Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) 41st Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference January 10, 2023 12:00 PM ET
Company Participants
Robert Ford – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Conference Call Participants
Robbie Marcus – J.P. Morgan
Robbie Marcus
Good morning, everyone. Welcome. I’m Robbie Marcus, medtech analyst at J.P. Morgan. Really happy to introduce our next session with Abbott Labs and the CEO Robert Ford. Robert, thanks for joining.
Robert Ford
Thanks for having us.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q – Robbie Marcus
So I want to start out. 2022 was an interesting year for everyone. Turn the calendar page, we’re now in 2023. That’d be good to start off with how you see the world, the outlook for Abbott this year?
Robert Ford
Sure. I mean, I think you change from one month to the other, one day to the other, it doesn’t all go away. I’d say, I’m not going to give any kind of specific guidance for Abbott today. We’ll do that in a couple of weeks. But I can give a general sense of that macro piece, which we’ve been talking so much about in 2022 and the trajectories of Abbott and the businesses. I’d say, obviously, tough environment over the last two years, especially the last 12 months, whether it’s such for U.S. multinational companies, whether it’s FX and the movements we saw there, especially for certain currencies we haven’t seen that movement in decades. Supply chain, inflation, labor shortages. I mean, we all know those.
I think what I can say about those that kind of had an impact for us, they still remain headwinds, but if you look at where we are today versus the trajectories on these topics, where we were in Q3, for example, for me and our business in terms of what we’re seeing is definitely an improvement in terms of trends and what we’re seeing with those factors. So I am seeing positive momentum, still headwinds for us without a doubt. But if I look at where we were in Q3 and where we are now, I think the momentum on those is starting to kind of move on the positive side. And we’ll have to see.
I think from an Abbott perspective as we go into 2023, there’s a lot of opportunities for growth. And I see a lot of growth for Abbott going forward. If you look at our device portfolio, for example, we made a lot of investments during the COVID period, taking advantage of our position with COVID testing, and made investments in a lot of great new technologies that are either just about to launch in the early stages of launching or launching into 2023. So I think that provides us great growth momentum.
I look at our branded generic pharmaceutical business focused in emerging markets, that has sustainably driven top line growth in the double digits, low double digits, high single digits. And I expect that kind of growth to continue just because of the attractiveness of those markets. In our diagnostics portfolio, yes, and I’m sure we’ll get into this somehow during the day here. But, yes, COVID testing will come down. There’s no doubt of that, but there will still be COVID testing, there’ll be still be pockets of demand, and we’re seeing that now. So there’s still a need for COVID testing. What I do like about our non-COVID diagnostic business is, we’ve been able to make the investments and they come out of COVID stronger than actually where they were pre-COVID, whether it’s investments we’ve done in R&D, the capital that we’ve invested into those business. So that’s been a great strategy for us over COVID.
And then on the nutrition side, obviously, we’re working through all the supply disruption that we had in last year on the infant formula side. The team has done an incredible progress, working incredibly hard. The number one focus that we had during that process was really to make sure that we could get the product back on shelves. We’re starting to see product getting back on shelves. Inventory levels are starting to build, they’re not where they need to be. But I can see that normalizing itself here as we go into 2023.
But also on the adult side of our nutrition business, a lot of growth opportunity in the adult side. We saw a lot of acceleration of new consumers coming into the category over COVID and that was a category that Abbott has on average 60% to 70% market share around the world. So that’s a great opportunity also for us in terms of growth acceleration. So overall, you put all that together, Abbott going into 2023 has got great momentum across all of its business units. And we used to really kind of look at that kind of high single digit growth pre-COVID. I kind of see that same high single digit growth as we go into 2023. So very positive there.
On the P&L side, there’s obviously challenges, as I said, in the beginning here regarding input costs with inflation, some supply chain disruption that occurred in 2022. And there’s been some friction on the gross margin line, but the team’s done a really good job at attacking that, those cost increases, whether it’s in our operations or in areas that we could pass on some of that increase in costs on our pricing. We’ve been able to do that too.
I think I would say on the investment side, I mean, that’s the key part of our strategy during COVID, which is, it’s a lot of leverage that we’ll see in the P&L into 2023 where we’ll be able to have this strong growth rate going into 2023 with all the different elements that I just described. But because we did a lot of investment into those business during COVID, we’ll be able to see — we don’t have to put the same amount of investment into the R&D and SG&A to be able to deliver that top line growth, because we somewhat forward invested during COVID. So we’ll see a lot of leverage on the P&L on those investment areas.
