Medical Device Market & Industry Briefs, April 2012

The only predictable part of Medtronic Minimally Invasive Therapies’s acquisition strategy is there’s no sign of it slowing down. For the past five years, since its spin-out from Tyco International Ltd., [See Deal] the multinational device company has spent close to $5 billion acquiring public and privately held device companies, with more than $1 billion of that being spent just over the past six months on privately held Barrx Medical Inc., Newport Medical Instruments Inc., Reverse Medical Corp., Oridion Systems Ltd., and superDimension Ltd.[See Deal][See Deal][See Deal][See Deal][See Deal]

The string of purchases bulked up every one of Covidien’s existing medical device businesses. (See Exhibit 1.) For example, Covidien’s most recent acquisition of Oridion Systems, maker of products to measure patient breathing, will fit into its Oximetry and Monitoring business unit, which already had been bolstered by the past acquisitions of publicly traded Somanetics Corp. and Aspect Medical Systems Inc.[See Deal][See Deal]. Meanwhile, the purchases of VNUS Medical Technologies Inc. and ev3 Inc