Last week, I drove to HORIBA’s facility in Piscataway, New Jersey to witness the ceremonial grand opening of its Analytical Solution Plaza (ASP), about 15,000 square feet of space within the larger facility that has been transformed into a lab environment focused squarely on working on applications and methods development with customers across multiple industries including materials, semiconductors, energy, life science, and biopharma. Over several hours, company representatives shared details of the company’s history, its current business, and specific plans for the new ASP and how it fits into HORIBA’s broader corporate strategy.

The New Jersey ASP is the 19^th to open globally, with the first launching in Japan and then expanding globally to facilities in places like China, the United Kingdom, and now the United States. 

During his opening remarks, Koutara Kato, executive vice president and assistant general manager, commercial operations, at HORIBA Instruments Incorporated, highlighted some of the industries that HORIBA is involved in, such as the semiconductor market, as well as where it plans to concentrate additional resources in future. That list includes energy and environment as well as biopharma and healthcare. Each area the company focuses on “gives us a lot of opportunities and challenges,” he said.

ASPs provide a space for HORIBA to apply its technology and scientific expertise to customers’ challenges and try to find possible solutions. It could especially benefit customers working with tight budgets amidst rising costs for lab equipment, space, and other factors, noted Michael Oweimrin, national sales manager at HORIBA, in his remarks. “We have a plethora of capabilities to address many different markets.” 

Over 280 heads at HORIBA report to the New Jersey facility which is about 130,000 square feet. And roughly 200 people work at the site. Among other features, the ASP features multiple labs, where HORIBA scientists work on customer projects as well as technical rooms for training application scientists. A key part of the ASP is its modularity. Instruments are placed or bolted to tables with wheels making it possible to move them seamlessly between labs as needed. 

A tour of a section of HORIBA’s facility, following the opening remarks and a traditional sake barrel opening ceremony, revealed space for stockrooms, manufacturing, and rooms testing and quality control as well as for training field service engineers. The tour included a look at the ASP labs where scientists leverage HORIBA’s expertise in instruments for modular spectroscopy, particle characterization, and Raman microscopy. Scientists in the ASP labs utilize these technologies to address applications in energy and environment, healthcare, and materials and semiconductors. They utilize HORIBA instruments including LabRAM Odyssey and LabRAM Soleil Raman microscopes as well as the Veloci Biopharma Analyzer, which is designed specifically for biopharma and pharma applications. 

Crucially, the ASP is HORIBA’s answer to an important question, Jeff Julien, PhD, life science applications manager at HORIBA, said in his opening comments. Specifically, “how to leverage what HORIBA does well” to shift the conversation from “what instrument is needed” to “what problem to solve.” Using biopharma as an example, he noted that companies developing therapeutic proteins often rely on input from multiple instruments and techniques during development. These are capabilities that the ASP scientists can provide, he said. 

As noted earlier, in each ASP lab, instruments sit on modular wheel-based carts and lab benches. This makes it possible to reconfigure the lab space for different customers’ pain points as well as to bring in technologies that  “we think could be applicable to those use cases,” Julien said. “It’s really an exciting time to be a part of HORIBA and doing this ASP development” particularly “as the markets change in terms of requirements and what customers are after,” he added. “It changes the way we think [and] the way we approach all of these problems.”

Shifting from sales to solutions

HORIBA’s ASPs  reflect a broader corporate strategy to move beyond purely transactional sales towards problem-solving partnerships. In the NJ facility, the focus is specifically in the life science and biopharma sectors. Here, HORIBA is positioning its core technologies as an underutilized set of orthogonal tools for various applications including biotherapeutic characterization.

To be clear, HORIBA’s primary business is still selling instrumentation, but moving forward, the company wants to do more to help customers utilize its instruments to solve problems, Kato said during a conversation with the press where he discussed some of the thinking behind setting up the ASP. “If a customer [is] facing some issues and difficulties, prior to having those instrumentation, we can address this” through the ASP, he said, by showing them how they can use HORIBA’s instruments and what kinds of outcomes they can expect. In most cases, to use the ASP’s capabilities, customers bring samples in and work with HORIBA scientists and tools. There are some cases where HORIBA can deliver needed instruments to customers’ labs to run their analysis on site.  

The company has no current plans to increase its headcount, rather it is leveraging expertise it already has in house to support customers looking to utilize the ASP’s capabilities. There are a few types of customer profiles that ASP scientists are working with and these typically are people working in research and development with specific pain points that they hope HORIBA’s fluorescence or Raman spectroscopy or its particle characterization capabilities could solve, Julien explained. 

Feasibility testing is a key step, often starting with simplified samples before graduating to real process samples. HORIBA emphasizes rapid pivoting between fluorescence, Raman, and particle characterization depending on what customer samples reveal. 

For example, “perhaps we’re anticipating [doing] a demo with fluorescence and we very quickly learn more about the customer samples or their process and then say … we need to pivot to Raman because that’s actually going to be a better fit for your use case,” he explained. Furthermore, “if we’ve exhausted our options in terms of what we think we can provide as a solution and it’s not meeting customer needs, we then can engage in conversation and … perhaps work together and develop a custom solution or a fit for purpose solution that’s going to meet those particular needs.”

HORIBA plans to launch additional ASPs in other locations—setups differ across the company’s offices. The strategy is one ASP per country in strategic locations rather than multiple per country, Kato said. This way, rather than having U.S. customers send samples all the way to an ASP in Japan, for example,, they can access a facility closer to them. ASPs are also customized to local industry needs, for example the ASP in Taiwan is semiconductor focused. The U.S. ASP leverages HORIBA’s location in the tri-state biopharma corridor. Conversations with company representatives highlighted HORIBA’s intent to make deeper inroads into the biopharma and life sciences market in particular.  

One area that the company is interested in broadening its footprint is in the biotherapeutics market. A key solution for the market is the Veloci Biopharma Analyzer which is designed for tasks such as analyzing antibody-drug conjugates, differentiating AAV subtypes, and for analyzing protein stability, among others. “We [are] now in an age where for a lot of therapeutics … [with] some of these stable technologies like near-IR that have been used historically … you’re infringing on the limits of detection for that technology” leading customers to seek out novel orthogonal measurement methods, Julien said. “That’s ultimately where we feel like we can add value.”

The company is working on some new products but HORIBA representatives declined to provide specific details about what they are.