And then on top of that, we’ve got a very strong balance sheet that is going to provide us a lot of strategic flexibility as we go into 2023. So I look at — yes, 2022 was a difficult year. Some of those factors are still headwinds, but I don’t see them right now as intense as they were maybe when we’re talking about them in Q3. And we’ve got a lot of growth opportunities across these four business units at Abbott. So I’m looking optimistic to 2023.
Robbie Marcus
Great. Abbott is pretty unique and that it touches a lot of different aspects of the healthcare system. So maybe you could talk to what you’re seeing in the healthcare environment today, both in the U.S. and around the world? And probably good to loop in COVID testing, you talked about how it’s probably going to come down. How do you see the future of COVID testing for Abbott and in general?
Robert Ford
Well, I think we played a really important role during the pandemic with what we did. The partnerships we had with regulators, with researchers and with governments across the world. I think testing played a key role. And I’m very proud of what the team has put together and intensity and the intentionality of how we put that COVID portfolio together. Listen, it’s going to transition from what I would call pandemic testing to more of an endemic normal respiratory, seasonal kind of testing portfolio, right? And one of the challenges that we had in that process is, okay, we know that this is going to come down. The question is, how fast and what’s the rate?
And if you look at what many expected to happen last year, it didn’t happen, right? Lot of projections about how testing was going to really kind of go down in 2022. We actually probably had a same size year’s 2022 as we did in 2021. So it’s really about, okay, how do we factor in that transition? And the reality is, it’s still going to be important. It was important pre vaccines. It’s going to be important post vaccines. And I think one of the real drivers there that when we put the strategies together is, we knew that it would require scale. We knew that it would require a different technology of just relying only on labs and we made a big bet on the rapid test side, not only here in the U.S. but internationally and that’s worked out very well. So I think the view that the rapid test was the platform has kind of really worked out. And I think we’ll still see some testing, either because of variants that will escape some of the immunities that people have or quite frankly, increasing in respiratory testing around — really around whether it’s flu, RSV, certain CVS now talking about that. When those increases it actually brings long all testing. I want to make sure that I want to know what it is, right? If it’s not COVID, what is it? And I also want to make sure that it is — that it is not COVID, right?
So I think we’ll still see the human behavior of just wanting to know before I go anywhere, I think that that’s probably where it starts to transition to. To know before you’re going to go somewhere, just to make sure that there’s not an infection there. And then you’ll have the seasonality of that business, Q1, Q4 also. So I think that’s where we’re heading. Obviously, it’s had an impact on healthcare systems. But I think a lot of the healthcare systems have ultimately figured out how to manage it and deal with it or obviously different situation versus where we were in 2020. So I think the leadership position that we’ve built in testing and not just COVID testing as I say, I think we need to start thinking about more respiratory. So flu, RSV, Strep, COVID, we’ve got a full portfolio of products. So we test for all of those. We have lab based systems, we have urgent care systems, we have at home testing platforms too. So whatever this market will look like and whatever this market it will be, I’m pretty confident that given the portfolio of products that we have, the position that we have, the scale that we’ve built, the economic value that we do bring that Abbott will be a leader in whatever market is going to be. I mean, I think it’s very difficult to kind of pinpoint exactly what it’s going to look like. But I still — now I think we can start to model what’s that — what that transition from pandemic testing to endemic testing is going to look like.
So we will be a leader in this segment. And ultimately, as we think about risk mitigation, it provides us a little bit of that hedge. And I’ve talked about this also where, okay, if COVID testing and if for some reason COVID gets worse, yes, it could have an impact on those healthcare systems, which then have an impact on procedures, but on the flip side then you’ve got — we’ve got a COVID testing portfolio that we’ll be able to offset that and vice versa. If we see very less COVID, I think then we’ll start to see even more an acceleration on the non-COVID part of Abbott too. So I think we’re well positioned there and I think that our portfolio really is market leading. So we feel good about it.
Robbie Marcus
Good for Abbott, bad for the Marcus family, but we’ve been frequent buying [indiscernible] this winter.
Robert Ford
Thank you.
Robbie Marcus
So [indiscernible] up a couple of dollars in sales there.
Robert Ford
Well, we were joking. We didn’t know what a rapid COVID test was in 2020 when we are here. So — and just piggybacking off that, I mean, I think that’s a really important part is that, we didn’t — this notion that we’ve now as consumers learn to understand that we’ve got more accessibility to rapid testing, testing you could do at home. I think that opens up a whole new testing channel. I think that’s one of the benefits that we’ve taken advantage of during the COVID is, how do we then continue this transition of being able to open up this new testing channel, pharmacies, urgent care clinics, airports. I mean, there’s just a great opportunity for us and we’ve seeded that market during COVID. So now it’s about how do you bring more assays and more tests into that channel that you’ve created.
