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Orthopedic companies have generally gotten off to slower starts in 2025. Supply problems, market uncertainty and longer sales cycles are some of the obstacles companies have cited. Below are selected comments from the leaders of top orthopedic companies as they reported 1Q earnings.
Supply Issues Crimp Growth Potential
CONMED continued its long term operations fix, while Globus Medical and Anika Therapeutics hit transitory supply issues in the first quarter of 2025.
Pat Beyer, CONMED CEO
We’re improving our supply chain for stability and for continuity going forward and the ability to grow this business sequentially in the future. There are three areas we’re focused on right now. Number one, is the procurement and relationship with our suppliers. Number two, planning of that production. And number three is the production.
Keith Pfeil, Globus Medical CFO
Moving into supply chain impacts, we experienced temporary issues driven by the timing of in-house manufacturing scale up. This disruption mainly impacted legacy NuVasive products and was driven by finalizing validation activities associated with production. These issues resolved themselves late in our first quarter, and production has since come online for the impacted products.
Dr. Cheryl Blanchard, Anika Therapeutics CEO
On balance, we’ve had a successful start to the year as we had continued strong performance in our commercial channel and advanced many of our key goals and objectives. Offsetting that, we have experienced ongoing pricing challenges in the domestic OA Pain Market and some short-term supply production yield issues with Monovisc and Cingal.
Competition Tightens in Key Market Segments
Orthopedic enabling technology has disrupted the competitive balance of the joint replacement and spine markets.
Tim Schmid, Johnson & Johnson EVP MedTech
To be perfectly frank, while we have seen an improvement in our performance both in hips and knees through 2024, Q1 clearly wasn’t our strongest quarter. We have seen competitive pressures. As you know, these are highly attractive categories within ortho, it’s where the primary fight is, and we need to do better. We believe that our performance so far in the quarter was slightly below-market.
Pat Miles, ATEC CEO
If your vocation is spine surgery, you want to be aligned with a company that is dependent upon being great in spine surgery. Candidly, that’s us. We’re the pure play. We’re unapologetically evangelical about this space. You look outside and see how things have spun to private equity in a couple of instances. We’ve already made a big investment that we’re scaling off of over the years ahead.
The guys who have spun out have a big investment ahead of them. This is an expensive place. We’re seeing a lot of people realizing that. When you start to see the volume of new surgeons who are coming over, then you start to wonder, will their rep come with them? For the straight commission guys, the answer is clearly yes.
Geoff Martha, Medtronic CEO
We’ve gone from a product story to a solution story. Our customers are upgrading from a product to a broader ecosystem. It’s not a linear upgrade. It’s more algorithmic. That’s giving us a durable advantage. Market growth is stable, and our competitive advantage is growing. You’ve seen a bunch of our competitors tap out. You see our primary competitor this quarter put up some results — we’ll see where it goes from here, but there’s a pretty big difference between us and them this past quarter.
First Quarter Brings Strategic Shifts
Companies in the U.S. market are really feeling the crunch of increased competition. Orthofix Medical, Zimmer Biomet and Anika Therapeutics all took steps in the first quarter to accelerate their growth rates in the U.S.
Massimo Calafiore, Orthofix Medical CEO
This was the moment to really think about our spine business and we want to be much more deliberate and intentional about how we go to market. Given our strengths, we realize that our current distribution network was already at capacity from the growth standpoint.
We are accelerating our transformation by investing in larger, much more capital-efficient commercial partner to drive the long-term growth that we’re expecting to create shareholder value. It’s coming with some pain points short-term, but we believe that we can create a higher growth business by investing in the right partner.
Ivan Tornos, Zimmer Biomet CEO
We’re making changes in terms of leaders, quantity of territories and the incentive plan. As a result of the lack of growth, certain individuals will be exiting the organization fairly soon.
We’re going to be deploying more people into S.E.T. We know we can do better in robotics if we add the right quantity and quality of individuals. We’re going to add additional people in the ASC environment. This is not something that is new. We’re just going faster at it because we deserve to grow at a faster pace in the U.S.
Dr. Cheryl Blanchard, Anika Therapeutics CEO
To date, the pricing volatility in the U.S. has not been fully offset by the measures J&J MedTech has implemented to stabilize pricing in the market. To further diversify our revenue base and grow our OEM channel outside of J&J, we’ve begun actively working on new product expansion programs, which would be sold by other partners.
Orthopedic companies have generally gotten off to slower starts in 2025. Supply problems, market uncertainty and longer sales cycles are some of the obstacles companies have cited. Below are selected comments from the leaders of top orthopedic companies as they reported 1Q earnings.
Supply Issues Crimp Growth Potential
CONMED continued its...
