Edwards: Transcatheter Valve Leader Proves You Can Go Home Again

Article preview from In-Vivo- November 01, 2010

After exploring a number of new product markets to drive growth in the decade since its spin-off from Baxter, Edwards has found its sweet spot in its own backyard: heart valves. Through an aggressive early acquisition, the company has emerged as the leader in what looks to be the next major device product market: - transcatheter valves. But in building a transcatheter valve business, Edwards must maintain its surgical customers while also selling to new physician customers: interventionalist cardiologists - a clinical specialty with a history of competing with surgery.

Edwards: Transcatheter Valve Leader Proves You Can Go Home Again

After exploring a number of new product markets to drive growth in the decade since its spin-off from Baxter, Edwards has found its sweet spot in its own backyard: heart valves, where the company is the leader in what may be the next blockbuster device market – transcatheter valves. But this means playing in the competitive interventional cardiology market, an area the company has been able to avoid, until now.

 

• When Edwards spun out of Baxter 10 years ago, the new company found that many of its existing businesses, particularly its surgical heart valve franchise, were in slow-growth sectors.
• To drive growth, the company aggressively explored a number of potential new product markets outside of its core areas without success.
• Edwards appears to have found its growth driver in the hottest segment of the valve market: transcatheter valves, which look to be the next major area of device growth.
• In building a transcatheter valve business, Edwards must maintain its surgical customers while also selling to new physician customers: interventionalist cardiologists – a clinical specialty with a history as competitors to surgery.
• Perhaps the company's biggest challenge is that transcatheter valves places them directly in the competitive interventional cardiology market, an area the company has previously been able to avoid.

 Change is an inevitable part of business and it is often true that companies that resist change generally come to regret it. The key is recognizing impending change and responding to it effectively, whether you seek out a new direction or have it thrust upon you. Edwards Lifesciences Corp. was looking for new product markets outside of the company's slow-growth traditional core areas to drive expansion. Ultimately, however, Edwards realized that its best opportunity for future growth was in extending its historic leadership in surgical tissue heart valves into the emerging area of transcatheter valves. Through an aggressive early acquisition, the company has emerged as the leader in what looks to be the next major device product market.

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