Wright Medical gains on Q4 earnings beat

Wright Medical (NSDQ:WMGI) shares gained today after the orthopedics maker smashed Wall Street’s earnings forecast by a full 25¢ in the 1st quarter since its $3.3 billion merger with Tornier.

Memphis-based Wright posted losses of -$105.8 million, or -90¢ per share from continuing operations, on sales of $177.0 million for the 3 months ended Dec. 27, 2015, cutting losses by -4.9% on sales growth of 112.5% compared with Q4 2014.

Adjusted to exclude 1-time items, losses per share were -8¢, 25¢ better than the consensus estimate on The Street.

Full-year losses were up 15.0% to -$289.7 million, or -$3.68 per share from continuing operations, on sales of $415.5 million, marking a 39.4% top-line gain. Adjusted EPS were -93¢, well below The Street’s -$1.60 forecast.

Wright and Tornier closed their merger in October 2015.

“In our 1st quarter as a newly merged Wright Medical, we delivered outstanding 4th-quarter results that reflect the continued strong underlying growth and positive momentum in our legacy Wright lower extremities and legacy Tornier upper extremities businesses,” president & CEO Robert Palmisano said in prepared remarks. “Our pro forma global extremities and biologics growth of 14% was a 2-percentage-point acceleration from the 3rd quarter of 2015, and combined with earlier-than-anticipated progress on capturing cost synergies, resulted in pro forma net sales and positive adjusted EBITDA results that significantly exceeded our expectations. We also got off to a strong start on executing our merger integration plans and with the early success we are seeing, we believe we are well positioned to continue our strong business momentum and to deliver on our synergy commitments as we progress through 2016.”

Wright said it expects to post adjusted losses of -65¢ to -71¢ on constant-currency sales of $695 million to $705 million.

“Our 2016 guidance assumes mid-teens underlying combined pro forma constant currency growth in extremities and biologics, excluding the impact of anticipated revenue dis-synergies. We also expect growth to accelerate in our biologics business due to the ongoing launch of Augment bone graft in the U.S. We will continue to focus on successfully executing our integration plans to realize our full potential and believe that the positive progress we saw in the 4th quarter is setting us up well for continued strong revenue growth and significant margin expansion in 2016 and beyond,” Palmisano said.

WMGI shares were up 4.0% to $17.83 apiece today in early afternoon trading.

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