Stryker Hits for the Cycle

When your base business is somewhere around $20 billion a year—which is to say, each quarter you are billing and collecting $5 billion of product shipments—and you grow, as Stryker Corporation did for the second quarter, 11.5%—then added $575 million in NEW business in just 90 days!

This is an incredible feat for a manufacturer—not a pharma or software company—in any industry.

Stryker’s June report soundly beat Wall Street’s forecasts.

But, as we noted in the headline, Stryker hit for the cycle. Each sector in the Stryker portfolio posted growth rates that were 2-3x the industry average:

• MedSurg and Neurotechnology sales: $2.9 billion, up 13% (homerun)
• Trauma and Extremity product sales: $766 billion, up 13% (standing triple)
• Knee product sales: $562 million, up 13% (solid double)
• Hip product sales: $393 million, up 8% (single, almost a double)

To what did management attribute this exceptional growth?

• Strong growth in the number of surgical procedures
• More hospital spending on capital equipment
• And, which always helps, a handful of hot products and markets for hospitals, clinics and surgeons, notably: emergency care, acute care, cementless knees, the continued popularity of the MAKO robotics platform and, importantly, international markets.

Looking to the rest of the year, Wall Street is no longer sweating issues like inflation, adverse currency headwinds or even supply chain problems for Stryker. They are focusing on procedure volumes, product innovation, operating efficiencies and strategic M&A—the fundamentals.

The latest models for Stryker are now predicting that sales for the full year will be up 10% from 2022 to $20.3 billion.