Agilent Technologies shares surge

Agilent Technologies' shares climbed by 2.49 per cent on Friday (April 10th), after a contract was announced for Rigaku to attain the firm's X-ray diffraction (XRD) business.

The XRD, formerly known as Oxford Diffraction before Agilent took over in 2010, is a key manufacturer of single-crystal X-ray instruments for the global chemical crystallography market.

Rigaku, a privately-held scientific instrumentation company headquartered in Tokyo, intends to merge XRD with its existing crystallography business to form a new unit within the company.

XRD products will continue to be developed and produced at Agilent's existing factories in Japan and Poland.

It is thought that the deal between the two firms will be completed by May 1st, subject to local laws and customary closing conditions. The financial value of the agreement has not been revealed yet.

Agilent provides bio-analytical solutions and services to the life sciences, diagnostics and genomics, chemical analysis, communications and electronics industries to several different countries across the globe.