Stryker Corporation (NYSE:SYK) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Shagun Singh: Great. Thank you so much for taking the question. I was just wondering what you have assumed for margin expansion in 2023 relative to your at least 30 basis points of outlook that you previously shared. And then I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the VCON business in hips and knees. In knees, your major competitor does have a new cementless launch. Do you see that as a price mix benefit for them or something that could drive competitive account conversion, and then on hips, it came out stronger than what we were expecting. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the drivers and if we could see meaningful share gains on the hip side, similar to what we have seen in knees? Thank you for taking the questions.

Glenn Boehnlein: Yeah. Yeah. Great question. I will start out and just touch on the margin expansion. We typically do not guide on op margins. So we are not going to pinpoint an expansion number. I think backing up from EPS and looking at tax and OI&E and where we are with sales that, you will see that the math doesn’t work unless we expand op margin. So I think what you will see is a progressive improvement each quarter in that expansion, especially as the comparable includes inflation from the prior year, so that’s what our plan is.

Kevin Lobo: Yeah. And related to joints, obviously, we are delighted with the year that we have had in both hips and knees. Having global double-digit growth in both hips and knees is terrific. The hip strength clearly driven by the launch of the Insignia Hip Stem, and as a reminder, we are only about a little less than halfway through that launch. So we still have a lot of sets to get out. It will take us all of this year and maybe into a little bit of the first quarter of 2024 to be fully launched with Insignia. So we are still kind of in the gaining momentum mode with Insignia and that’s coupled with the 4.1 Mako hip software. So we can — we expect hips to continue to be very strong. As it relates to knees, clearly, that’s been an outperformer for us for the past six years, seven years since we launched the Mako Total Knee application.

And with cementless, where we continue to gain, I am not at all worried about competitive entrants on cementless. People aren’t going to move away from our cementless for a competitive product when we have tremendous proven, Jason mentioned, 1 million procedures already done and competitors just starting to launch theirs. They are going to be awfully very cautious before they move to another product on something like that and that synergy with cementless and Mako is really significant. Last thing I’d say is, we are launching new software, just like we did with hip with the 4.1, we call it, TKA 2.0 Mako software. We have just — we are in the middle of a limited launch. It’s going exceptionally well. We expect the full launch sometime by around Q3 of that new software upgrade, which creates better user experience, better for training residents and teaching hospitals, so very, very good feedback on that.

So we do expect to continue to outperform in both knees and hips again in 2023.

Shagun Singh: Thank you for the color.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Ryan Zimmerman with BTIG. You may proceed.

Ryan Zimmerman: Hey. Thanks for taking the questions. Not to take away, this is a really good quarter, Kevin, but I do want to ask about two segments that are maybe a little softer than expectations. Neurovascular and Spine, both come on the back of what I think what we would consider easier comps and you can probably challenge me on that. But what are you contemplating in terms of your guidance for growth in those areas for 2023, and just commentary on both the Neurovascular and the Spine segment this quarter and kind of what impacted results?

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