The buy side says: “He provides old-fashioned, no-fluff models on companies that are sometimes hazily covered.”
Derik de Bruin of UBS debuts in the top spot in this new sector, which inched up 1.7 percent in the 12 months through August (and trailed the broad market by 1.1 percentage points). The 46-year-old analyst — who earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1993 and worked as a life-sciences analyst at Salomon Smith Barney and then Credit Suisse before joining UBS in 2002 — upgraded Millipore Corp. from neutral to buy in May 2009, at $64.48. De Bruin believed the Billerica, Massachusetts–based contract research organization was showing promising signs of revenue recovery. In late February, Germany’s Merck agreed to buy the company for $7.2 billion, or $107 per share. “They earned our vote right there,” says one grateful investor. Merck completed the Millipore acquisition in mid-July.
