Source: Home of Instruments
The home of the device has learned that in the near future, the medical device giant Medtronic will lay off 35 people in Israel, accounting for about 3% of the Israeli workforce (about 1,200 employees). Most of those laid off in Israel will come from Mazor Robotics, which Medtronic has acquired and develops robotic navigation systems for spine surgery.
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Medtronic's recent layoffs
Medtronic has approximately 95,000 employees worldwide and a market capitalization of $110 billion. Medtronic opened its Israeli office back in 1974 and has spent about $4 billion to acquire Israeli companies to date.
The move is unrelated to current activities in Israel and is part of Medtronic's ongoing global restructuring plan. Most of those laid off in Israel will come from Mazor Robotics, which Medtronic acquired in 2018 for $1.6 billion, Medtronic's largest acquisition in Israel. Mazor develops robotic navigation systems for spine surgery.
On April 30, Medtronic plans to lay off 44 jobs in Carlsbad, California, according to a mass layoff notice filed with California. Medtronic told the California Department of Employment Development that the permanent layoffs will begin at 2101 Faraday Avenue around May 19. The address is a facility for Nellcor Puritan Bennett Corp., the respiratory monitoring and ventilator brand that Medtronic acquired when it acquired Covidien, according to FDA records.
In 2022, Medtronic had said it would divest its medical-surgical portfolio of patient monitoring and respiratory interventions (PMRIs), but no buyers appeared. Earlier this year, Medtronic announced plans to exit the ventilator market.
Subsequently, Bob White, Medtronic's executive vice president and president of the Medical-Surgical portfolio, and Ariel Mactavish, president of Respiratory Intervention, left Medtronic. On February 20, 2024, when Medtronic announced its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2024 ended January 26, it announced that the remainder of the PMRI business would be renamed Acute Care and Monitoring (ACM).
Earlier this year, Medtronic Chairman and CEO Geoff Martha told the JPMorgan Chase & Co. Healthcare Conference that as part of a restructuring effort to improve the company's margins, Medtronic plans to close more than five manufacturing sites and six distribution centers, consolidate the original eight distribution centers into two super distribution centers, and cease business with nearly 200 suppliers.
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Medtronic began restructuring last year
In fact, in 2023, Medtronic has already launched a number of policies to cut costs.
In April 2023, Medtronic said in an email to employees that the company was grappling with higher operating costs and began moving forward with layoffs in its international operations. In the email, CEO Geoff Martha did not disclose the exact number of layoffs, but he said that the layoffs will occur in the coming months, and the specific list of layoffs will depend on the impact of team, country and region and other factors.
The move comes as Medtronic said it had "significantly cut expenses" in the last quarter of its fiscal year, which ended April 28, 2023.
In a reply to foreign media, Medtronic said: "These decisions are never easy, and we treat all affected employees with great care. Medtronic will follow a fair and consistent process and provide comprehensive transition resources to affected employees during this time. ”
In addition, in March 2023, Medtronic introduced a voluntary early retirement incentive to complete a significant cost-cutting plan by the end of the fourth quarter. In a public statement, Medtronic said the Voluntary Early Retirement Plan, or VERP, is a "limited opportunity to retire early and enjoy more benefits" and a way for the company to avoid layoffs. Compared to mass layoffs, it can also reduce job losses, severance pay and litigation costs.
In response to Medtronic's layoff plan, an industry analyst said: "In fact, with the continuous development of the medical industry and the intensification of competition, layoffs have become a common phenomenon in the medical device industry. In the process of enterprise development, the essence of optimizing the company's structure through layoffs, mergers, and splitting production lines is to better develop the company. It should not be subjectively assumed that layoffs or sales of the business are not doing well. Unchanged is not the yardstick for the healthy development of an enterprise. ”
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Mazorspine 导航机器人开创者
Mazor is a global pioneer in spine navigation robots and has gone through three iterations of technology.
In December 2018, Medtronic acquired Mazor Robotics for $1.64 billion, officially stepping into the surgical robot industry. Mazor Robotics is an Israeli medical device company and the world's leading manufacturer of robotic guidance systems for spine surgery. Mazor Robotics was founded in 2001 by Prof. Moshe Shoham and Eli Zehavi from the Robotics Laboratory of the Technion School of Mechanical Engineering at the Technion Institute of Technology.
Moshe Shoham, known as the godfather of surgical robotics, is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Invention of the world's first commercial robotic guidance system for spine surgery, Mazor Robotics Renaissance™. He has founded a number of top robotics companies in the medical field, including Microbot Medical, Tamar Robtics, and ForSight Robotics.
In 2004, the first generation of Mazor spine robot, Spine Assit, obtained CE and FDA certifications, and was the first to use CT imaging for preoperative planning. In 2011, the second-generation product Renaissance was born, which can realize intraoperative 2D and 3D navigation. In 2016, the third generation of the Mazor X was launched.
Since the first generation of Mazor spinal robots developed by Moshe Shoham, the Mazor series products have more than 20 years of clinical application experience, accumulating a large amount of clinical data, laying the foundation for the continuous optimization of navigation technology.
Medtronic MazorX Spine Navigation Robot
The MAZOR X system is equipped with Medtronic's leading intraoperative navigation technology, which enables robotic surgery with full visualization. The integration of the dual systems not only greatly improves the efficiency of the operation, but also truly enables MAZOR to cover the entire spine surgery.
Previously, Medtronic released fiscal year 2023 data showing that the company's full-year revenue in fiscal year 2023 was $31.227 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 1.4%.
After a slight decline in fiscal 2023 results, Medtronic ushered in a year of transformation, not only with a series of major divestitures, but also with plans to reduce employees and reduce costs. Entering the 2024 fiscal year, Medtronic's latest financial data shows that the company achieved revenue of about US$8 billion (about 56.8 billion yuan) in Q2 of fiscal year 2024 (FY24) ended October 27, 2023, a year-on-year increase of 5.3%. So, driven by "restoring profitability as a top priority", what kind of development will Medtronic usher in in 2024? The home of equipment will continue to pay attention.