Johnson & Johnson jumps into orthopedic robotics, looks ahead to biologics: 5 key quotes from Q1 earnings call

Spinal Tech

Johnson & Johnson reported 1.1 percent worldwide growth in the orthopedics segment for the first quarter of 2018, but believes the line will grow as the year goes on, according to the earnings call as posted in Seeking Alpha.

 

CEO Alex Gorsky did not participate in the call; instead, Vice President of Investor Relations Joseph Wolk and outgoing Executive Vice President and CFO Dominic Caruso spoke during the call. Here are five key quotes on where the company is headed in the future.

On orthopedic line growth, Mr. Wolk: "We were pleased to announce during the first quarter the acquisition of Orthotaxy, which we believe will provide the next-generation robotic-assisted surgery which will be on display at our May 16 analyst day."

On spine losses, Mr. Wolk: "We are losing share in spine and newer competitive entries are being better received in the market…we believe new offerings throughout 2018 such as Attune revision system, Attune S+ and cementless are expected to improve performance."

On global supply chain changes, Mr. Caruso: "We plan to implement a series of actions across our global supply chain that are intended to focus our resources and increase investments in critical capabilities, technologies and solutions necessary to manufacture and supply our portfolio. This will enable us to better meet patient and customer needs, make us more agile in a rapidly evolving landscape and drive business growth."

On U.S. tax legislation and reinvestment, Mr. Caruso: "The new U.S. tax legislation creates greater flexibility and opportunity to capitalize on our investments in innovation and R&D. In fact, we intend to invest more than $30 billion in the U.S. with capital investments in R&D between 2018 and 2021 representing an increase over the prior four years of more than 15 percent."

On future technology investments, Mr. Caruso: "Looking forward into the future, we need more of some newer technologies like biologics, like investment in CAR-T for example. And we need less of the technologies that are related to some of the older parts of the portfolio. So we need to advance our manufacturing footprint to have more capacity with new technologies, less capacity with older technologies. We're going to do that from a position of strength, so that we're ready when our plans materialize and our strategies to continue to launch new products that have these newer technologies embedded in them and we want to be ready for that."

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