|
Below is an excerpt from a complementary research note written by our Healthcare Team of Tom Tobin, William McMahon, and Justin Venneri. We are pleased to announce our new Sector Pro Product Health Care Pro. Click HERE to learn more. |
If you didn't catch Johnson & Johnson’s (JNJ) Virtual Medical Devices Update - General Session, check it out or read the transcript over the weekend.
At a macro-level, for 3Q20, Ashley McEvoy, EVP & Worldwide Chairman of Medical Devices, noted "significant improvement vs. 2Q20, w/ the U.S. returning to positive growth of 1% and China +17% (adjusted operational growth)."
Management expects the MedTech market to return to 5% growth "once procedures return to more normalized levels." If our data and recent field checks are accurate, this could happen sooner than later once the current wave of COVID passes.
The COVID-19 vaccine(s) will surely help, but as we’ve been saying, there’s at least a quarter or two before the COVID Comp(s) come, which will be more challenging for some than others. Reminder, MicroQuad 3 stocks are still longs, just smaller allocations due to the risk of slipping into MicroQuad 4.
We are most interested in what Dr. Frederic Moll, founder of Intuitive Surgical, current Chief Development Officer, Medical Devices at JNJ (joined by way of Auris, which JNJ acquired last year) had to say - he introduced Ottava yesterday (11/19) - the musical reference is the reason for the title of this morning's note.
Also, Dr. William Hait, Global Head, J&J External Innovation, and Dr. Avrum Spira, Global Head, Lung Cancer Initiative, provided some interesting color.
To keep it simple:
- We're tracking GH, EXAS, ILMN, NTRA, et al. closely and the Monarch clearly plays in the "early detection" of lung cancer realm,
- JNJ looks like it poses a real threat to ISRG (Monarch vs. Ion, Ottava vs. da Vinci),
- The C-SATS platform seems like an interesting data/AI play, and
- JNJ's VELYS robotic-assisted solution is worth watching heading into 2021 (competition for MAKO).
