The 10 largest medical device companies in the world

The 10 largest medtech employers of 2018 – and what their employees really think

Consolidation is still the name of the game

The first thing that struck us about this year’s Big 100 list is how much lower the bar was to get in. Last year, the 100th ranked firm, Alphatec, eked its way on the list with revenues of $120.2 million. This year, the bar was set at $40.4 million by EDAP.

The driver, as ever, was consolidation. Although it hardly seems possible, if anything medtech’s fervor for M&A – as documented in our Big 100 issues from the past few years – only increased last year.

In fact, dating back to March 2012 and Fujifilm’s $1 billion buyout of Sonosite, former residents of the Big 100 drew a collective $241.4 billion from acquirers.

Of course, this only reflects a small portion of medtech’s M&A deal volume (albeit a large portion of its M&A spend). As always, there was a plethora of smalland mid-sized transactions; as of this writing in mid-September, our team had reported on nearly 170 acquisitions and divestitures this year alone.

Finally, a note on our methodology. We begin the process early each year as companies’ annual results begin to arrive. Once late summer rolls around and the companies with non-calendar fiscal years have reported in and the list begins to shape up, we attempt to contact each company to confirm the information.

We then compile the listings, ranking the companies first according to annual revenues, then by R&D spend and number of employees.

We use data from the most recently concluded fiscal year for each company, plus information from our own archives, corporate documents and public regulatory filings, and the companies’ websites. For diversified companies with businesses in non-medical device areas, we exclude those results from our tabulations. For foreign currency conversions, we use the prior year’s average exchange rates as set by the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Brad Perriello
Executive Editor