Agilent Technologies's Customers Performance

Life Sciences and Diagnostics Customers
We had over 46,000 customers for our life sciences and diagnostics business. No single customer represented a material amount of the net revenue of the life sciences and diagnostics business. A significant number of our life sciences and diagnostics customers are also customers of our chemical analysis business.
The life sciences and diagnostics business is susceptible to seasonality in its orders and revenues primarily based on U.S. and foreign government budgets and large pharmaceutical company budgets. In general, the result is that our third and fourth fiscal quarters tend to deliver the strongest profits for this group. The diagnostics business is generally a fairly stable business impacted primarily by local holidays. However, general economic trends, new product introductions and competition might overshadow this trend in any given year.

Life Sciences and Diagnostics Sales, Marketing and Support
The life science and diagnostics channels focus on the therapeutics and human disease research customer base (pharma, biotech, CRO, CMO and generics), clinical customer base (pathology labs and high complexity clinical testing labs) and on emerging life sciences opportunities in academic and government life science research institutes. We deploy a multi-channel approach, marketing products to our customers through direct sales, electronic commerce, resellers, manufacturers' representatives and distributors. We primarily use direct sales to market our solutions to our pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and clinical accounts. Sales agents supplement direct sales by providing broader geographic coverage and coverage of smaller accounts. Our active reseller program augments our ability to provide more complete solutions to our customers. We sell our consumable products through distributors, telesales, electronic commerce and direct sales. We utilize telesales for more mature product lines, as well as for reorders of reagent products.

We deliver our support services to customers in a variety of ways, including on-site assistance with repair or exchange of returned products, telephone support and self-diagnostic services provided over the Internet. We also offer special industry-focused service bundles that are designed to meet the specific needs of hydrocarbon processing, environmental, pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical customers to keep instruments fully operational and compliant with the respective industry requirements. Our products typically come with standard warranties, and extended warranties are available for additional cost. Our complete pathology solutions are often sold with both application and technical service support.

Chemical Analysis Customers

We had approximately 37,000 customers for our chemical analysis business. No single customer represented a material amount of the net revenue of the chemical analysis business. A significant number of our chemical analysis customers are also customers of our life sciences and diagnostics business.

The chemical analysis business is susceptible to seasonality in its orders and revenues primarily based on U.S. government and large company budgets. The result is that our fourth fiscal quarter tends to deliver the strongest profits for this business. However, general economic trends, new product introductions and competition might overshadow this trend in any given year.

Chemical Analysis Sales, Marketing and Support

Our sales and support delivery channels are aligned by key markets. We market products to our customers through direct sales, electronic commerce, resellers, manufacturers' representatives and distributors. Additionally, we are optimizing our worldwide distribution capabilities to address high-growth opportunities such as the environmental and food safety markets in the Asia-Pacific region.

We use direct sales to market our solutions to our large- and medium-sized chemical customers and environmental accounts. Sales agents supplement direct sales by providing broader geographic coverage and coverage of smaller accounts. Our active reseller program augments our ability to provide more complete solutions to our customers. We sell our consumable products through distributors, telesales, electronic commerce and direct sales.

We deliver our support services to customers in a variety of ways, including on-site assistance with repair or exchange of returned products, telephone support and self-diagnostic services provided over the Internet. We also offer special industry-focused service bundles that are designed to meet the specific needs including those for hydrocarbon processing and environmental customers to keep instruments fully operational and compliant with the respective industry requirements. Our products typically come with standard warranties, and extended warranties are available for additional cost.

Electronic Measurement Customers

Agilent's electronic measurement customers include original equipment and contract manufacturers of electronic products, wireless device manufacturers and network equipment manufacturers who design, develop, manufacture and install network equipment, service providers who implement, maintain and manage communication networks and services, and companies who design, develop, and manufacture semiconductors and semiconductor lithography systems. Our customers use our products to conduct research and development, manufacture, install and maintain radio frequency, microwave frequency, digital, semiconductor, and optical products and systems and conduct nanotechnology research. Many of our customers purchase solutions across several of our major product lines for their different business units.

We had approximately 14,000 customers for electronic measurement products and no single customer represented a material amount of the net revenue of the electronic measurement business.

In general, the orders and revenues from many of the electronic measurement markets and product categories are seasonal, traditionally marked by lower business levels in the first quarter of the fiscal year and higher volumes in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year. This seasonality is particularly evident in products that we sell into the aerospace and defense industry, as well as those linked to consumer spending, which includes some of our communications test equipment. The seasonal impact of our business is tempered by broader economic trends and the diversity of our electronic measurement products and customers, which span multiple industries.

Electronic Measurement Sales, Marketing and Support

We have a focused sales strategy, using a direct sales force, resellers, manufacturer's representatives and distributors to meet our customers' needs. Our direct sales force is focused on identifying customer needs and recommending solutions involving the effective use and deployment of our equipment, services, systems and capabilities. Some members of our direct sales force focus on global accounts, providing uniform services on a worldwide basis. Others focus on our more complex products such as our high-performance instruments, where customers require strategic consultation. Our sales force also engages with the contract manufacturer market by collaborating with original equipment manufacturers to specify our test equipment for contract manufacturer test applications, as well as marketing to contract manufacturers directly.

Our direct sales force consists of field engineers and systems engineers who have in-depth knowledge of the customers' business and technology needs. Our systems engineers provide a combination of consulting, systems integration and application and software engineering services and are instrumental in all stages of the sale, implementation and support of our complex systems and solutions.

To complement our direct sales force we have agreements with many channel partners around the world. These partners, including resellers, manufacturer's representatives, and distributors, serve Agilent's customers across a number of product lines and provide the same level of service and support expected from our direct channel. Lower dollar transactions can also be served by our tele-sales and electronic commerce channels.

Our products typically come with three year standard warranties, and extended warranties are available at additional cost.