Medtronic (MDT) announced Monday morning that it has agreed to acquire Invatec and two of its affiliated companies.

Medtronic will issue an initial payment of roughly $350 million. Invatec develops medical technologies that are used for the "interventional treatment" of cardiovascular disease. In addition to Invatec, Medtronic will acquire Fogazzi (which provides polymer technology to Invatec) and Krauth Cardiovascular (which distributes Invatec's products in Germany)

Continue reading Medtronic Acquires Invatec

Medtronic Acquires Invatec originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Seize the day with JNJ

Seize the day with JNJ originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX), an expert in medical devices and a colleague of Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), reported earnings for the second quarter on Monday after the closing bell. Wall Street liked the results. Shares of the company were bid higher by 5.8% in the after-hours session.

Net sales increased 7%. On an adjusted basis, Boston Scientific made 20 cents per share. According to Earnings.com, the business was supposed to bring in only 13 cents per share. Thus, management did a superb job of beating the analysts at their precious game. Unfortunately, Boston Scientific made the same amount of adjusted profit in the year-ago period, so there wasn't any growth on the bottom line.

Continue reading Boston Scientific tops estimates and guides higher

Boston Scientific tops estimates and guides higher originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Johnson & Johnson: A stock for your child's college fund

Johnson & Johnson: A stock for your child's college fund originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 20 May 2009 17:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) is a company in trouble. It spent too much for medical device company Guidant, leaving it with $8.3 billion in debt. And sales of its drug-coated stents have been hurt by clotting problems. The company lost $272 million in the last quarter.

The combination of high debt and poor earnings has done a great deal of damage to the stock. The company's shares are down about 22% this year.

Boston Scientific has come up with a simple plan, which is to sell itself off in pieces until its debt comes down to a level that it can service. Today, the company sold its cardiac surgery and vascular surgery units for $750 million. The buyer was Getinge, a Swedish company. The two units were part of Guidant.

The announcement is another example of the hideous cycle that begins when companies overreach. From late 2003 to early 2005, before BSX bought Guidant and took on mountains of debt, its shares moved from $13 to $35. Earnings were strong and shareholders were happy. But BSX management could not resist buying another medical device company and got into a brutal bidding war with Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), which pushed the price of Guidant to an irrational level.

Now, Boston Scientific can sell off what it bought, but probably at a lower price.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Boston Scientific unit sale digs it out of hole originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 05 Nov 2007 06:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

A Swedish study of 35,000 patients reported last week that drug-coated stents posed little risk to heart patients. But a newer survey by European doctors shows that "patients given drug-coated stents after an acute heart attack are nearly five times more likely to die six months to two years later than those with bare metal forms of the arterial scaffolding." Doctors at the European Society of Cardiology said the finding showed the need to be very selective about giving drug stents to the right patients.

Reuters also makes that point that a Swedish study presented on Sunday, involving 35,000 patients, found no overall increased risk for heart patients between drug and bare stents after four years of follow-up -- a reversal of the same researchers' earlier three-year findings that patients with coated stents were more at risk.

The New York Times reports that stent sales "hit nearly $6 billion globally last year but have since fallen sharply. They are forecast to be as much as $1 billion lower this year in the United States alone."

The two big drug stent companies, Boston Scientific (NYSE:BSX) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), have been hurt by medical research attacking the safety of their products disputed the new study. No wonder. Boston Scientific's shares are down 50% over the last two years.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and Boston Scientific (BSX) face more stent trouble originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.