Orthopedic companies have generally gotten off to slower starts in 2025. Supply problems, market uncertainty and longer sales cycles are some of the obstacles companies have cited. Below are selected comments from the leaders of top orthopedic companies as they reported 1Q earnings.
Supply Issues Crimp Growth Potential
CONMED continued its long term operations fix, while Globus Medical and Anika Therapeutics hit transitory supply issues in the first quarter of 2025.
Pat Beyer, CONMED CEO
We’re improving our supply chain for stability and for continuity going forward and the ability to grow this business sequentially in the future. There are three areas we’re focused on right now. Number one, is the procurement and relationship with our suppliers. Number two, planning of that production. And number three is the production.
Keith Pfeil, Globus Medical CFO
Moving into supply chain impacts, we experienced temporary issues driven by the timing of in-house manufacturing scale up. This disruption mainly impacted legacy NuVasive products and was driven by finalizing validation activities associated with production. These issues resolved themselves late in our first quarter, and production has since come online for the impacted products.
Dr. Cheryl Blanchard, Anika Therapeutics CEO
On balance, we’ve had a successful start to the year as we had continued strong performance in our commercial channel and advanced many of our key goals and objectives. Offsetting that, we have experienced ongoing pricing challenges in the domestic OA Pain Market and some short-term supply production yield issues with Monovisc and Cingal.
Competition Tightens in Key Market Segments
Orthopedic enabling technology has disrupted the competitive balance of the joint replacement and spine markets.
Tim Schmid, Johnson & Johnson EVP MedTech
To be perfectly frank, while we have seen an improvement in our performance both in hips and knees through 2024, Q1 clearly wasn’t our strongest quarter. We have seen competitive pressures. As you know, these are highly attractive categories within ortho, it’s where the primary fight is, and we need to do better. We believe that our performance so far in the quarter was slightly below-market.
Pat Miles, ATEC CEO
If your vocation is spine surgery, you want to be aligned with a company that is dependent upon being great in spine surgery. Candidly, that’s us. We’re the pure play. We’re unapologetically evangelical about this space. You look outside and see how things have spun to private equity in a couple of instances. We’ve already made a big investment that we’re scaling off of over the years ahead.
The guys who have spun out have a big investment ahead of them. This is an expensive place. We’re seeing a lot of people realizing that. When you start to see the volume of new surgeons who are coming over, then you start to wonder, will their rep come with them? For the straight commission guys, the answer is clearly yes.
Geoff Martha, Medtronic CEO
We’ve gone from a product story to a solution story. Our customers are upgrading from a product to a broader ecosystem. It’s not a linear upgrade. It’s more algorithmic. That’s giving us a durable advantage. Market growth is stable, and our competitive advantage is growing. You’ve seen a bunch of our competitors tap out. You see our primary competitor this quarter put up some results — we’ll see where it goes from here, but there’s a pretty big difference between us and them this past quarter.
First Quarter Brings Strategic Shifts
Companies in the U.S. market are really feeling the crunch of increased competition. Orthofix Medical, Zimmer Biomet and Anika Therapeutics all took steps in the first quarter to accelerate their growth rates in the U.S.
Massimo Calafiore, Orthofix Medical CEO
This was the moment to really think about our spine business and we want to be much more deliberate and intentional about how we go to market. Given our strengths, we realize that our current distribution network was already at capacity from the growth standpoint.
We are accelerating our transformation by investing in larger, much more capital-efficient commercial partner to drive the long-term growth that we’re expecting to create shareholder value. It’s coming with some pain points short-term, but we believe that we can create a higher growth business by investing in the right partner.
Ivan Tornos, Zimmer Biomet CEO
We’re making changes in terms of leaders, quantity of territories and the incentive plan. As a result of the lack of growth, certain individuals will be exiting the organization fairly soon.
We’re going to be deploying more people into S.E.T. We know we can do better in robotics if we add the right quantity and quality of individuals. We’re going to add additional people in the ASC environment. This is not something that is new. We’re just going faster at it because we deserve to grow at a faster pace in the U.S.
Dr. Cheryl Blanchard, Anika Therapeutics CEO
To date, the pricing volatility in the U.S. has not been fully offset by the measures J&J MedTech has implemented to stabilize pricing in the market. To further diversify our revenue base and grow our OEM channel outside of J&J, we’ve begun actively working on new product expansion programs, which would be sold by other partners.
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Mike Evers is a Senior Market Analyst and writer with over 15 years of experience in the medical industry, spanning cardiac rhythm management, ER coding and billing, and orthopedics. He joined ORTHOWORLD in 2018, where he provides market analysis and editorial coverage.
