Waters Corporation reported first-quarter 2026 results on May 5, the first reporting period that consolidates the Biosciences and Diagnostic Solutions businesses spun out of Becton, Dickinson and Company. The BD transaction closed on February 9, 2026, and re-shaped Waters from a focused analytical-instruments house into a four-division life-sciences and diagnostics group.
Total reported revenue was $1.267 billion, exceeding the top end of company guidance by $56 million. Organic revenue - the legacy Waters business - came in at $747 million, up 13% as reported and 11% in constant currency, with the company citing high-single-digit instrument growth and mid-teens chemistry growth inside the Analytical Sciences Division. The acquired BD businesses contributed $520 million in the partial quarter, $40 million above internal expectations. Adjusted EPS was $2.70, up 20% year-on-year; GAAP diluted EPS was a $0.87 loss, reflecting acquisition-related charges. The company now reports four segments: Analytical Sciences ($607M), Waters Biosciences ($232M), Advanced Diagnostics ($349M) and Materials Sciences ($79M).
Management raised full-year 2026 guidance, taking organic constant-currency revenue growth to 6.5-8.0%, total reported revenue to $6.405-6.455 billion, and adjusted EPS to $14.40-14.60. The acquired businesses are now expected to generate $3.035 billion of reported revenue in 2026 on an owned-period basis.
For process-analytics buyers, the read-through is narrow: Waters’s PAT-adjacent exposure sits in chemistry consumables and in the Analytical Sciences instrument line, and chemistry’s mid-teens growth is the cleanest signal that pharmaceutical QC and release-testing demand remains firm. The Biosciences and Diagnostics segments do not overlap with inline process spectroscopy. The structural story is the segmentation itself: vendor benchmarking against Waters will, from this quarter onward, need to filter out diagnostics and biosciences revenue to compare like-for-like with peers reviewed in our analytical instrument vendor leadership note and the Thermo Fisher Q1 2026 segment read.