Boston Scientific is acting like its business is OK again after a string of bad news. The company is boasting that sales will rise 11% to 21% in 2007. For investors to believe this, they need to buy into the fact that most of the integration risks of the company’s $21 billion purchase of medical devices company Guidant is behing it.Boston Scientific is also asking Wall St. to believe that sales of its drug-coated stents ,which keep clogged arteries open, will improve. It is forecasting that stent sales could be as high as $2.7 billion next year. But, a number of studies show that stents may actually increase clotting and cause heart attacks. No wonder the company’s stock trades near its 52-week low with shares changing hands at about below $16, down from nearly $28 earlier in the period.Now, the news gets worse. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine says that, in many cases, stent implants may not help patients at all. Treatment with drugs may well be just as effective in many patients, making stents unnecessay. The finding are particular harmful to the future of Boston Scientifc’s devices if their is a health concern associated with stent implants.Boston Scientifc obviously wants investors to think the worst is behind it and that 2007 will be a strong year. But, the evidence keeps contradicting that.Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
More Bad News For Boston Scientific (BSX)
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
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