Report: Medtech faces 2018 challenges, FDA a bright spot

Financial trends for the medical device industry last year point to a continuing series of challenges for large and small companies alike in 2018, ranging from a tightening M&A landscape to an even tighter funding scene – with the FDA making a surprise appearance as a potential bright spot.

According to the Pharma, Biotech and Medtech 2017 in Review report from EP Vantage, the editorial arm of life science market researcher Evaluate, the trends of 2017 augur worst for smaller medtech enterprises.

“In medtech the funding crunch still exists for small companies,” Elizabeth Cairns, author of the report’s medtech section, said in prepared remarks. “Last year so few venture deals were done, and so few IPOs got away, that there is a real possibility that the pool of start-ups could dry up completely if this trend is not reversed.”

Here are a few key points on the medtech market from the report:

• The big keep getting bigger – and doing better. No company with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion saw its share price decline.
• Medtech indices surge. The Thomson Reuters Europe index went from a -12% drop in 2016 to growth of 16% last year. In the U.S., the Dow Jones U.S. Medical Equipment Index and the S&P Composite 1500 HealthCare Equipment & Supplies index went from 2016 growth of 5% to 7% to 30% and 31%, respectively.
• M&A values stay up, volume still in decline. Although the total value of all mergers last year was $98.5 billion – the second-highest after 2015 and more than twice as high as 2016, buoyed by the third- and fourth-largest medtech deals on record (Abbott-St. Jude and BD-Bard) – the number of deals was the fewest since then financial crisis of 2009 at 183.
  
• It’s the same story with VC funding. At $5.1 billion, 2017’s total was the highest on record for venture capital spending (the top 10 rounds made up half of the total spend), but the number of deals was the lowest since 2006 at 225.
• IPO market stays quiet. Initial public offerings were slow last year, with only 10 companies issuing flotations. Only half were in the U.S., with nearly a third coming from Sweden alone. Unusually, foreign IPOs raised more, at $141 million OUS to $100 million domestically. And the OUS stocks fared better too, gaining 47% compared with 8% for their U.S. peers.
• FDA gets faster. The federal safety watchdog approved 50 devices in record time last year, with its 14-month average halving the average approval time in 2013 and running five months better than 2016. There were twice as many high-risk device approvals (PMA and HDE) as in 2013, to boot.

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