How important is the Asia Pacific market for the company?
It is easy to see that APAC holds great potential as a huge market with broad untapped areas. So we have great opportunities to bring our exceptional technologies to more people. We are a technology leader, a solutions leader and a thought leader in this field. As a multinational company, we face competition from both foreign and local companies; yet our combination of international gold standard technologies and local products for local needs give us an edge that neither can match.

QIAGEN started expanding in APAC region from 2005, since when the company executed on two milestone strategies. One is expanding to the molecular diagnostics business from our traditional sample and assay areas, primarily serving the research segment, and moving to the clinical segment. The other milestone decision that the company took was to expand to emerging markets, where APAC was a prior target. This is how we get started. First we set up the regional office in Shanghai, and then we looked at what should be our strategies to fast expand into the dynamic market here.

With these strategies, we expanded our own presence as well as through acquisitions in both research and clinical segments. Through the acquisitions and the regional expansion, we have had faster market penetration, having the access to channels of the acquired companies and also the customers.

What percentage of your revenue comes from the Asia Pacific?
In the fiscal year of 2011, Asia Pacific (Japan excluded) contributed 12 percent of QIAGEN's net sales throughout the world. Since 2005, basically APAC region, in particular China, has built from the ground and has become the fastest growing region for QIAGEN as a whole. In APAC, China has been the fastest growing market. Since 2005, the revenue of China has grown by more than 30 times and China has become QIAGEN's third largest country in the world after the US and Germany.

What are the other segments that QIAGEN is hopeful about, apart from diagnostics?
Now we have a deep MDx pipeline across all indication areas, personalized healthcare, virology and microbiology. Besides that, in June 2012 QIAGEN announced initiative to create next-generation sequencing (NGS) workflow with a benchtop sequencer, a full range of sample and assay kits and bioinformatics tools that can be expected in 2013 for research use. We've already launched a series of consumable products to improve NGS workflows in research. QIAGEN is also continuously expanding menu-of-pathway and biomarker products for life sciences, and applied testing content in food, forensics and veterinary.