As someone who built this company, I can say most employees hate Greggie Boy and all the white collar criminal VP's. Especially you Leddy. I hope your wife doesn't find out about what you've been up too. Gonna cost you half of what you stole. What a joke of a BOD for this company....just a bunch of looting butt budies.
The teams at Sorrento Valley made this compant great. FU Lucier.

The pain of Lucier, according to Forbes.

Gregory T Lucier's Compensation vs. Drugs & Biotechnology Medians
Salary $1.13 mil $1.30 mil
Bonus $2.87 mil $2.33 mil
Other $29.75 mil $3.13 mil
Stock Gains NA $0.00 mil
Total Compensation $33.75 mil $13.40 mil

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-compensation-11_Gregory-T-Lucier_MEMP.html\

The "other" probably has to do with the 2nd knuckle

Will Life Tech take down their scoreboard ad at Petco Park now? What a ridiculous waste of money. And what about the private luxury suite?

"■Despite its growing revenue, the company underperformed as compared with the industry average of 10.2%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly increased by 4.1%. This growth in revenue does not appear to have trickled down to the company's bottom line, displayed by a decline in earnings per share.
■LIFE TECHNOLOGIES CORP's earnings per share declined by 10.3% in the most recent quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago. This company has reported somewhat volatile earnings recently. But, we feel it is poised for EPS growth in the coming year. During the past fiscal year, LIFE TECHNOLOGIES CORP increased its bottom line by earning $1.99 versus $0.79 in the prior year. This year, the market expects an improvement in earnings ($3.72 versus $1.99).
■Net operating cash flow has decreased to $204.49 million or 10.51% when compared to the same quarter last year. In addition, when comparing the cash generation rate to the industry average, the firm's growth is significantly lower.
■The company, on the basis of change in net income from the same quarter one year ago, has significantly underperformed when compared to that of the S&P 500 and the Life Sciences Tools & Services industry. The net income has decreased by 13.7% when compared to the same quarter one year ago, dropping from $110.57 million to $95.47 million. "

So Mr. CEO million dollars man, Mr. MBA , what will you do to fix the items above?

There is no shame in Lucifer's game. This BOY needs a day with a few manly cousins from Arkansas... Lucifer will then know the rules after they finish with him.

Dear My Adoring Public,

To demonstrate the sincerity of my sympathy to the departed, I will be giving half of my lobster and scotch lunches to a local homeless shelter and begin car pooling. If you are interested in car pooling in my Maserati convertible, please include your age and measurements along with a recent photo.

Additionally I am proud to announce a new mentoring program in which I will help young people in the community whose families have political connections. Please send a short description of the political elite in your family along with your 2010 tax info to apply.

Yours truly,

GL

The irony there is that even a generation ago, certainly less than two, a Japanese executive who felt he had failed in his responsibilities so gravely would have felt a need to redeem his honor in a somewhat harsher way than a temporary pay cut. Still that is infinitely more sincere remorse than Lucifer pleading for our sympathy for the "pain" he feels in his "heart."

LA times end of article

In an age when Rupert Murdoch can argue that his failings as a CEO make him the perfect choice to clean up his own mess, we need more metrics of CEO performance, not fewer. Who says so? Warren Buffett, for one, who observed in his 2009 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders that CEOs and directors of failed companies "have largely gone unscathed.

"Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style," he continued. They "have long benefited from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be part of their employment picture as well."

Greg, learn a lesson.

LA Times.
August 21, 2011|Michael Hiltzik

When Nintendo slashed the price of its 6-month-old 3-D game device by nearly a third (to $169.99) a few weeks ago, company President Satoru Iwata voluntarily took a 50% pay cut.

That wasn't the first time in history that a corporate CEO took a pay cut, of course. But what made the event more unusual was Iwata's choice of whom to blame for the botched rollout of the Nintendo 3DS — himself.
"I feel greatly accountable for having to make the markdown shortly after the launch, for having damaged our consumers' trust, for having made a significant impact upon the financial forecasts," he stated.

That was in stark contrast to the position taken by another CEO halfway around the world, when asked whether he should accept responsibility for the legal and public relations disaster facing his company by resigning.

"Nope," Rupert Murdoch replied to a British parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking by his News Corp. minions. "People I trusted have let me down," he said. "It's for them to pay.... Frankly, I'm the best person to clean this up."

