The expansion recently completed by SGS Environmental Services is an indicator of the company’s decade of growth in the Wilmington area, company officials said last week at the public unveiling of their facility.

SGS, based in Geneva, Switzerland, is a major global inspection, verification, testing and certification company. Its Wilmington location, established in 2005 when SGS acquired Wilmington-based Paradigm Analytical, is the company's regional head office and performs environmental and contaminant testing in foods, tissues and natural elements.

The Wilmington office is preparing to enter the pharmaceutical market as well, said laboratory director Bryan Vining at the open house last week.

SGS is now the sole tenant at 5500 Business Drive, having taken over the entire building 30,000-square-foot building after its 2012 purchase of Analytical Perspectives, another testing company located in the same business park. Phillip Hanna, SGS’s vice president for U.S. environmental services, said renovations to the building took much of 2014, and inclement weather during the past few months delayed the public unveiling.

The renovation created a unified floor plan for the facility, which now houses offices and laboratories for SGS’s merged 50-person Wilmington workforce.

One of the labs is equipped with eight high-resolution mass spectrometers, used to measure the masses and relative concentrations of atoms and molecules. SGS can test for contaminants in concentrations as low as parts per trillion, its officials said.

“Our expertise is low-level detection,” said Vining, adding that very few laboratories in the U.S. can boast this number of the sensitive instruments.

The Wilmington branch of SGS has seen a “significant” revenue increase in the past three years as its client base and capacity have grown, Vining said, adding that if this pace of growth continues, the company will add two to three positions each year.

The company’s client base is not only larger; it is also becoming more diverse, according to Hanna.

“Our customer base includes Fortune 500 companies and small mom and pops, he said. “Diversification keeps the variety of work interesting. We do not consult; we test what we’re asked to; and don’t advise customers on what to test.”