Air Liquide reported Q1 2026 sales of EUR 7,028 million on April 28, up 3.4 percent excluding currency and energy, with a record EUR 5.5 billion investment backlog and DIG Airgas closed in January.
Linde reported first-quarter 2026 sales of $8,781 million on May 1, with adjusted operating margin at 30.0% and a $7.1 billion contractual sale-of-gas project backlog.
BASF held sales close to flat, Dow swung to a GAAP Q1 loss on heavier costs, and DuPont raised full-year guidance after a 4 percent sales lift - three Q1 2026 prints that diverge sharply on margin trajectory.
The FDA's push to collect analytical laboratory quality metrics from drug manufacturers has taken a decade to become the voluntary QMM assessment. What laboratories should expect from the 2026 cycle.
At its Rio de Janeiro Assembly on 2-3 June 2026, ICH brought E6(R3) Annex 2 to Step 4, extending GCP to decentralised and registry-based trials. Q1 and Q3E remain in draft review.
FDA, EMA, and PMDA all build on ICH Q2(R2) and Q14, but their expectations for routine chemometric model upkeep, post-approval changes, and reference-method failures diverge in ways that shape submission strategy.
Recent literature on SERS substrates points at flexible cellulose, 3D-printed metals, and uniformity-engineered nanostructures. We review what is useful for industrial work and what stays in the lab.
The open-source stack that academic spectroscopy groups now teach with - mdatools, Quasar, pyMCR, rampy, pybaselines - has matured into something an industry hire arrives knowing. A field snapshot.
Four mid-May physics.chem-ph preprints worth a PAT reader's time: vibrational eigenstate computation, polaritonic spectroscopy reliability, ML for photochemical decay, and DFT-accuracy ML force fields.
Across BASF, Lanxess, Solvay, Syensqo, and Wacker, only Solvay and Syensqo published 2025 plant counts and outcomes against named digital platforms. The others restructured, paused, or went quiet.
Lonza's May 8 Q1 2026 trading update reaffirmed 11-12% CER sales growth guidance and a CORE EBITDA margin above 32%, with the Vacaville site fully integrated and the Visp and Portsmouth build-outs still on the books.
Tornado Spectral Systems' separate brand has been retired into Bruker's process Raman portfolio. Timegate Instruments stays independent in Oulu, with a new Central European distributor signed for analytica 2026.
Quadrupole and membrane-inlet mass spectrometers sit between gas chromatography and inline spectroscopy in the PAT toolkit. The placement and the limits of the technique are settled, even if vendor marketing is loose.
Focused beam reflectance probes return a chord-length distribution, not a particle-size distribution. The difference is what determines whether the signal is useful in crystallization and slurry monitoring.
Univariate SPC watches one number. A spectroscopic analyser produces a thousand. Multivariate SPC condenses them into two statistics that have been the standard since the early 1990s.
A side-by-side ranking of the open-source software stack practitioners actually use for Raman, IR, and NIR processing in 2026 - what each does best, where it stops short, and which combinations work in production.
Six vendors that matter for bioreactor monitoring - what each one is good at, what they are not, and the methodology we used to scope the field down from the full process Raman market.
A composite of practitioner conversations on FDA and EU inspections that put process analytical technology and chemometric models in scope. Inspectors read the lifecycle records, not the qualification protocols.
Synthesised observations from PAT-adjacent engagements where data scientists from web-product backgrounds collide with chemometricians steeped in PLS, ASTM E1655, and calibration transfer.
A multi-site rollout is not one deployment repeated N times. Five upstream decisions - governance, transfer, validation, change control, data flow - determine whether site N behaves like site one.
A practical method for ROI on a process analytics project that finance will accept. Full lifecycle costs, benefits that survive audit, asset-matched horizons, and the pitfalls that turn a real win into a paper one.