Dow Jones 10,875.35 0.53%
Nasdaq 2,347.68 0.25%
Healthcare 0.61%
LIFE 35.56 -0.78%

Dow and NASDAQ up - LIFE down.

"I must tell you that this is an incredibly painful thing to do, and I feel in my heart the stress and trauma this downsizing causes those folks affected." - GL EMAIL

Did he really say that???? What a sleazy turd. OK Greg, even if you got what you deserved tomorrow, you'd still be rich so no pain to you in being dumped like yesterday's garbage. So howzabout you donate your enitre fortune to a fund to support the thousands of people you have rewarded for their contributions by destroying their lives. And then you take a "package" of just enough money to pay your mortgage for 2 months. Then get out there and compete for work in an economy with zero jobs, while being tainted with the stink of being one of the people nominated as worthless by company starting to reek of failure.

Then MAYBE you would "feel in your heart the stress and trauma" you have caused. But highly unlikely. Sociopaths like you are neurologically incapable of it. But you are a natural to run for governor or senator in the next election. Knock yourself out.

Life stock downgraded: http://www.thestreet.com/story/11226199/1/life-technologies-corp-stock-d...

Good luck to all those who got suckered into holding for 1 year.

"Here's an example of a typical high-level LT exec"
I don't understand the point of this post. The guy quit his job at Ion Torrent last year to form his own startup working on cannabis pharmacology. Where's the scandal? How does this related to "the typical ligh-level LT exec"?

You would have to know who KM is and his history.

"Here's an example of a typical high-level LT exec"
I don't understand the point of this post. The guy quit his job at Ion Torrent last year to form his own startup working on cannabis pharmacology. Where's the scandal? How does this related to "the typical ligh-level LT exec"?

"Can I ask how many months salary would get if get laid off?"

I heard someone who worked there about 20 years only got 2 months.

"How many in Madison, Eugene, Brown Deer, Frederick , Grand Island, Foster City, Austin, Pleasanton, Bedford, Norwalk, Durham?"

Grand Island: 3

Finance Manager, Facilities Admin, and HR gen.

"Can I ask how many months salary would get if get laid off?"

Anywhere from 4 mo to 12 mo depending on length of service and grades.

Hi

Can I ask how many months salary would get if get laid off?

"From June 2008:
"Invitrogen to Buy Applied Biosystems. Invitrogen Corp. (Carlsbad CA), which makes technologies for disease research and drug discovery, agreed to pay $6.4 billion in cash and stock for scientific instruments maker Applera's Applied Biosystems Group (Foster City CA). Invitrogen will pay $38 per share for Applied Biosystems, representing a 17% premium to the stock's closing price prior to announcement of the buyout. The purchase price will be paid 45% in cash and the rest in stock. Based on the 168.7 million Applied Biosystems common shares outstanding at May 5, the deal is valued at $6.4 billion. In a statement, the companies valued the transaction at $6.7 billion."

August 19 2011:
Current Market Cap of current combined company... 6.47B"

That's sobering.

reply flag this

From June 2008:
"Invitrogen to Buy Applied Biosystems. Invitrogen Corp. (Carlsbad CA), which makes technologies for disease research and drug discovery, agreed to pay $6.4 billion in cash and stock for scientific instruments maker Applera's Applied Biosystems Group (Foster City CA). Invitrogen will pay $38 per share for Applied Biosystems, representing a 17% premium to the stock's closing price prior to announcement of the buyout. The purchase price will be paid 45% in cash and the rest in stock. Based on the 168.7 million Applied Biosystems common shares outstanding at May 5, the deal is valued at $6.4 billion. In a statement, the companies valued the transaction at $6.7 billion."

August 19 2011:
Current Market Cap of current combined company... 6.47B

Any truth to the rumor GL was caught 2 knuckles deep in a Phillipino boy's ass?

No wonder the SOLiD program was so disorganized.

Here's an example of a typical high-level LT exec:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-18/marijuana-dna-sequenced-by-star...

20 In Eugene

More cuts 2 to 4% coming at years end. Sales are poor, because products are fair. No blockbusters and No "revolutionary" IP or market for LIFE that is not already saturated.

Ship is sinking and Lucifer will take down as many souls as he can with him into hell - as he make bank and leaves his employees bankrupt.

Any cuts planned in bioinformatics?

