(Reuters) -Life sciences firm Danaher raised its annual profit forecast on Tuesday, banking on resilient demand for its diagnostic testing tools and services.
However, the Washington, D.C.-based company’s shares declined 3% to $182 in premarket hours, after it maintained its target for full-year core revenue growth.
Excluding one-time items and foreign currency impacts, Danaher expects its annual core revenue to grow about 3% from a year ago. It also reiterated that proposed tariffs could add “several hundred million dollars” to its costs this year.
The company’s sales came in at $5.94 billion during the second quarter, helped in part by a weaker dollar, largely in line with analysts’ average expectation of $5.84 billion, according to data from LSEG.
Danaher’s clinical lab diagnostics business grew across most regions, which helped offset declining revenues in China.
Revenues took a hit in China, which makes up about 12% of the company’s sales, due to the country’s volume-based procurement policies where the government buys products in bulk at a cheaper price.
Analysts have warned that Danaher will continue to grapple with sliding revenues in China and weakness in the company’s life sciences unit, through which it sells instruments used to understand the causes of diseases and manufacture new therapies.
Like its peers, Danaher is seeing soft demand and high costs related to these products.
Danaher expects its third-quarter revenue to grow at a low-single-digit percentage rate from a year earlier.
The company forecast annual adjusted profit in the range of $7.70 to $7.80 per share, compared with its previous projection of $7.60 to $7.75.
Analysts were expecting annual profit of $7.70 per share, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Separately, Danaher announced that Matthew Gugino will be succeeding long-time CFO Matthew McGrew, effective February 28, 2026.
(Reporting by Padmanabhan Ananthan in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Shreya Biswas)
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