Robbie Marcus
Maybe switching gears a bit, one of your largest and fastest growing businesses at Abbott is Libre. Diabetes is still an underpenetrated market around the world, fast growing and the Libre CGM platform is the leading device within this market. So maybe you could talk about Libre today, the future of Libre? And would also love to hear about Lingo, your new product that’s using the same form factor to look at different analytes antibody?
Robert Ford
Well, I think the Libre story is still very early. I mean, there’s been — we’ve written a lot of chapters, but I think the book is still very long. I think fundamentally, we have to go back to how we thought about this. We had to really change our mindset to think about the opportunity that we had with this platform and to think a little bit differently about how we traditionally would go after, medtech companies would go after and when you got 400 million people around the world living with diabetes, 90% of them outside the United States, over 100 million of them doing testing. You’re not talking about the population sizes that we usually talk about in medtech, a couple of hundred thousand single digit million patients. So we really had to think differently about it. And our strategy here was really simple. We wanted to build a consumer friendly, intuitive, one piece disposable sensor, invest a lot in manufacturing technology and scale that we could then have a cost profile that would allow us price for affordability and accessibility in a very different way than what we would traditionally go after the market.
And that’s proven to be, as he said, very successful. I think that if you look at the growth of the CGM market before Abbott, you could probably extrapolate it and say, hey, this is a very good growing segment in healthcare. But if you look at Abbott’s entrance into the market back in 2017 and look at what that’s done to the category, it significantly increased the category. And I think the team has — the Abbott team has done a really good job at executing that and you could see it in our numbers. I always — obviously, there are things that we’re going to do better. My team knows, they never get the full high five, it’s always a high four, because there’s always something that we can always do better and we kind of continue to push ourselves because we need to, but 4.5 million users roughly at an annual recurring revenue of just under $1,000 a year and you can do the math on that in terms of where we’re at. We’ve made significant — our bottom line grows just as faster than our top line. And that’s putting in the CapEx investment, putting in the R&D investment, putting the SG&A investment. So it’s doing very well. And like I said, it’s still — when you think about that 100 million population segment, we’re here talking about 4 million to 5 million and being the leader there. I think that there’s a lot to do.
We’ve built a strong portfolio. We’ve just launched Libre 3 into the U.S. during Q3. It’s our third generation one piece disposable sensor. Our competitor is on their first generation. And I think that we’ve got a lot of opportunity here for growth. And I’ve said this a couple of times, I think Libre will be a $10 billion product in the next five years. And that, obviously, implies roughly a 15% annual growth rate and there’s really kind of three areas that I see that drive that growth rate. First of all, is really continuing to have the leadership position that we have in the patient segment that has historically benefited the most from CGMs and that is the heavy insulin user, whether it’s MDIs or pump patients. We are the leader definitely when it comes to the MDI population. So those injecting insulin without the use of a pump.
And I’ve talked about how we are going to be working to be able to bring a product, to be able to look at that pump segment, albeit a smaller segment, but nonetheless an extremely important segment. So we’ve already announced at the end of last year, our first pump integration in Europe. We’ve done all of our clinical work to support our filing with the FDA on our Libre 2 system. And we’ll be able to then — once we work through that approval process, we’ll then be able to work with the different pump companies and bring that technology. But I think that strategy really just kind of puts us in a catch up mode. One of the things that we’ve learned how to do and do very well is, how can you actually put more analytes on a single sensor. And we announced this at the ADA last year. We’re working on a dual sensor, a glucose plus ketone sensor. And as I talk to a lot of the key opinion leaders in terms of the go to sensor for a pump connected system is if you can be able to bring that ketone measurement that continuous ketone measurement into the algorithm it provides additional safety features because when, let’s say, you’ve got an interruption in insulin delivery, the number — the first [indiscernible] to pop is ketone, so — and up to about 30 minutes before. So I think that’s going to be a great opportunity for us to be able to look at that heavy insulin user segment.
