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The big news from Fresenius Medical Care this year was that it inked a deal to pay $2 billion for NxStage Medical (No. 88 on this year’s list) and its home hemodialysis technology at $30 per share. The deal is slated to close in 2017 and Fresenius said it expects NxStage to add to net income and earnings per share within three years of the deal’s close.
Waltham, Mass.-based Fresenius Medical Care also rebranded its dialysis division last year, to Fresenius Kidney Care, launching a new website to provide education about dialysis and treatment options for people in various stages of kidney disease.
As the company aims to see revenues climb above $20 billion by 2020, it has spent the last year acquiring several large dialysis providers around the world. In February 2016, it bought Japan’s largest dialysis group with around 6,000 patients. In its biggest takeover yet, Fresenius bought Spain’s biggest private hospital chain Quironsalud for $6.4 billion in September last year.
Fresenius continues to deal with the lawsuits that came after the FDA launched a Class I recall of its GranuFlo product in March 2012. The company’s GranuFlo and Naturalyte products were used to lower the acidity of patients’ blood during dialysis treatments, but lawsuits allege that the compounds’ high concentrations of acetone led to abnormally high levels of bicarbonate in the blood, which caused fatal heart problems and strokes.
In March 2017, Fresenius Medical Care won the first bellweather trial in a series of product liability lawsuits brought over the dialysis drugs, after a Massachusetts jury found that the plaintiff’s estate failed to prove its case.
It was the first case to go trial among a group of plaintiffs who declined to enter a $250 million settlement struck in 2016 in the multi-district litigation proceeding in a Mass.-based federal court.
In an internal annual medical report, Fresenius last year touted a 27% reduction in mortality and a 22% cut in hospitalizations amongst its permanent dialysis patients over 10 years. The company accredited the positive patient outcomes to the company’s expansion into care coordination and continued innovation.