An inside look into Abbott’s momentum across diagnostics and devices, tariff impacts, and how AI will transform healthcare within five years.
Transcript:
CAROLINE WOODS: Joining me now, Robert Ford, CEO of Abbott. Robert, Thanks so much for being here.
ROBERT FORD: Thanks for having me.
CAROLINE WOODS: So I saw you up on the podium ringing the opening bell. You’re here with the We Give Blood drive. It’s a collaboration you have with the Big Ten conference. Congratulations for being up there. Tell me a bit about the collaboration, why you’re doing it and why you’re focused on college students for donating blood.
ROBERT FORD: Sure, well, this is the second year we’ve been doing this. The reason we’re doing this is that there’s a blood shortage in this country. And, you know, we approached the Big Ten last year and said, hey, we want to create a competition and create the largest blood drive the country has ever seen. And we thought the best way to do that was to create a competitive environment with the Big Ten. So that’s the problem we’re trying to solve. There is a shortage and we haven’t seen blood donations go back post-COVID. So they’ve dropped off and they haven’t gone back. So that’s our goal here. And we’ll announce the winning school of the competition. And we’ll announce the winning school December 5 at the Big Ten Championship game. And the winning school gets a million dollars to invest in community and student health care services. So it just kicked off. I did see that UCLA is currently in the lead, so we’ll have to see if some of the others can catch up. Still early going.
CAROLINE WOODS: What’s the hope? How many people are you hoping to get out there to roll up their sleeves and donate blood?
ROBERT FORD: Well, last year we did 20,000 donations that are directly tied to this initiative. Every donation saves three lives. I cannot think of a better ROI of somebody’s time—30, 40 minutes—you could save three lives. So I know my team doesn’t want me to talk about the actual target, but we definitely want to way exceed that number this year because we’ve learned what works, what doesn’t work. So we’ve got high expectations.
CAROLINE WOODS: OK, so we will certainly track that. In terms of business overall at Abbott, you became very well known during COVID for the COVID tests, of course, but you have so many different business sides—there’s diagnostics, heart devices, nutrition. Tell me where you’re seeing the most momentum right now.
ROBERT FORD: Really across the board, to be quite honest with you. If you think about where the most diversified health companies—we have a nutritional business. Good health starts with nutrition. If you have an issue, you got to get diagnosed. 70% of every medical intervention starts with a diagnostic test. So we have a very broad diagnostic portfolio. And then you got to treat it. You got to address it. We’ve got a pharmaceutical business and we have a medical device business. You mentioned the cardiovascular side. So we looked at those four segments. Some grow really fast, some are very good growers. But we’re really seeing it across the board. Post-COVID, a lot of people want to be more aware of their health and invest in it. Really seeing growth in our nutrition business, people getting more involved in diagnostics, a strong diabetes and bio-wearable business. People buying sensors to understand what’s going on with their metabolism. So we see a lot of growth. First half of the year, we grew about 7.5% on a $45 billion revenue run rate. I think that’s evidence our portfolio is working.
CAROLINE WOODS: When you say there’s momentum in every business, COVID testing too? I can’t remember the last time I took a COVID test.
ROBERT FORD: That is one part of the portfolio, but we never really viewed that as a real long-term business. We did what we believed we had to do for society. That’s kind of now at an endemic stage. Seeing a little uptick post-summer and during winter in the northern hemisphere, and we’ll have products to support that. But it’s not the core of our business right now.
CAROLINE WOODS: What’s the biggest breakthrough Abbott’s working on right now that could impact people’s daily lives?
ROBERT FORD: Well, it’s difficult because it’s a parent’s heart, you got room for everybody, all of your portfolios. But I would say across cardiovascular devices, we have a pacemaker getting a lot of traction—a leadless pacemaker. These pacemakers don’t require creating an incision in your chest; it gets put in through your groin. Great outcomes. Incredible technology to separate medical devices inside your heart, communicating with each other and delivering therapy.
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