QIAGEN, Sanquin and the Diagnostics Businesses Built in Venlo, Amsterdam and Best

Dutch diagnostics is a business of plumbing rather than breakthroughs: reagents, instruments, blood products and regulatory services that every hospital and laboratory needs and that a small, well-connected country can supply at scale. QIAGEN is a German-founded company that chose a Dutch legal home; Sanquin is a not-for-profit foundation with a statutory monopoly; Philips’ imaging plant in Best is the largest medical-equipment factory in the country; and the European Medicines Agency is a public body whose relocation from London was the Netherlands’ most tangible Brexit dividend. Together they explain why Amsterdam, Leiden and the Brainport region around Eindhoven are as important to European healthcare as the biotech corridor profiled in the Galapagos and argenx article. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

How did QIAGEN come to be headquartered in Venlo?

QIAGEN moved its legal seat to the Netherlands in the 1990s because a Dutch N.V. offered a listing-friendly, tax-efficient and defensible corporate structure for a company that was already more international than German. The business itself was founded on 29 November 1984 by scientists from Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, and its first product, a method for purifying plasmid DNA, became the standard sample-preparation kit in molecular-biology laboratories worldwide.

The Venlo address is modest, an office building in a border town better known for logistics parks, but the structure it anchors is substantial. QIAGEN N.V. is the parent of operating companies in Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, China and elsewhere; its primary listing moved from Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange in 2018 under the ticker QGEN, and it is also listed in Frankfurt’s Prime Standard as QIA, where it has long been a member of the TecDAX and, at times, the DAX. The company reports in US dollars and employs about 5,700 people, with the largest sites in Hilden, Germantown in Maryland and Manchester.

The Dutch domicile proved its worth in 2020. Thermo Fisher Scientific offered €39 per share in cash, about US$11.5 billion, in March of that year, and raised the bid to €43 in July after shareholders objected. Under Dutch takeover rules the offer needed acceptances from two-thirds of the shares; it received about 47% and lapsed on 13 August 2020, leaving QIAGEN independent and Thermo Fisher with a US$95 million expense reimbursement. The episode is a textbook example of how Dutch company law, with its foundation-held preference shares, supervisory boards and high acceptance thresholds, gives boards leverage that German or US law does not, a theme examined in the article on the Dutch headquarters climate.

What does QIAGEN sell, and what did it earn in 2025?

QIAGEN sells the consumables and instruments that turn a biological sample into a test result: nucleic-acid extraction kits, PCR and digital-PCR systems, the QuantiFERON blood test for tuberculosis infection, the QIAstat-Dx syndromic panels that identify respiratory and gastrointestinal pathogens in about an hour, and bioinformatics software for interpreting genomic data. In 2025 those products generated net sales of US$2.09 billion, up about 5.7% from US$1.98 billion in 2024.

Profitability recovered sharply. Operating income rose to US$553 million from US$495 million, and net income jumped to US$425 million, or US$2.04 per share, from US$84 million in 2024, a year depressed by impairment charges on discontinued product lines. Free cash flow was US$453 million. Quarterly revenue ran between US$483 million and US$540 million through 2025, with the fourth quarter the strongest, and the company has for several years returned most of its free cash flow to shareholders through buybacks and synthetic share repurchases, a Dutch-law mechanism that combines a capital repayment with a reverse stock split to achieve the tax treatment of a buyback.

The growth drivers are specific. QuantiFERON, acquired with Australia’s Cellestis in 2011, has displaced the century-old skin test for latent tuberculosis in much of the world and grows at high single digits. QIAstat-Dx, which came with the 2018 purchase of Barcelona’s STAT-Dx, gained FDA clearance for a bloodstream-infection panel that reached US laboratories in September 2026. QIAcuity, the digital-PCR platform, and the QIAsymphony and new QIAmini automation systems round out the instrument base, and in October 2026 the company expanded AI-assisted bioinformatics for research and drug discovery. Sample technologies, the original business, still account for the largest single share of revenue.

