AAOS in Vegas

We recently attended the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS) meeting in Las Vegas. As any original equipment manufacturer (OEM) supplier with customers in the orthopedic space knows, AAOS is the world’s largest orthopedic international trade show. While somewhat limited in attendance since 2019 (due to the pandemic), this year’s event was back in full force with a strong contingency of international companies, orthopedic industry executives, and orthopedic surgeons from around the world.

In addition to the educational sessions and poster sessions, one of the highlights of this annual event is the exhibit floor. Beyond being a place to showcase the latest products from industry companies, it’s truly an opportunity for key networking meetings that impact all of us. Some of the most interesting topics from this year’s AAOS:

• M&A: The recent announcement about combining Nuvasive and Globus created some industry buzz, with a wide range of opinions from “it’s impactful” to “good luck to them both.” Overall, there seems to be some skepticism that these two organizations can make this merger productive to their stakeholders and customers. We expect more M&A to come in 2023.

• Strategic partnerships: The recent announcement by J&J DPS regarding their commitment to expand their relationship with a Swedish surgical planning company (Ortoma AB) (to enable US (and global) surgeons to access their artificial intelligence (AI) enabled surgical planning platform created some industry attention regarding AI surgical planning in the orthopedics space. It’s also another example of the growing number of strategic partnerships in the enabling technologies space. We expect more enabling technology strategic partnerships to be announced this year.

• Robotics: Stryker continued to demonstrate their market leadership in orthopedic robotics by announcing their Mako 2.0 platform. It’s interesting to observe that most major companies had some type of robotics technology on the exhibit floor or in the works – a major change in the past five years. Due to Stryker’s pressure, we expect more robotic announcements across this industry segment in 2023.

• And a bank failure: Unbelievable to state even now, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed during AAOS. As SVB has been one of the industry’s largest financial supporters of early-stage life science companies (including orthopedics), this news created quite a stir as some company CEOs actually were losing sleep for a few days wondering if they still had access to their company cash and whether they could stay afloat. Fortunately, the FDIC did what it was intended to do and prevented a possible customer disaster and even more importantly – a greater U.S. banking financial crisis. Anyone remember 2008? None of us want that financial history repeated!

In summary, AAOS (post-pandemic) has re-established itself as one of the medical industry’s preeminent events that impacts us all. We already look forward to seeing you there next year!

About the authors: CCEO Florence Joffroy-Black is a long-time MedTech M&A and marketing expert. She can be reached at florencejblack@medworldadvisors.com. Managing Director Dave Sheppard is a former medical OEM Fortune 500 executive and an experienced MedTech M&A professional. He can be reached at davesheppard@medworldadvisors.com. “Value = Strategic Fit + Timing® is a registered trademark of MedWorld Advisors.

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