Aitor Galdos to leave Tecan; Thomas Bachmann named new CEO

12-17-2004: Tecan announced a change in its Group Management. Aitor Galdos, who has served as CEO since 2003, is leaving the company. He will be succeeded by Thomas Bachmann (45). An experienced top Swiss executive, Bachmann is currently CEO of the Steel Division of the AFG Arbonia-Forster Group, and previously held various senior positions with Rieter Ltd., the global industrial concern.

The change of CEO stems from differences between Mr. Galdos and the Board of Directors over the company's operational management. The Board has agreed the following top-priority operational goals for 2005:

- to achieve and maintain worldwide regulatory compliance; - to increase operational efficiency; - to aggressively pursue further growth opportunities; - to improve margins.

"We are very confident that, with the support of our management team and our staff, Thomas Bachmann will successfully focus on and achieve these goals," says Mike Baronian, Tecan's Chairman of the Board. A Swiss citizen who is married with three children, Thomas Bachmann can look back on 20 years of management and specialist experience in various industrial sectors. He can also draw on extensive experience of various countries and cultures, having worked in North America, China, India, Brazil and the Asia-Pacific region as well as several European countries.

A graduate in mechanical engineering from the School of Engineering and Information Technology of the Berne University of Applied Science (and the subsequent holder of an Executive MBA from the IMD Lausanne), Thomas Bachmann started his career with Rieter Ltd., the Swiss-based leading global supplier to the textile and automotive industry. After initially working in marketing and sales, where he later assumed responsibility for developing Rieter's markets in North America and especially in Asia (China, Taiwan, Japan and India), he was in operational charge of one of the group's plant construction divisions for several years. Following this, he was assigned overall responsibility for Rieter's groupwide strategic planning and for its industrial merger and acquisition projects. He joined the pan-European AFG Arbonia-Forster Group in 2002, where, as a member of Group Executive Management and CEO of its Steel Division (2003: comprising around 710 employees and generating annual revenues of some CHF 240 million), he bore full operational and financial responsibility for the division's business activities.

The precise date on which Thomas Bachmann will assume his new duties as CEO of Tecan is still to be finalised. In the meantime, Tecan Group Management members Hans Camenisch (Vice President Global Research & Development), Rudolf Eugster (Chief Financial Officer) and Jan Timmers (Vice President Global Marketing) will share responsibility for the company's operations, reporting directly to the Board of Directors. Board member Gérard Vaillant, a former Johnson & Johnson group chairman living in the USA, will be supporting Group Management in its sales activities in the United States and Japan.