Quarterly Profit Up 15% at Beckman Instruments : * Earnings: Company credits new medical diagnostic equipment. Analyst says lackluster period may be ending.

Beckman Instruments Inc., one of Orange County’s largest companies, said Thursday that its new medical diagnostic equipment helped boost first-quarter profits to $9.3 million, a rise of 15% compared to a year earlier.

Beckman generally has been considered a lackluster performer by Wall Street. But one stock analyst said the year-to-year earnings gain--the best in several years--may mean the company is starting to churn out enough new products to keep sales and profits growing robustly.

“After three blah years, we’re starting to see signs of improvement,” said Robert C. Dunne, an analyst at Martin Simpson & Co., a New York brokerage.

Beckman stock closed Thursday at $20.25, up 37.5 cents a share in New York Stock Exchange trading.

The company also said the first quarter may be the end of its doldrums. “We believe that our quarterly results are part of an improving trend for Beckman,” said Chairman Louis Rosso in a statement.

The first-quarter earnings amounted to 32 cents a share, compared to earnings of $8.1 million, or 28 cents a share, the preceding year. Sales rose 9% to $213 million, from $195.9 million last year.

Beckman makes research equipment such as centrifuges, the motorized arms that sweep test tubes in a circle and separate their contents.

That part of the business, however, has been flat the last few years. The reason: The biggest customers in this market are big research institutions, and government funding for purchases of biological research equipment has been shrinking.

Although first-quarter sales were up compared to last year, the future is somewhat clouded, the company said. Rosso said “uncertainty about public funding for research instrumentation continues and could affect life science results.”

Dunne, the stock analyst, said: “New grants have been kind of erratic. And Beckman hasn’t come up with a lot of new products in this area.”

The research business accounts for about 43% of Beckman’s sales, or roughly $92 million last quarter. That’s down from 50% a few years ago.

The big growth during the quarter came in sales of equipment that hospitals use to test and analyze blood and urine and do other tests. Beckman said its sales of diagnostic equipment grew twice as fast as the market.

After six years as a subsidiary of drug company SmithKline Beckman Corp., Beckman was made a separate, publicly held company in 1988 and 1989.

The company’s earnings have been humdrum since then, and its stock has languished.

Part of the problem, said stock analyst Dunne, is that SmithKline may have put pressure on its subsidiary to crank out profits each quarter while neglecting its prospects for long-term growth.

Now, however, each year Beckman is spending nearly 10% of sales--or about $80 million--on research and development of new products, a proportion that analysts say is above normal for similar companies.

That renewed emphasis on product development may have helped attract the wealthy Bass family of Texas, which announced in February that it had raised its stake in the company from 4.8% to 5.3%. In boosting its stake above 5%--the threshold at which the Securities and Exchange Commission requires certain public disclosures--the Bass group may have wanted to send a message to Beckman management.

The Basses probably didn’t raise their investment in order to seek control of the company or get it to pay them “greenmail” to go away, said Dunne, but are probably just trying to prod management into improving earnings.

The Basses, for instance, haven’t put the company “in play”-- that is, it hasn’t become a possible takeover target with a lot of speculative investing in its stock.

In fact, the company said Thursday that management continues “to believe our objectives are in parallel with investors who include members of the Bass family.”

But that, of course, doesn’t mean some sort of play couldn’t happen, Dunne said.

“This is a good, solid company with excellent cash flow and relatively little debt,” the analyst said. “I don’t get the sense the Basses are pressing management to do anything other than get profits up.

“But the Bass investment could attract people with other motives, who could put the company into play.”

Beckman earned $38 million on sales of $858 million last year, which makes it larger than all but a small handful of Orange County companies.