While the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference has thus far failed to yield any major M&A deals for the industry, Medtronic believes the time is ripe for buyouts.
At last year’s JPM event, Medtronic’s CEO Geoff Martha talked up the company’s plan to strike so-called “tuck-in” deals. Now, the company has created a new “growth committee” that aims to try to zero in on deals more quickly, Chief Financial Officer Thierry Piéton told investors this week at JPM.
The company’s policy around tuck-in deals is “pretty tangible right now,” Martha said at the medtech’s presentation in San Francisco Monday morning, although he did not give a timeline for any potential deals.
Any acquisitions would be “supplemental” and, in terms of deal value, would be in the low- to mid-single-digit billion-dollar range, the CEO said. In the Q&A session of Medtronic’s presentation, Piéton added that “what’s changed compared to the last few years is that [the industry] is doing more M&A.
“I think we went through a period that Geoff [Martha] mentioned about improving operations on a day-to-day basis, and now we’re there, so we’ve earned the right to do these acquisitions, and we’ve got the capacity, so we’re going to step up in that area,” Piéton said.
The renewed focus on M&A comes after Medtronic expanded its board back in the summer to chase M&A opportunities and efficiencies in response to activist investor Elliott Investment Management taking a stake in the company.
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Medtronic has been looking to reshape itself over the past several years, including through the post-COVID exit of the hospital ventilator business.
Before deciding last year to spin out its diabetes division—which features a portfolio of insulin delivery systems and wearable blood sugar trackers—the company had previously planned to hive off its acute care and patient monitoring segments, though that plan was ultimately reversed.
Medtronic also once pursued a $738 million buyout of South Korean insulin patch pump developer EOFlow, but the deal was scrapped after that company became snarled in a patent and trade secrets dispute with Omnipod maker Insulet.
