Johnson & Johnson in a bid to expand and gain access to surgical robotic scope is intending to acquire Auris Health Inc.
As announced by the company on Wednesday, the deal to acquire the Auris for $3.4 billion is part of the company’s expansion plans into the healthcare robotics market, a segment expected to be reach near to $12 billion by 2023.
Auris is a privately held company and the thing which attracted the J&J toward it was its surgical robotic scope having a larger use in the detection of lung cancer as well as respiratory procedures, while currently Intuitive Surgical Inc. has been dominating that segment of minimally-invasive robotic surgery.
J&J is not only trying to focus on but also is boosting the sales at its those businesses which are coming up with better performance like cancer treatments, and for the reason it came on laying off some of its divisions like diabetes care.
J&J’s aggressiveness moving towards the robotics field is encouraging and it will fill up the gap of its medical devices business, Wells Fargo analyst Larry Biegelsen said.
For declining sales in its medical devices unit, J&J started efforts to turnaround the same and since then, it has been improving and with current move company is expecting that in 2020, medical device unit will be growing at a pace more than that of the market.
Fredric Moll is a surgical robotics pioneer who founded the Auris and to the Intuitive Surgical, he is also one of the co-founders, and J&J without disclosing his status, has said that he will also be joining to J&J once the acquisition of Auris become completed.
As part of agreement, Auris, subject to the achievement of certain goals, will also be entitled to payments of worth $2.35 billion details of which have not been specified by the J&J.
