October, 2018 SMM-186
Medtech’s Mixed-up Monsters
If nature abhors a vacuum, traditional theory has it that investors hate conglomerates; markets tend to value aggregates of different businesses at less than the sum of their parts. How odd, therefore, that most larger life sciences firms – Medtronic, J&J, Becton Dickinson, Stryker and the like – are effectively run as a group of diverse businesses operating in an essentially autonomous way under a larger corporate umbrella.