Wright Medical turns a $29 million profit in Q4, sales up 12.7%

February 27, 2018 By Chris Newmarker Leave a Comment

Wright Medical (NSDQ:WMGI) today made good on its previously predicted 12.7% increase in fourth-quarter sales, boosted by a 29% jump in U.S. sales of its upper extremity surgical solutions for the shoulder, elbow, wrist and hand.

The earnings results, reported after market close, included sales of $217.6 million for the quarter ended Dec. 31. Profits were $29.1 million, or 27 cents per share, a turnaround from a loss of $44.9 million, or 43 cents per share, for the same quarter a year before.

Adjusted non-GAAP earnings were 10 cents per share, beating the 4 cents per share average estimate of analysts polled on Yahoo! Finance.

When it comes to lower extremities products — foot and ankle — U.S. sales were only up about 4% year-over-year during the fourth quarter.

“As anticipated, we did not see any benefit in the fourth quarter in our U.S. lower extremities business from the sales force expansion. Additionally, we had some supply constraints primarily related to a third-party coating vendor in the fourth quarter, which we believe have been addressed. However, this affected our total ankle business during the fourth quarter,” CEO Robert Palmisano said in a news release.

“As previously discussed, we will continue to focus on improving our execution and building our physician relationships to restore growth in our core U.S. lower extremities business and expect to see improvement in 2018 as our larger sales footprint, new products, new reps and expanding relationships begin to take effect.”

For all of 2017, Wright Medical lost $202.6 million, or $1.94 per share, off $745.0 million in revenue, versus a loss of $432.4 million, or $4.20 per share, off $690.4 million in revenue in 2016.

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