The next segment in the strategy then is really the Type 2 and the basal segment. And that’s the majority of people with diabetes and I would say this is a great opportunity to be able to not drive growth, but also to be able to bring outcomes. We’ve got — if you do a lit search on all the clinical trials that have been done with Type 2 basal patients, you’ll see Libre predominantly in those studies and we’re able to show reductions in A1C, reductions in time, in hyperglycemia and great opportunity here. There’s probably a couple key milestones next year. I think the first one is, CMS has been public about its common period to be able include basal patients for Medicare reimbursement. So I think that’ll be more of a second half event in 2023. There’s about 1.5 million people in the U.S. Type 2 basal in — on Medicare, and then there’s another 3 million patients on the commercial side.
So if you think about that in the U.S. it’s a huge opportunity, I would say, for the category to be able to show the benefits and expand its use to different patient segment. And the clinical data that we’ve been working on not only in the U. S. but also internationally has kind of shown those outcomes. And I think that’s going to be the case, not just in the U.S. but I think it’s also going to be the case internationally. Where you’ll see more and more governments start to see the success of this technology, the real outcomes and benefits that they’re delivering to that patient population and start to expand that to the Type 2 population.
And then the third part, the third leg of that stool of growth of getting to $10 billion by 2028 is really looking at Libre as more than just diabetes, but as a platform. And knowing that, okay, we’ve built a successful, we’ve shown that we can make it work with diabetes, can you use that platform, the investment that we’ve made in R&D and in the capital side on the manufacturing network to be able to broaden the use of the technology outside of diabetes. And I cannot tell you the amount of people that have either sent me letters that I bumped into that don’t have diabetes or fairly healthy individuals. And I have just given glowing feedback about the impact of being able to see their glucose levels on a regular basis.
So we announced this last year at CES that we’re going to launch a whole new platform called Lingo. It’s going to look at expanding beyond diabetes, not just with glucose, but with ketones, with lactate sensors and other types of measurements. We have a whole separate team that’s dedicated and exclusively focused on only driving that opportunity. And I think that’s going to be a great opportunity and it falls right into this trend of consumers wanting to empower themselves with their health information so that they can actually modify their behaviors and they can use that data to be able to either motivate them or provide insights for that behavior modification. So I think this is a great opportunity. We’re going to launch the first version of Lingo into Europe. I’d say this year, let’s call it like that, probably in the first half. And we’re really excited about what we’re going to do with that. It’s a whole different go to market strategy. I think that’s another part of the innovation that we’re going to bring in terms of how we approach a healthy individual, a healthy consumer with this kind of technology.
So I think we’re very early in this kind of biosensor, bio-wearable book. Libre has been an incredible growth driver and quite frankly, it has been an eye opener for us in terms of what we can actually do when we address costs through our manufacturing technology, through designing costs into the product and the opportunities that we have to be able to really broaden access to healthcare. So I think this is a great opportunity for us and I’m very excited about executing on those three strategies.
Robbie Marcus
If we look out down the road, Abbott is always investing today for tomorrow, what do you think are the most exciting pipeline products you have that investors should be on the lookout for?
Robert Ford
Yes, my team will always kind of look at this kind of question if I’m going to have favorites, I love them all. I think we’ve got great opportunities here. But I would say just as a step back, I mean, I’ve been coming to this confidence for about eight years now, including the two hiatus ones, the two virtual ones, right? But just walking around, going to meetings, this one here, just how exciting health care has becoming. And it’s just incredible. And I’m sure a lot of companies are coming up here and talking about their pipeline and talking about how great they are and they should because it is just a really exciting time in healthcare with the technologies that are developing and our opportunity to target diseases in a completely different way. So I think this is very, very exciting.
Obviously for Abbott, it’s no different. So I will talk about our children. I think what’s a little bit unique about our pipeline, our portfolio — our pipeline is that, it mirrors a lot of our — of the portfolio of Abbott, right? We’re diversified. We have different segments, different patient segments, different geographies, different R&D cycles, et cetera. And I think that derisks a little bit when you think about your pipeline going forward, it derisks a little bit. We have a mix of, what I would call, iterative pipeline and then some more transformational pipelines. And I think it’s important to have both of those because it provides that sustainability in your growth and reduces a little bit of that risk.
If you look at our established pharmaceuticals on our nutrition business, I’d put those more in that iterative side where they’re less capital intensive in terms of bringing these new technologies — these new products to market. The key here — there’s less technical risk. The key here is just great consumer insights and speed. And I think the teams here have done a really good job. I’ll high four to them, but a good example of that, I’d say, when you think about, okay, does that look — what does that look like? Pedialyte is a great example of that where for many years it was a rehydration solution for pediatric patients that are in an infection. The teams expanded that use to more on the adult side and came up with interesting products like Pedialyte immune support, Pedialyte zero sugar, Pedialyte Sport, and that has accelerated the growth in that product. So, iterative R&D work is just as important when you look at some of the portfolio that we have in the product.
