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TWST: How do you think your research and development expenditures will change in the future?

Mr. Williams: They will continue to increase quite dramatically on a dollar basis; but as a percentage of sales revenue they’ll decline simply because our revenue is growing quite rapidly. We see the company, as we have stated, becoming profitable by the end of next year. To do that, marketing and sales and R&D have to decrease on a percentage basis. But, dollar-wise, the spending will increase. Actually, we see a fairly big shift to incremental spending on R&D, with G&A clearly flattening much faster than R&D and marketing and sales on a percentage basis.

TWST: Do you think the 50/50 relationship will remain truly domestic versus international?

Mr. Williams: Yes. In the life science market, that seems to be a pretty good mix a lot of companies strive for. We’ve been fortunate in that we’ve already been able to achieve that mix.

TWST: Are acquisitions, mergers, joint ventures, partnerships and alliances part of your future?

Mr. Williams: Yes, they are always of interest to us. We’ve done several acquisitions in the past, prior to becoming public. We believe that this market is going to consolidate. There’s value in having companies become larger, supplying a more complete solution to the customer. For that reason, we are looking at certain opportunities.

TWST: What are the major concerns or risks facing Genomic Solutions (Nasdaq:GNSL) today and in the future?

Mr. Williams: Managing the growth is always a very significant task. When you grow as fast as we are growing, you’re doubling your capacity, essentially, every 10 to 14 months, so there are always a lot of issues with hiring employees. That is one of the major issues right now. We have a lot of job openings, and high-tech/high-knowledge businesses are only as good as and only can grow as the number of employees they can secure to fill positions. I think, right now, we have approximately 35 job openings. It’s not that we’ve lost employees, just that we can’t add them quickly enough. Another issue is manufacturing capacity. We’re fine right now and for the next several months, but there’s always the challenge of adding new space before you actually need it and getting it online.

TWST: How many employees do you have now, roughly?

Mr. Williams: Around 145.

TWST: What incentives do you have in place to keep and attract good people?

Mr. Williams: We have an extremely strong benefit program. We actually had a consultant come in and rate our benefits. We’re in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so, to a certain degree, we have to compete with very large companies like the auto companies, Dow Chemical and the University of Michigan for administrative employees. For scientific personnel, we’re competing with large entities as well. We offer a very comprehensive benefits program, including health, dental, vision, life insurance and our 401(K) is very good, with significant matching contributions from the company. We also offer stock options. All Genomic Solutions employees either own stock in the company or have stock options after spending a certain length of time with the company.

TWST: Could you tell us more about Genomic Solutions’ competitive advantages? What differentiates the company from its competition?

Mr. Williams: The major competitive advantage is that we now sell systems to our customers, but, unlike some of our competitors, we sell complete systems that are highly automated, and we’re able to essentially transfer technology. We’re not just an engineering house or a software development house or a reagent house — we have all those. Plus, we have scientists who also run this equipment. So we’re able to teach our customers how to use this very sophisticated, high-tech equipment so that they can get up to speed quickly and start generating results, which is really the name of the game. So, our competitive advantage has been: highly automated systems that are highly productive, as well as having a complete set of skills within the company that enables our customers to quickly understand how to use this equipment and apply it to their individual applications.