...NEW YORK (Standard & Poor's) Jan. 11, 2016--Standard & Poor's Ratings Services said today that its '###' corporate credit rating and stable outlook on Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. are unaffected by the company's announcement of its intended acquisition of Affymetrix Inc. for approximately $1.3 billion. We expect Thermo Fisher to fund the acquisition with a combination of debt and cash which may result in a temporary leverage increase to around 3.5x. At the same time, given our expectation that the company will generate over $2 billion of free operating cash flow in 2016, we expect leverage to improve to around 3.2x by the end of the year, the level commensurate with our current "significant" financial risk assessment. Affymetrix markets life science and molecular diagnostic products that enable parallel analysis of biological systems at the gene, protein, and cell level. In our view, the Affymetrix acquisition will be a good complement to Thermo Fisher's Life Science Solutions segment,...
