Harbor, WA under the banner of Scivex, their newly designated parent company.

In business since 1900, SEI is a leading manufacturer of precision component parts from very hard materials, such as synthetic sapphire, ruby and zirconia ceramics. These materials are known for their inert characteristics and are therefore preferred in the analytical and HPLC instrument markets as wetted component parts in liquid handling and detection systems.

SEI serves a global market with its sapphire pistons and ruby ball seat check valves. Over the last 10 years the company has offered increasingly complex turnkey, sub-assemblies to OEMs, ranging from complete pump heads and check valves, to flow-cell assemblies. Last year SEI introduced a line of low-pressure positive displacement and dispense pumps that have been well received by the instrument market. Other market activities include precision micro ball lenses and assemblies for fiber optics and technical sapphire components for industrial applications.

Upchurch Scientific is a leading manufacturer of close-tolerance fluid transfer fittings, filters, valves, tubing and accessories, specializing in precision injection molding, machining and extrusion of high-end engineering thermoplastics. Key markets for Upchurch include the analytical instrumentation, medical devices and diagnostics industries.

"Each company will continue to operate independently with existing management," said Alan Schell, CEO of Scivex and Upchurch Scientific. "However we are beginning to explore the possibility of combining product development on certain projects because of the liquid transfer engineering problems that we can jointly solve. That's why this merger makes sense."

"In the early 80's," added Keith D. Besse, Sapphire Engineering president and CEO, "everyone produced and sold components to OEM's who built up their assemblies in house. But in the last 10 years there has been concentrated effort by OEMs to outsource many of these activities. Consequently, both organizations have followed specialty components upstream at the OEM level and began offering customers subassembly and turnkey services."

"Today, we purchase a number of Upchurch parts to connect and finish our subassemblies," Besse continued. "But surprisingly there is very little competing overlap in the products manufactured by our two companies. We can therefore concentrate on taking advantage of each other's strengths to better serve our customers and the markets instead of worrying about duplicate capacities."

KRG Capital Partners, L.L.C. is the leading equity sponsor of Scivex. KRG is a Denver, CO based private equity firm with approximately $400 million in committed capital under management.

IDEX, 619 West Oak Street, P.O. Box 1529, Oak Harbor, WA 98277-1529. Tel: 360-679-2528; Fax: 360-679-3830.