Boston Scientific (NYSE:BSX) expects positive sales growth for the company by the 2nd half of 2013, CFO Jeffrey Capello told MassDevice.com in an interview.
A return to positive sales growth would end nearly 2.5 years of sliding revenues, and the medical device maker still has some rough patches to navigate, he said.
"In the 1st quarter we’re still up against a difficult comparable for U.S. drug eluting stents, so we’ll cycle through that. The 1st quarter will be challenging," Capello told us. "The 2nd quarter should be better."
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Boston Scientific officials were in New York City Tuesday for a series of analysts’ meetings and media interviews, spreading the word of what the company calls a "new era" for the Natick, Mass.-based medical device giant.
"By the 3rd and 4th quarter we’ll have PROMUS PREMIERE out in the market in the U.S., we’ll have it out in the E.U. for a couple quarters," Capello said. "We’ll have the emerging markets growing. There’s just a number of things that are lining up that make the 3rd and 4th quarter look pretty promising for us."
The Massachusetts medical device titan last month reported
a 4.9% slide in revenues for 2012 and the company has been actively paring its global workforce. Boston Scientific was alone among medtech giants in reducing its total workforce from 2011 to 2012, having cut its total staff by 7.7%. The company now employs about 24,000 worldwide – around 1,000 fewer workers than at about this time last year, a spokesperson told MassDevice.com last week.
Chief among the company’s troubles has been continuing declines in sales of its cardiac rhythm management devices and drug eluting stents. Capello told us that he expects the headwinds from the global slowdown in CRM to ebb in the coming months and years.
"The CRM market was down 3% in the 4th quarter and the DES market was down 2%," he said. "We think both those markets will improve over the next couple years as the emerging markets become a bigger piece of the global market, because those are growing quite well."
