Boston Scientific records a $200 million third-quarter profit

October 20, 2009 by MassDevice staff

Most product categories see revenue gains, paced by a $22 million jump in ICD sales for the Natick, Mass.-based medical devices giant.

Boston Scientific Corp. enjoyed sales gains across most product categories, lifting the Natick, Mass.-based medical device manufacturer to its first nine-digit quarterly profit in more than two years.

Overall, Boston Scientific late Monday reported a $200 million profit, or 13 cents a share before one-time adjustments, on $2.03 billion in sales during the three months ended Sept. 30. The gain compares favorably with year-ago results, when the company lost $64 million on sales of $1.98 billion and marked its best quarterly profit since posting a $111 bottom line in June 2007.

Contributing to the 3 percent company-wide jump in global revenues were implantable cardioverter defibrillator sales, up $22 million compared with year-ago levels, of $445 million; and pacemaker sales, which climbed to $163 million, up $14 million from $149 million in the third quarter of 2008.

Global sales of drug-eluting stents rose $15 million to $411 million during the period. The company also boosted its market share for the devices in both the United States and in Japan and now claims 49 percent of all drug-eluting stents sold in this country.

In a prepared statement, CEO Ray Elliott predicted Boston Scientific will retain its market lead, noting that it has "the industry's only two-drug platform and the finest sales and marketing team in the business."

He also fired a shot at Abbott, which last month published trial results indicating its Xience V stent worked better at preventing blood clots and deterring major adverse cardiac events than the Boston Scientific Taxus system. The study of 1,800 patients who received either the Xience or Taxus devices found that after one year, Taxus users were nearly 50 percent more likely to suffer complications than Xience users.

But Elliott said the Abbott research was flawed, dismissing it as a "single-center, non-double blinded [and] underpowered" study lacking "optimal trial protocol."

Abbott now controls about 28 percent of the U.S. market for drug-eluting stents and last week reported total sales of $244 million for its stents world-wide during the three months ended Sept. 30.