Stockpiling and new healthcare protocols increase PPE demand
“As you think about the back half of the year related to PPE, it’s going to be somewhat fluid, but we don’t expect the demand to roll back to pre-pandemic levels for quite some time. And here are some of the reasons why on that. First and foremost, it’s the healthcare protocols that have been adopted. And if you think about that, they’ve been adopted now for nearly a year, and it’s just in the way business is being done in the hospitals. It is a tremendous focus on infection prevention. So, the utilization of that PPE is going to continue beyond the pandemic, which is how we feel about that,” Owens & Minor CEO Edward Pesicka told analysts in a call transcribed by The Motley Fool. “Next, the opportunity we see in the back half and continuing even beyond that is really around stockpiling. There are a lot of states, whether it’s federal government, states, locals or even some hospitals themselves, setting criteria what they want from a stockpiling or a safety stock. We believe that’s going to continue on for an extended period of time. I think about our customers during the height of the pandemic, there were products that were approved for emergency use authorization. There were products that may not have been traditionally medical-grade or medical brands that they were purchased… longer-term on stockpiling, there’s an expiration of those products. So there’s an opportunity on that standpoint.”