The first half of 2026 was steady rather than spectacular. First-quarter sales of US$492 million were followed by US$535 million in the second quarter, in line with the prior year, with net income of US$68 million and US$103 million respectively. In August the company reaffirmed its full-year 2026 outlook and said growth should accelerate in the fourth quarter, and third-quarter results are expected in early November.

Why did QIAGEN change CEO and attract private-equity interest in 2026?

QIAGEN’s leadership change and the takeover speculation are connected by a share price that spent years below the level Thermo Fisher had offered. Thierry Bernard, a former bioMérieux executive who became CEO in 2020 after Peer Schatz’s two-decade tenure, steered the company through the pandemic testing boom and bust but could not lift the stock back above the 2020 bid, which was worth about US$50 a share at the time.

In August 2026 QIAGEN announced that Bernard would step down and that Jonathan M. Pratt would become CEO on 1 September 2026, with an extraordinary general meeting called for 6 November to appoint him to the managing board. Trading in the shares was briefly halted around the announcement. Pratt inherits a reaffirmed outlook, a programme to raise operating efficiency and an unresolved legal problem: on 28 August 2026 a US jury found that Parse Biosciences, a single-cell sequencing company QIAGEN had acquired, had wilfully infringed ten patents held by 10x Genomics, exposing the group to damages and possible injunctions.

The private-equity reports came on 18 September 2026, when financial media said KKR, Advent International, TPG and others were studying a bid, and that major shareholders would expect at least US$50 a share. The stock, which had closed at US$43.33 that day, climbed above US$47 in early October before settling at US$46.55 on 19 October, giving a market capitalisation of about US$9.6 billion. Barclays upgraded the shares to overweight and JPMorgan raised its target to US$55 ahead of the third-quarter report. No formal offer had been made as of mid-October 2026, and any bidder would again have to clear the Dutch two-thirds threshold and the foundation-controlled defences that stopped Thermo Fisher.

How does Sanquin’s blood-supply monopoly work?

Sanquin is the only organisation licensed under the Dutch Blood Supply Act to collect blood and plasma from donors, and it operates as a not-for-profit foundation, Stichting Sanquin Bloedvoorziening, headquartered on Plesmanlaan in Amsterdam. It was created in 1998 by merging the regional blood banks with the Central Laboratory of the Blood Transfusion Service (CLB), which had been the country’s plasma-fractionation and research centre since the 1940s.

The operational numbers for 2025 show a system running at scale. Sanquin had 458,198 registered donors, welcomed 64,287 new ones and recorded 786,729 donations, of which 362,994 were whole-blood and 423,735 were apheresis plasma donations. It delivered 355,324 red-cell concentrates and 226,430 platelet units to hospitals and collected 420,862 kg of plasma, an annual record, under a programme called Plasma 450 that targets more than 450 tonnes by 2027. More than 2,000 people work for the foundation, about 300 of whom joined during the year, and a board of three, chaired by Ivo van Schaik, reports to a supervisory board.

Donors are unpaid, which is both a point of national pride and a constraint. Demand for red cells has been falling for years as surgery becomes less invasive and hospitals manage blood more carefully, so Sanquin’s growth business is plasma, which is fractionated into immunoglobulins, albumin and clotting factors that the Netherlands would otherwise have to import from countries where donors are paid. In September 2025 the foundation launched HORIZON 2030, a financial-sustainability programme with a €5 million cost-saving target for 2026, and it is rolling out a new donor-loyalty scheme, Donors for Life, from March 2026, alongside a new SAP-based ERP system and a CRM platform.

Sanquin is also a research institution, publishing more than 200 scientific papers a year with over 230 researchers, and its work on blood groups, including a DNA array covering 366 blood-group antigens, anti-D plasma supply and the long-term decline in red-cell demand, feeds directly into how the Dutch system described in the healthcare-system article is supplied.

What happened to Sanquin’s plasma-products and commercial businesses?