In diagnostics, as I said in the beginning, we made a lot of investments during COVID. The number one investment that we can make. I mean, we placed a lot of instruments out into the market. The number one R&D investment we can make, the best return is to be able to increase the menu and the assays that will go on to those instruments. So I’m excited about some of the assays that we have been developing to be able to broaden our pipeline, our assay menu there. I think one of them that I’m very excited about is our traumatic brain injury assay. It looks the first blood biomarker that will be able to determine whether somebody’s had a concussion and probably needs to go get it checked on a CT perspective. There’s some work that we still need to do to be able to move that from the lab into a handheld prick your finger kind of blood test. But you can imagine the opportunity that we have there and the impact that that can have to society if you could be able to find out at any high school, college, sporting event, etcetera, whether somebody’s had concussion and you can — or you can at least rule out the concussion in 15 minutes.
On devices across all the portfolio, I mean, we’ve got exciting innovations across all of them. I’d say probably more notably to your question. I’d say [indiscernible] on the LAA side. I mean, this is a fast growing market. We launched our product into the U.S. — our generation one product into the U.S. last year, we’re seeing great — good momentum with this product. We’re already investing in our generation two version of this. We’ve made investments on generating more clinical trials, clinical evidence, so we’re currently enrolling in a trial to be able to compare the device versus [Novax] (ph) and that will obviously open up the market also and the use of the product.
So I’m excited about that investment and that product Aveir, which is our leadless pacemaker. This is an incredible technology. It only represents about 15% of the low [indiscernible], the peso market. But it’s off — we launched it in the second half of last year and seeing great results from it. Obviously, the bigger market, the dual chamber market is, obviously, where the opportunity is for us. And we’ve actually enrolled — completed our enrollment in a trial for a dual chamber leadless pacemaker. And this will be the first device where you have two implantable devices communicating to each other at the same time as they’re implanted in your body. And the results that we’ve seen are fantastic. So I think this has an opportunity to really reset our growth trajectory in the CRM space.
TriClip, I’ve talked a lot about that. And bring an innovation to the tricuspid valve. There’s not a lot of options to treat tricuspid regurgitation. And we’ve launched the TriClip in Europe, had seen great success. We made some modifications to the delivery catheter from the micro product, but seeing great success in Europe. We’ve completed our ID trial for FDA approval. We’ll be presenting the results of that in a couple of months. So I’m very excited about that opportunity in terms of what it can bring in terms of care for patients.
If you think about CardioMEMS, I’d say that’s probably one of those I’m very excited, because I don’t think we’re able to really take advantage of the potential that this product has during COVID and as COVID starts to subside, I think there’s a great opportunity here. We completed our trial. We’ve got a label expansion. And so, I think there’s great opportunity here. It’s not Libre — it’s not entirely Libre for the heart, but there’s the opportunity is significant to be able to bring that kind of monitoring of the pulmonary artery pressures and provide early warnings for heart failure. So I think that’s another great opportunity I’m excited about.
And then Navitor on the TAVI side. This will be our second generation product. We’ve launched it in Europe. It’s doing incredibly well. And we submitted it to the FDA last year. We’ll work through the process, but I think it really is — given the data that we’ve seen, the kind of impact that it’s had in the European systems, I truly believe that we have a real shot here accredible third player into this still very large market. So — and then, I mean, we can talk about a bunch of other things like on the EP side, we’re going to be launching our TactiFlex ablation catheter together with our new mapping system that we launch last year. We’ve been making investments on PFA, on an internal program. On the vascular side, we’ll be having readouts on imaging and using OCT imaging for coronary procedures. We’ll be seeing some data come out towards the end of the year on that in terms of the impact that that can have on outcomes. A lot of focus on the endovascular side also. So we got into mechanical thrombectomy last year. We’re looking — we’re currently in a trial where we’re taking our bio absorbable scaffold and actually looking at its application on below the knee. So we have trial enrolling there.
So really looking at our endovascular portfolio as an opportunity to bring innovation and bring more alternatives for patient care there. So, a neuro — just launching new systems, new indications. So it’s a pretty rich pipeline. It’s a pretty rich portfolio. And I can talk about maybe some of the other technologies that are probably three, four, five years out, but there’s also R&D work that’s being done across all of our business just to think, okay, what’s next after three, four years. So I think it’s a very balanced pipeline, again, between iterative and more transformational. And that’s one of our key focus is how can we use our organic pipelines and the proximity we have with our customers to drive the top line.
