St. Jude Medical (STJ) recently announced that over two million patients have been treated with its mechanical heart valve technology. This landmark achievement is a reminder of the company’s contribution to cardiac surgery.
St. Jude Medical has, for over 30 years, offered recipients top-class performance from its mechanical heart valves. While counting over 2 million heart valve beneficiaries, the company shares this important milestone and moment with medical practitioners and hospitals across the globe.
The company continues to develop heart valve replacement technologies for patients with dysfunctional or defective heart valves. It has used its expertise to produce the Trifecta heart valve. The Trifecta is a futuristic tissue valve with a triple-leaflet stented pericardial design for enhanced hemodynamic outcome. The Trifecta was launched in Europe in 2010 after it received CE Mark approval. As yet, the Trifecta valve is not available for use in the U.S.
The heart valve product line-up from St. Jude includes mechanical heart valves, porcine tissue valves, valve annuloplasty rings and the Trifecta heart valve, its latest bovine stented pericardial tissue valve.
St. Jude is also well positioned to benefit from any incremental opportunities in Cardiac Rhythm Management (“CRM”), especially in implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (“ICD”), on the back of a strong product pipeline. Several new product launches across the U.S. and Europe should boost the company’s CRM market share later in 2011. St. Jude competes, in niches, with other major global medical devices makers, such as Medtronic (MDT) and Boston Scientific (BSX).
While we are impressed with St. Jude’s solid fundamentals, strong product mix, healthy growth trajectory and operating leverage, we remain wary about competition-driven pricing pressure, the dilutive impact of acquisitions and any unfavorable currency exchange fluctuations on the bottom line. This is reflected in our Neutral recommendation for the stock, backed by a Zacks #3 Rank (Hold).
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