ConMed Beats Wall Street’s Sales Estimates for 2015

For the last three months of a very eventful 2015, ConMed Corporation (home of Linvatec, Hall, Concept and Shutt) reported $191 million in sales—which pulled the full year up to $719 million—higher than Wall Street’s $189.7 million estimate for the quarter.

While better than Wall Street expected, ConMed’s sales were still down about 2.0% from the same quarter in 2014—before currency effects. The effects of currency translation on ConMed’s sales outside the U.S. pulled the overall sales growth rates down. Excluding currency, ConMed’s sales were actually UP by a half a percent for the quarter and UP one percent for the full year.

ConMed, Stryker Corporation and JNJ’s DePuy Synthes Companies have all reported a stronger-than-expected sales report for the final quarter of 2015.

Here are the numbers for ConMed.

With rising profit margins and a number of new initiatives including the SurgiQuest growth platform CEO Curt Hartman and his team raised their sales guidance for 2016. SurgiQuest, Hartman and his team expect, will kick in between $55 million – $60 million and bring the full year’s sales range to between $760 million – $770 million for 2016.

Wall Street’s Take

Needham & Co.: “To simplify, the 2016 math looks like this: organic cash EPS growth of 7% plus SurgiQuest accretion of 10% offset by 21% of currency headwind results, unfortunately, in a 4% decline in cash EPS. While disappointing, we believe that two consecutive quarters of positive revenue growth show that the turnaround is happening—albeit more slowly than we hoped.”