Thermo Fisher vs. Danaher: the lab-supply rivals after COVID, three spin-offs and two $9 billion deals

Thermo Fisher and Danaher sell the instruments, consumables and services that laboratories, drugmakers and hospitals run on. Thermo Fisher is the bigger of the two: $44.56 billion of revenue in 2025 against $24.57 billion, and a market value of $244.9 billion against $155.5 billion at the Oct 12, 2026 close. Over the last twelve months Thermo Fisher rose 26.2% and Danaher 9.3%.

Their profitability is closer than their size: net margins of 15.0% and 14.7% in 2025, and price-to-earnings ratios of about 35 and 39 on the last twelve months of profit. What separates them is how they got here — and the filings show three things a quick look at the revenue line would miss.

Where the revenue comes from

The two companies measure segment profit differently — Thermo Fisher before acquisition amortization and other charges, Danaher after it — so their segment margins should not be compared with each other. By geography, the United States was 49.9% of Thermo Fisher’s 2025 revenue and 40.6% of Danaher’s; Danaher’s sales in China fell from $3.14 billion in 2023 to $2.63 billion in 2025.

Danaher’s revenue line has three steps in it

Danaher has spun off three businesses in ten years: Fortive in July 2016, its remaining stake in Envista in late 2019 and Veralto in September 2023 (one Veralto share for every three Danaher shares). Each time, the next annual report restated only the two or three prior years without the business that left. Read in one line, Danaher’s reported revenue drops from 2013 to 2014 and from 2016 to 2017 and barely rises from 2020 to 2021 — none of which is a fall in sales. Comparisons only hold inside each block: 2014–2016, 2017–2020 and 2021–2025.

Thermo Fisher grew the other way, by buying: Life Technologies in February 2014 and PPD, a clinical research provider, in December 2021, among others. Danaher bought too — Cytiva, General Electric’s biopharma business, for about $20.7 billion in March 2020, and Abcam for about $5.6 billion in December 2023.

The COVID boom and fade

Thermo Fisher sold $6.63 billion of products related to the COVID-19 response in 2020 and $9.23 billion in 2021. Sales of COVID-19 testing products alone went from $7.26 billion in 2021 to $3.11 billion in 2022 and $0.33 billion in 2023, and 2023 was the only year since 2011 in which Thermo Fisher’s revenue fell (−4.6%). Danaher’s comparable 2023 revenue fell 10.3%; its annual reports do not put a dollar figure on COVID sales.

2026: two $9 billion deals and a new Danaher CEO

Both companies made a deal of roughly the same size this year. Thermo Fisher completed its purchase of Clario, a provider of clinical-trial data, on March 24, 2026, for $9.1 billion including the debt it settled. Danaher completed its purchase of Masimo, which makes pulse oximeters and patient monitors, on June 10 for about $9.8 billion, or $180 a share; its Leica Biosystems unit has also announced a deal for StatLab. On October 1, Julie Sawyer Montgomery, who ran Danaher’s diagnostics business, became chief executive, succeeding Rainer Blair.

Because both now include their new businesses, reported growth flatters 2026. The companies’ own organic measures — which strip out acquisitions, divestitures and currency — show the underlying pace:

One quarterly comparison needs a caveat: Danaher’s second-quarter 2026 profit rose 56.8%, but the year-earlier quarter included a $432 million impairment in its Life Sciences segment.

Dividends and buybacks

Thermo Fisher has paid a dividend since 2012 — $1.72 a share in 2025, raised 10% in 2026 — and bought back $20.5 billion of its own stock from 2016 to 2025, cutting diluted shares from 402 million to 378 million. Danaher paid $1.28 in 2025 and repurchased $9.1 billion over the same years, with diluted shares at 716 million in 2025 against 708 million in 2015. The yields are small: 0.28% and 0.69%.

A data-quality note: a widely used market data feed records Danaher’s July 2016 Fortive spin-off twice — once as a share adjustment and again as a $24.56 “dividend.” Its dividend-adjusted price history therefore overstates Danaher’s long-run return: for twenty years it shows about $16,200 from $1,000, where the correct figure is about $10,400. The numbers below remove the duplicate; this site is correcting its own copy of that data.

$1,000 over 5, 10 and 20 years

Both beat the S&P 500 over twenty years, and only Thermo Fisher did over ten. Over five years neither came close, and Danaher is the only one of the three below its starting value. The lead between the two changed 21 times in the ten-year window; it last changed in July 2025.

Funds and insiders

At the end of June, 11 of the 38 managers this site tracks held Thermo Fisher and 13 held Danaher. The largest Thermo Fisher holder was Andreas Halvorsen ($971 million); the largest Danaher holder was Cliff Asness ($503 million). Israel Englander raised his Danaher stake about twelvefold in the quarter, and Chase Coleman and Stanley Druckenmiller opened positions. These are June 30 positions; Thermo Fisher has since risen 32.1% and Danaher 16.1%.

No insider bought shares of either company on the market in the twelve months to October 12, 2026. At Thermo Fisher, insiders sold $158.1 million — $89.7 million under pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans, including $53.9 million by chief executive Marc Casper, and $68.4 million outside a plan, almost all of it by executives exercising options and selling in the same filing. At Danaher, insiders sold $257.9 million, none of it under a plan: $234.6 million by Mitchell Rales, chairman of the board’s executive committee, in October and November 2025, and $12.7 million by Rainer Blair in August 2026, after his retirement was announced. A charitable foundation of which Rales is a director also filed notice to sell 146,957 Danaher shares it had received from him as a gift.

The figures above come from the companies’ filings and the 13F and Form 4 filings listed below. They describe what happened; they are not a forecast and not investment advice.