Hologic CEO Steve MacMillan salutes CFO Karleen Oberton, offers his outlook and talks M&A

After interviewing Hologic CFO Karleen Oberton for Medical Design & Outsourcing‘s annual Women in Medtech issue, we connected with CEO Steve MacMillan to get his take.

He offered praise for his finance chief’s leadership throughout the pandemic, shared his outlook for the Marlborough, Massachusetts–based company’s future and discussed the M&A strategy for Hologic (NSDQ:HOLX), which announced its latest deal on Friday.

Can you offer your perspective of Karleen’s leadership throughout the pandemic?
MacMillan: While already a strong leader, Karleen became an even stronger partner to me and the entire Hologic leadership team through her quick actions, clear communication, and thoughtful ideas and actions early on and throughout the pandemic. For perspective, to weather the impact of the pandemic, Karleen made moves to preserve cash and retain our financial flexibility. In fact, those early moves enabled Hologic to make a significant impact in addressing the global crisis.

With solid financials, we had the ability to move quickly by developing two molecular COVID tests and increasing our manufacturing capacity more than three-fold to meet demand for our COVID tests and Panther instruments. Also, Karleen and the team efficiently redeployed the strong cash flow we generated from sales of our COVID assays, buying back our own stock and making several acquisitions to accelerate our growth and ensure that we come out of this pandemic a stronger company.

What’s your outlook for the company’s future?
MacMillan: Hologic’s future is bright, but even brighter is the future of women’s health and the role Hologic will play in advancing that. Hologic exists with the purpose of enabling healthier lives, everywhere, every day. And while we will continue to discover and develop some of the world’s most groundbreaking products and services that benefit everyone, we are especially passionate and laser-focused about those that advance women’s health and well-being — this is the future we are looking to.

And as a business, now more than ever, we are firing on all cylinders, from within all our divisions and across all our regions. We have strong R&D pipelines, robust commercial organizations in all three divisions, and our international business has emerged as a consistent growth driver.

On top of this, with our strong cash flow, we have been able to successfully execute on our M&A strategy, acquiring multiple companies that are broadening our capabilities and accelerating our growth. As a result of all this, we recently issued long-term revenue guidance for the first time, laying out expectations for 5-7% top-line growth over the next few years.

What has the team learned from the Cynosure chapter, more specifically whether Hologic has less appetite for a deal of that size in the pandemic or anytime soon after?
MacMillan: We’ve learned a lot. We saw the importance of bolstering our base businesses so that we can consider acquisitions from a position of strength, rather than viewing them as a necessity. We also learned the importance of staying true to our M&A strategy, which is focused on division-led, tuck-in acquisitions that leverage existing strengths rather than establish new lines of business.

Today, all our divisions are actively searching for assets that we truly believe align with our strengths and will better perform under the Hologic umbrella. And as for deal size, we are generally looking for smaller transactions that together fit within our annual cash flow and can be integrated effectively, rather than larger, transformational acquisitions.

Save the date: MacMillan and Oberton will discuss Hologics’s full-year financial results on Nov. 1.