How many in Madison, Eugene, Brown Deer, Frederick , Grand Island, Foster City, Austin, Pleasanton, Bedford, Norwalk, Durham?

How many people were laid-off in Carlsbad?

Nice PGM review...

I would add the following tidbit.

The PGM is being touted as something every clinical lab will have, making WGS and similar PGM apps common place in diagnostic labs everywhere. At least that's the vision I see being portrayed in all the LT hype...And what is probably needed for LT to meet the numbers required to justify the price they paid for the technolgy. Just selling to academic labs isn't going to cut it.

The fly in the ointment, so to speak, is that clinical/diagnostic labs need to validate every part of their testing process to get certification. So, a Clinical/diagnostic lab that develops a test on the current technology is going to need to re-validate in 6 months or less. And certification/validation studies are not cheap, especially for federally funded sites where money will be even more scarce. There are definite, multiple chip and workflow improvements that will be made over the next 12-24 months...And let's not forget that any changes in the data analysis needed to accommodate the higher throughput will also need to be validated too. These labs can't go out and implement a diagnostic assay on the current technology and expect to be able to instantaneously transfer it over to the technology once it comes out. Clinical/diagnostic labs need a very stable platform to develop their assays. I think the technology will eventually get there...The question is will LT be there when it does?

regarding IT:

IT is OK technology. It is essentially taking 454 technology and making it cheaper and more accessible. There are a few things though, that were unknown or overlooked during the due diligence.

1. There is a homopolymer 'issue' inherent in tis sort of technology. This gives rise to false results, especially if you are don't already know what you are sequencing. Roche have spent many years trying to get rid of it but still have not succeeded. This issue may limit acceptance by some customers.

2. The upfront steps are painful. LT tell people that it will be completely automated soon, but beware of smoke and mirrors and half truths when discussing workflows with vendors. Remember it is in their interest to make it appear trivial until the purchase order is in their hands.

3. Miseq from Illumina wasn't announced when they made the acquisition. It was costing people many thousands of $ to do sequencing, so IT was game changing. Miseqs are now shipping, so will take market share, and will have stopped some people from pushing the button in an IT purchase.

4. More sophisticated customers can see that the data quality isn't that hot.

5. It is cheap. "Surely they knew about that?", I hear you cry. While not *actually* 50k once you have bought all the other stuff you need to get it going (more like double that), you need to sell a lot to make your money back. LT probably envisaged making the real money on consumable sales, but again, Illumina have spoiled that for them by providing a credible competitor which will be as cheap or cheaper, and will keep them honest on their consumables prices.

We shall see though. The one thing for sure is that IT is unlikely to be the sort of cash cow that the $750m price tag suggested. Illumina got the last one of those in the sequencing environment when they snapped up Solexa.

About Ion Torrent, this is probably one of the reasons LT will fail really bad... It's a great technology, it has it's issue but LT is pumping everything in it. Here is what they forgot:

To this day, clinical WGS has little usage, cancer sequencing even less. Sample prep is still a nightmare, we won't get into bioinformatics.

The reality is that even if the instrument was 10K and a chip was 5$, the complete diagnostic workflow for an answer is a nightmare to entertain and will be for many years. LT decided to disrupt Illumina but it will pay very dearly for that and will likely not gain a lot of users. There are so many machines still in boxes or unused out there. The speed of acceptance is much slower than Life Tech or Greg Lucier understands, unfortunately he cannot outsource is customers...

My take on this is that he will make a choice between cellular and genomics and will start selling off some company assets and products.

Also, for all the folks cheering about asian outsourcing, the QC on some products has fallen so low that the cost of replacement and the recognition of the product is falling way below any acquired brands such as Applied Biosystems.

I, for one, really enjoyed seeing GL impose the no alcohol and no strip bars policy on all staff while he promoted BB to Medical Genomics, more stocks and a parachute. Impose all sorts of crap on your staff, threaten them with crazy rules that they never broke anyways and promote the same guy that created the KOS. Wonderful.

How could there be such division in outlook over the prospects for IT? Better than 3/4ths of the comments on this board/thread toward it are negative, yet GL convinced the BoD to make a $375M bet (double that if certain "milestones" are met) on the technology. Does it just not work? Will it not continue to scale? Are we seeing more LT (IVGN/ABI) funny numbers? Even if the tech works, does the market not exist? All the above? Can someone provide a compete and coherent argument, why/why not is IT not what GL/JR say it is/will be.

