Metris - Asia Tour Metris

March 16th - 31st, 2006

Intro

At March 16th Ronald Bulthuis and Michel Schless left for a 15 day visit to Asia. The trip included the combined tour with Kuo Yang Sci Corp. in Taiwan, Scitech Korea Inc. in South Korea, Neuroscience Inc. in Japan and our new agent Medi Analytika Pvt. Ltd. in India. Goal of the tour was to familiarize with our distributors and to present the latest versions of our flagship products LABORAS and SONOTRACK

Taiwan

The tour started at the island of Taiwan where we were invited by our distributor Kuo Yang for a 5-day visit. The 5-day tour in Taiwan started with the presentation of our products LABORAS and SonoTrack at the biggest annual lifesciences conference in Taipei, March 18th-19th. Many Taiwanese researchers showed interest in the new technology of LABORAS for automatic animal behavior detection and specifically the unique behavior detection modules for scratching- and pain related behavior detection. Also SonoTrack, our ultrasound measurement & analysis system attracted much attention from researchers in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry.

Picture: Kuo Yang and Metris at Lifescience conference in Taipei (from left to right: Ronald Bulthuis, Joe Kan, Paul Chuan and Michel Schless)

The Taiwan program continued with a three-day tour to both academic as well as commercial customers spread out over the island of Taiwan; in Taipei, Taichung and Tainan. During the tour engineers of Kuo Yang assisted with the setup of the LABORAS system to familiarize with the installation aspects. All demonstrations were done with real laboratory animals directly proving the capabilities of the LABORAS and SonoTrack systems. Our LABORAS demonstration system was left for a two weeks experiment at the China Medical University to enable the researchers to experience the LABORAS benefits. Only one hour training was needed to enable the researchers to operate the system, showing the user-friendly character of the LABORAS software. The successful trip to Taiwan was concluded with real Taiwanese vodka and Taiwanese beer.

Picture: Garden with medicinal herbs at the China Medical University in Tainan

South-Korea

On March 23 we continued for our second stop in South Korea. Our short visit to South Korea was dedicated to meet Mr. Chan-Seung Park and Mr. Jin Lim of Scitech Korea Inc. who we briefly met at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference in Washington last year. We presented our Metris mission to fully automate animal experiments and our product portfolio. During the two day program we discussed the great potential of the market in South Korea and need for the high technology products of Metris. Therefore we concluded to enforce our relationship and to announce Scitech Korea Inc. to be our exclusive distributor in South-Korea. The visit was completed with a delicious Korean BBQ where both our physical capabilities as well as our experience with chop sticks were challenged.

Picture: Traditional Korean BBQ; from left to right Jin Lim, Chan-Seung Park, Michel Schless and Ronald Bulthuis

Japan

The third country was Japan which is not a new place for Metris since we are already present in several R&D centres of Japanese companies with our product LABORAS. During our three day visit to Japan, We introduced and demonstrated our new SonoTrack system and discussed the potential market in Japan with respect to the use of Ultrasound in pharmacological research. The successful introduction of Sonotrack is underlined by the first two orders of our product by Japanese institutes. We decided to strenghten our position in Japan with the help of our new distributor "Neuroscience Inc.". They will become our exclusive distributor for LABORAS and SonoTrack per April 1, 2006.

Picture: Dinner with the "crew" of Neuroscience Inc. in Tokyo

India

We finalized our Asia trip in India were we visited the office of Medi Analytika, our agent in India since July 2005. Medi Analytika directors R. Ramesh and R. Magudeswaran presented us to their respected customers - including universities and pharmaceutical companies- who were very eager to learn more on the application and use of our products LABORAS and Sonotrack. The two day introduction trip allowed visits in the Chennai area which showed many new construction works. The market in India is booming and mergers of big India Pharmaceuticals with European and US companies are recently in the news proving the growing strenght of India’s pharmacutical industry. The India market is enforced by a huge home market and great ambition. We are convinced that India’s market might take giant steps in the near future and we hope that our products will be supporting this process.

Picture: Demonstration of Sonotrack at one of Chennai's medical universities.

Picture: Impression of a road in Chennai (Madras) during rush hour

Picture: Dinner with the founders of Medi Analytika (from left to right R. Magudeswaran, R. Ramesh, M. Schless, R. Bulthuis)

Contact details of our international distributors and agents