Medacta CEO Talks About Sports Medicine Opportunity

Medacta is one of the fastest growing companies in orthopedics and is expected to finish 2025 with more than $800 million in revenue. Knees and hips have long been the mainstays of the company’s growth, but recently Medacta has been giving additional focus to the sports medicine segment.

We spoke with Medacta CEO Francesco Siccardi about the opportunities ahead for the company in sports medicine and its views on additional M&A. Excerpts from our conversation follow, edited for clarity and brevity.

You’ve increased the number of employees by about 7% in the first half of 2025. What part of the business are you adding to with those people?

Mr. Siccardi: In general, there is almost a 50/50 split between headquarters, manufacturing especially, and the commercial organization. We furthermore onboarded slightly fewer than 50 employees from Parcus, adding incremental upside compared to our usual employee growth trajectory.

Is the commercial organization the right size, or do you need to add some people there?

Mr. Siccardi: We constantly add new employees everywhere. The key pillars of Medacta’s growth are, number one: we definitely have very strong, innovative products. We then support surgeons new to our products with medical education. However, if we don’t have salespeople to sell those great products, we wouldn’t be growing at the pace we are. So, we constantly hire a significant number of salespeople.

And of course, in the U.S., a significant portion of our salesforce expansion is not through employees, but through agents, which you don’t see in the numbers. But of course, it is a lot of effort and work to attract the right talent and manage their non-competes.

You’ve substantially increased the 2025 outlook. What drove the success that led to the increase?

Mr. Siccardi: I think we had some hope that our knee portfolio was going to continue to grow at the pace we grew last year. By definition, the larger the base, the more challenging it is to maintain the percentage of growth. However, we are seeing a continuation of a strong above-market growth.

We also see a very strong pulling effect from our knee success into our hip, and that’s probably where salesforce and service make a difference, especially in the U.S. market. There are many surgeons who, if they switch the knee, often they also switch the hip and vice versa, because they like our service level. This is exactly the same phenomenon we have been seeing on the hip side with our anterior approach for many years.

We have two very strong arguments: on one side, the anterior approach, and on the other side, the kinematic alignment with a specifically designed implant. Those two are working in a very synergistic way.

We have achieved significant success in our shoulder portfolio, which is part of our extremities business line. Our extremities grew more than 40% in H1 2025, which is very, very strong. Even in spine, which is more challenging, with close to 200 companies selling screws and cages, we were up 18% in H1 2025.

This is mainly driven by our focus on technology. If you add technologies like NextAR and MySpine to the portfolio mix, then Medacta is one of perhaps 10 or 12 companies that truly have a strong technology platform within their portfolio.

What are Medacta’s near and medium-term goals for the sports medicine segment?

Mr. Siccardi: The reason why we decided to accelerate and expand on sports medicine is twofold.

In the U.S., ambulatory surgery centers will be the space where companies compete, both in arthroplasty and sports medicine, and where I expect both lines to represent at least 70% to 80% of the market. We’re not there yet with arthroplasty. We’re already there with sports medicine, but I think we all agree that this is where the market is going.

So, for us to be able to be a larger partner in that segment with the innovative products on both ends, good medical education and good ability to support with bundle initiatives is definitely a strategic reason for us to invest in that space.

I expect sports medicine to become increasingly relevant for Medacta over the next five years. We do have ambitious plans in terms of organic growth, attracting good key opinion leaders and making sure that we continue to stay ahead in terms of new product development.

Sportsmed products have a much shorter life cycle. I think larger companies are potentially a bit slower than us in keeping up a good pace. However, we see huge opportunities to compete in this space.

Outside the U.S., there are even more synergies under a single surgeon point of view, as a knee surgeon who does arthroplasty very often does ACL, shoulder arthroplasty, shoulder sports medicine and so on, so forth. We believe there are numerous synergies that we can capitalize on.

Is Medacta open to more M&A?

Mr. Siccardi: The short answer is no. The Parcus acquisition was more of an opportunistic deal, and I think it would have been ignorant of us not to execute this transaction.

We are targeting continuous excellent organic growth, and we believe that across different product lines and different geographies, we can achieve a very good organic growth above the market for several years to come.

We have already built a solid base from a geographical point of view in Europe, in the U.S., Australia and Japan. From there, we think we can expand both with the existing core lines, hip and knees, but also with the newer lines, spine, shoulder and sports medicine.