You are Sabine Achermann, 51, chief executive of Helvetia Instruments AG in Zürich. Overnight, a venture-backed challenger has taken one of your oldest pharmaceutical accounts. The board is giving you CHF 300 million and ninety days, and the first thing it wants is your reading of where Helvetia stands.
The situation
Helvetia makes high-precision laboratory and diagnostic instruments that pharmaceutical and clinical labs around the world treat as the standard. It earns CHF 1.9 billion of revenue at an 18% operating margin, about CHF 342 million a year, and employs 4,600 people in Switzerland, Germany and Singapore. Behind it sit a large installed base and the service contracts that come with it. The hardware business has grown at 2% a year for several years.
On Monday 20 January 2026, Lumea went live with a cloud-native diagnostic platform and, before the week was out, had won a pharmaceutical customer that had bought from Helvetia for a decade. Its pitch was not instruments but subscription data services. The market Lumea plays in, connected instruments and AI-driven analytics, is growing more than 30% a year. In Helvetia's own accounts it is still 3.8% of revenue.
The board has fixed a pool of CHF 300 million over three years and wants, within ninety days, a capital plan and a readiness score it can track. Eighteen months after that it wants to see the revenue mix moving; if it is not, it will consider new management or selling the franchise while it still commands a premium. Your reputation and your incentive plan rest on the operating discipline that made Helvetia the most profitable name in its category, and the hardware organisation is in no hurry to hear that the model is changing.