Robbie Marcus
So I guess one of the benefits of COVID is that, you now have a very large cash pile on the balance sheet from selling COVID tests and love to hear your thoughts on how Abbott can use the capital to maximize shareholder value and its priorities?
Robert Ford
So we’ve always taken a balanced approach. So we think about investing in both the Abbott business to deliver long term kind of growth prospects and at the same time balancing that with driving value to shareholders. So if you look at between 2020 and the first nine months of 2022, we’ve delivered about $14 billion back to the shareholder in the form of dividends and buybacks. And that’s — critical to us is our commitment to a strong and growing dividend. We’ve increased it 40% versus 2020, just announced 9% increase in 2023. And that’s important for us.
Buybacks, we’ve historically really just focused on offsetting dilution, I think with the St. Jude and the [indiscernible] acquisition. We didn’t do a lot of that. So I’d say over the last couple of years, we’ve done a little bit of catch up there. First nine months of this year of 2022 we did about $3 billion of buybacks and we got the flexibility do more if it makes sense for our shareholders. But you balance all of that within, okay, we can also still invest in our business, right? And we’re investing capital to be able to build manufacturing capacity on all these great opportunities that I’ve talked about, whether it’s Libre, whether it’s cardiovascular, whether it’s neuromodulation. We just announced at the end of the year a $0.5 billion investment in a new infant formula facility here in the United States. So we can balance this. We can deliver to the shareholder and we can still invest in the long term by fortifying our positions in our business.
And then that leaves us plenty of firepower for M&A. And I think we are in that position where we’ve got a lot of strategic flexibility. I’ve talked about this quite a bit in terms of we’ll — two kind of key factors in terms of making those decisions. Obviously, strategic fit talked about we don’t want to do anything that’s going to dilute our growth rate, our top line. And so anything that’s kind of fits strategically into these areas probably a little bit more focused on devices and diagnostics. That’s where we see a lot of opportunity, a lot of group targets to be able to add and then got to make sense financially for our shareholders. And that’s another key gate here to be able to make it happen. Like I said, there’s a lot of great targets out there that maybe in ’21 and ’22 didn’t at least to the first half of ’22 didn’t make a lot of sense financially, but a lot of those targets now start to make a little bit of sense. So I think we’ll always have this balanced approach in terms of how we deploy our capital. And if we see targets that make sense for us strategically, financially, we are in that position where we’ve got plenty of firepower in our balance sheet to be able to do that.
But I don’t think that when we talk about our long term growth plan, I don’t feel that we need to do M&A to be able to get there. I think we’ve got a whole lot of organic opportunity. So then that just puts us an opportunity to be a little bit more opportunistic in terms of seeing these opportunities that come our way.
Robbie Marcus
So with the last few minutes, I’ll leave you with a question. People are concerned about the economic environment around the world. Abbott has a really unique set of businesses that a lot of other companies don’t have replicated in one. So how do you think your company would weather a difficult economic environment given the mix of businesses?
Robert Ford
Yes. Well, I mean, I think healthcare in general has been a little bit more resilient to those recessionary periods. I think that we’ve always talked about — when we talk about the diversity of the Abbott portfolio, we’ve always talked about it in terms of being able to have a lot of shots on goal for growth and then protect on the downside. Right? We really didn’t have a moment of downside until COVID happened to be able to kind of prove that out. And I think that the portfolio moved from a nice bullet point or talking point to really showing in essence what it can do during a shock to the system. Obviously, we had our institutional based businesses, our diagnostics our device portfolios, those got more impacted. But on the flip side, our consumer facing business got actually accelerated. And that was able to kind of offset, of course, that wouldn’t have been enough and COVID was a great opportunity. COVID test was way to kind of offset that. But I think in general, it’s proven to be very resilient because of that diversity. And it’s not just diversity of technologies or business, it’s diversity of geography, it’s diversity of we’re not overly reliant on a single product, on a single platform. We have a diversity in our payer mix where we still have a nice portion of our business that is consumer paid. So that diversity I think is what really has set us apart in terms of being able to kind of navigate those more tougher times.
And yes, there’s a lot of forecasting of what could happen, I think that we’re well positioned because of that diversity and everything that I’ve outlined here in terms of the pipeline and the products that we have.
Robbie Marcus
Well, great. We’re out of time. Thanks, Robert. Appreciate the time.
Robert Ford
Thank you.
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