Abbott (NYSE:ABT) shares ticked up this morning on third-quarter results that easily topped the consensus forecast.
The Abbott Park, Illinois-based company posted profits of $2.1 billion, or $1.17 per share, on sales of $10.9 billion for the three months ended Sept. 30, 2021, for a 70.5% bottom-line gain on sales growth of 23.4%.
Adjusted to exclude one-time items, earnings per share were $1.40, 46¢ ahead of Wall Street, where analysts were looking for sales of $9.6 billion.
The company’s medical device business registered revenues of $3.6 billion, representing a year-over-year increase of 14.6%. Abbott’s diagnostics business, bolstered by its COVID-19 testing products like the over-the-counter BinaxNow rapid diagnostic, saw 48.2% growth to revenues of $3.9 billion for the quarter.
“We achieved another quarter of strong growth overall and across all four of our major business areas,” Abbott president & CEO Robert B. Ford said in a news release. “We’re particularly pleased with the continued advancements of our new product pipeline, including several recent launches in large, high-growth markets.”
Abbott said it now expects to log adjusted EPS of between $5 and $5.10 for the full 2021 year.
ABT shares were up 4% at $124.05 per share in early-morning trading today. MassDevice’s MedTech 100 Index — which includes stocks of the world’s largest medical device companies — was up 0.4%.