Sanquin separated its commercial activities from the statutory blood supply over the past decade, and in 2025 it completed its exit from plasma fractionation. The plasma-products division, which operated a fractionation plant in Amsterdam and another in Brussels, was carved out as Prothya Biosolutions in 2021. Sanquin’s commercial subsidiary kept a 15% stake, which it sold effective 1 February 2025; later in 2025 Accord Plasma, part of India’s Intas group, acquired 100% of Prothya, with Sanquin retaining only a priority share that protects the Dutch plasma supply.

The remaining commercial activities sit in Sanquin Health Solutions, a group wholly owned by the foundation. In 2025 it generated total revenue of €74.4 million, slightly up from €73.8 million, but product revenue fell to €36.0 million from €38.5 million as it stopped sourcing foreign plasma for one customer and wound down pharmaceutical services. The group posted an operating loss of €4.5 million and a net loss of €1.7 million, improved from a €5.0 million loss in 2024, and paid a €10 million dividend to the foundation while keeping equity of €106.5 million. Headcount fell from 328 to 313.

The group’s units are a diagnostics laboratory business, renamed PurSang Diagnostiek in March 2026 and refocused on hospital testing; a research division; real-estate and facilities companies that manage the Amsterdam campus; Sanquinnovate, which handles licensing and partnerships; and the Amsterdam Cell Therapy Center, which manufactures advanced-therapy products for commercial clients. A collaboration with argenx, the FcRn-blocker company profiled elsewhere in this hub, began in 2025, while a major pharmaceutical partner ended its contract at the end of that year.

The foundation has signalled that it may end its ownership of Sanquin Health Solutions altogether, and has taken external advice on selling the shares or the businesses separately. No decision had been announced as of the 2025 annual report, but the direction is clear: Sanquin is returning to its core as a blood and plasma supplier and research institute, leaving commercial diagnostics to companies such as QIAGEN and Eurofins.

Why does Philips build its scanners in Best?

Philips builds CT, MRI and X-ray systems in Best, a town between Eindhoven and ‘s-Hertogenbosch, because that is where its medical-systems division has been since the 1960s and where the supplier base, the engineering talent of the Brainport region and the proximity to the Eindhoven research campus combine. The Best site is the manufacturing heart of the Diagnosis & Treatment segment, which had 2025 sales of €8,531 million, the largest of Philips’ three segments, and an Adjusted EBITA margin of 11.7%.

The product story in 2025 and 2026 has been about doing more with less radiation and less helium. Philips launched SmartIQ for its Azurion image-guided therapy platform in 2026 to reduce X-ray dose in coronary procedures, markets a helium-free 1.5-tesla MRI scanner that avoids the supply problems and quench risks of conventional magnets, and has won regulatory approvals for AI-based image reconstruction. Its spectral CT line competes with Siemens Healthineers and GE HealthCare in a global oligopoly where the three companies share most of the market.

The segment’s challenges are the ones described in the Philips Respironics article: China, where volume-based procurement has cut prices and delayed hospital orders, and tariffs, which affect systems shipped from Best to the United States. In the second quarter of 2026 the segment’s margin excluding a one-off US tariff refund was only 9.3%, down more than four percentage points year on year, and management guided the segment to the lower end of its growth range. Order intake, the leading indicator for a business that sells multimillion-euro machines on long lead times, remains at record levels, which suggests the problem is pricing rather than demand.

For the Dutch economy the site matters beyond Philips. Best and the wider Brainport region host hundreds of precision-engineering suppliers that serve both Philips and ASML, whose own cluster is examined in the ASML article, and the medical-imaging supply chain is one of the few places where Dutch high-tech manufacturing directly serves healthcare rather than semiconductors.

What did the EMA’s move to Amsterdam bring?

The European Medicines Agency’s relocation brought the EU’s central drug regulator, about 900 staff and a network of 4,000 experts to Amsterdam, and with them a cluster of pharmaceutical regulatory-affairs offices, law firms and consultancies that need to be near the agency. The move was decided on 20 November 2017, when EU ministers, after three rounds of voting that ended in a 13–13 tie with Milan, drew lots and Amsterdam won.

