Fuji film Holdings Corp. will buy two units of Merck & Co. that manufacture biopharmaceuticals as it wants to see growth in the health-care industry to compensate for down going sales in cameras and film.

The maker of imaging equipment and digital cameras based in Tokyo will acquire laboratories in the United Kingdom as well as America for a sum of forty billion yen or four hundred and ninety million dollars as reported by Nikkei English News, today but did not say where it got the pricing information. A Fuji film spokesman, Toshihiro Matsumoto, affirmed the purchase by phone today, without giving a price.

Fuji film has plans to three fold its sales in health care in the next ten years as the market for catering biologic vaccines and drugs are hoped to increase by fifteen percent a year, it said. The deal follows as sales from its imaging solutions, including color films and digital cameras, dropped sixteen percent in the last financial year with more consumers using smartphones for taking photos.

Fuji film is doing the ground work in health care for future growth because its existing digital cameras and film material businesses are fluctuating, said an equities analyst at Daiwa Securities Group Inc. in Tokyo, Kogo Horie. The purchase was sensible.

The company will buy MSD Biologics (U. K.) Ltd., based in Billingham, England and BioManufacturing Network Diosynth RTP LLC of Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The deal for the units, which generate about thirteen billion yen in sales per year, should be completed by early April, Matsumoto said.

The units of Merck, considered as the second biggest drug manufacturer in the U. S., have manufacturing facilities for biologic products used in vaccines and drugs based on human proteins.