Ground for dismissal!!! oops forgot, I am already dismissed!! Thanks GL.

Someone should post his letter to the company...

I love how GL (in his latest love letter to the company) blamed our losses on system failers and therefore delivery of poor product to customers. Really, dumbass? When you slash key employees who can actually manage the "systems" and don't bother replace them, systems will fail. That's right, Mr. 33.7 million. Shocking, I know.

Did Elmer Fudd (aka NW) survive the purge? What a slimeball!

Lucifer will run this already crappy company into the ground and walk away with bulging pockets, destroying employee's lives - just to turn around and run another company into the ground. I don't know how he sleeps at night. But then again, it takes all kinds.

"Any forecast to how LIFE will do in Q3, revenue from IT? Look to me the whole market/economy is weak, would be nice to know the make up of LIFE revenues from its major business units."

It's not too late to sell your LT stocks yet. When the Q3 results come out, you will be lucky to get out at price now.

IT cannot save this sinking ship.

Poor, even in a strong market. IT is a NOT a game changer and will never be.

Any forecast to how LIFE will do in Q3, revenue from IT? Look to me the whole market/economy is weak, would be nice to know the make up of LIFE revenues from its major business units.

In response the the BK question, I am not quite certain to whom you are referring, however, I do have a good guess. I can tell you this: If they are old school Ambion, they are likely not "all talk". I mean, yes, we had our share of schmucks, but the ratio of shcmuck to hard-working human was very low. And our numbers reflected that. RIP Ambion. What a great company that was.

"If you are too stupid to realize that post was tongue-in-cheek then you should be the first to be cut."

Don't bury your head in sand. Those folks really exist, although some of them were let go in the latest round. There are still many more. I hope you don't work here. If you do, I suggest you look at people around you closely. Pay attention to what they do, their qualifications, their contributions, and how they got there. You will realize that this is not a joke. If you think people just made this up, You are just too f**king naive. You all agree that the Lifetech HR is horrible. Well, it's same HR that allows these people to exist in the first place.

Wait for the new website. It's a miracle in progress, if that is the kind of merging functionality LT offers, you might as well sink the boat now. Total bullshit. In the meantime real companies are building things like bees instead of being parasites wasp.

The lack of the ability of readers to detect sarcasm is disturbing.

What is the status of the lawsuits going on?
Anyone know what % of the laid off people were women? I think there is some bias going on.

"Man, I hope you folks are not average LT worker, I rest my case, with employees like these GL needs no competitor or enemy, GL has more cleaning to do, Cut, Cut, Cut 30-40% more."

If you are too stupid to realize that post was tongue-in-cheek then you should be the first to be cut.

"I nearly finish HS, and I get 6 figures and do not work, and are friends with people at top, and I am a free loader staying home, and I clean labs and hide all day, and I love my blanket, and I love LT and I love GL......"
Man, I hope you folks are not average LT worker, I rest my case, with employees like these GL needs no competitor or enemy, GL has more cleaning to do, Cut, Cut, Cut 30-40% more. Give TL real nice hair cut.
GM and Fort had to Cut 50% to finally start making real money. Watch out Chinese and Indians are coming BABY from UCs, they have more than stupid HS degrees, and they will take your job, take your home, and marry your daughters and wives, and they do not F... around all day at work, and be proud of it! Such a bunch of losers!! Man forget about LT and its share holders, you are wasting your own life, living a Medicare life, eating leftovers and hoping for GLs charity. Such losers!!!

Good Job GL, we need more Cuts please!!!!!

I love to work at Life too. My heart at Life has been dead long time ago. I do almost nothing daily except keeping the labs sparkling clean and organized. There is not much going on anyway. The business is dying. My pay is very high based on my work output. I am close to retirement age. I am just waiting for a package on my way out. Damn! I miss the package again. Well, either way, I am making some free money. Got nothing to complain about. Just sorry to see my buddies suffering, especially the ones with families and kids.

I love to work at Life. I barely finished H.S.. I know nothing about the science, the engineering, and the business at Life. Yet, I am managing a major operation. I got a shit load of stocks and a huge ICP payouts because my boss likes me. I am still here enjoying myself. I manage all these nerdy technical people. If they don't respect me, I bad-mouth them behind their backs to get these losers out of here. It's whom you know not what you know, baby.