The agency, founded in 1995 and based in London’s Canary Wharf until Brexit, moved its staff to temporary offices in Amsterdam in March 2019 and completed the transfer to a purpose-built tower in the Zuidas business district by January 2020. The London lease, with much of its 25-year term remaining, became a legal and financial headache after the English High Court ruled that Brexit did not frustrate the contract; the EMA eventually sublet the building. Its 2024 budget was €478.4 million, funded mostly by fees from pharmaceutical companies seeking marketing authorisations, and it is led by Executive Director Emer Cooke, an Irish pharmacist who previously ran the World Health Organization’s regulation and prequalification unit.

For the Netherlands the agency is both a symbol and a practical asset. Dutch regulators at the Medicines Evaluation Board (CBG) in Utrecht already took a large share of EU assessment work; having the EMA’s committees meet in Amsterdam makes the country a natural base for companies that need to interact with the EU approval process, from argenx and Pharming in the biotech corridor to global groups opening European regulatory hubs. It also complements the cluster of health-focused institutions along the Amsterdam-Leiden-Utrecht axis, including Sanquin, the Amsterdam UMC academic hospital and Leiden Bio Science Park, a concentration mapped in the Amsterdam City Startup Atlas.

What risks do these businesses face?

The risks differ by institution but share a theme: each depends on a buyer or a regulator it does not control. QIAGEN’s exposure is to laboratory budgets, US tariffs on instruments made in Germany, China’s domestic-substitution policies and the outcome of the 10x Genomics litigation; a leveraged buyout would add financial risk to an otherwise conservatively run balance sheet.

Sanquin’s exposure is to donor behaviour and to the pricing power of the insurers and hospitals that buy its products. Falling red-cell demand means its fixed costs are spread over fewer units, which is why the HORIZON 2030 savings programme exists, and the growth of paid-plasma collection elsewhere in Europe raises the question of whether an unpaid-donor model can keep pace with rising immunoglobulin demand. The possible sale of Sanquin Health Solutions would also remove a source of research funding and licensing income.

Philips’ imaging business is exposed to Chinese procurement, US trade policy and the margin pressure of competing with Siemens Healthineers and GE HealthCare on price. The EMA faces the slow-moving politics of the EU’s pharmaceutical-package reform and the perennial risk that member states argue over fees, staffing and the location of agency functions.

What can founders and investors learn from Dutch diagnostics?

The sector offers four lessons that generalise well beyond blood and reagents.

First, legal domicile is a strategic asset. QIAGEN is German by origin and American by listing, but Dutch by law, and that choice gave it takeover defences, a neutral platform for cross-border acquisitions and a capital-return mechanism, the synthetic buyback, that few other jurisdictions offer. Founders planning a company that will raise capital in several countries should pick the legal home early and deliberately rather than inheriting it from the first office lease.

Second, monopolies carry obligations that limit their economics. Sanquin’s exclusive licence guarantees it the Dutch blood market but obliges it to collect from unpaid donors, supply hospitals at regulated prices and maintain capacity for emergencies, which is why its commercial subsidiaries have struggled to earn a return. Investors in regulated utilities, from blood supply to grid operators such as those covered in the TenneT article, should expect stability rather than growth.

Third, infrastructure follows regulators. The EMA brought regulatory, legal and consulting activity to Amsterdam, and the CBG, Sanquin, the academic hospitals and Leiden Bio Science Park form a corridor that global companies use as a European entry point. Policymakers elsewhere who want a life-sciences cluster should note that the Netherlands won the EMA by a coin toss but kept the benefits through infrastructure, English-language administration and a predictable regulatory culture.

Fourth, the value in diagnostics lies in the installed base. QIAGEN’s share price has disappointed for years because instrument placements and consumable growth were steady rather than spectacular, but the same steadiness is what attracted KKR, Advent and TPG in 2026. Businesses that generate predictable recurring revenue from laboratory workflows are the kind of asset private equity pays a premium for when public markets lose patience, and that is the dynamic playing out in Venlo this autumn.

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