Hi Antonios.
You wrote:
>
>I first heard about Acuson today
> ...
>I am interested in investing in Acuson, any info and feedback [...]
Ok. I'll start with what I consider useful background information.
If anyone else is still on this thread after the crash, please
jump in to correct or add anything.
Acuson (http://www.acuson.com/) is one of the leading companies in
medical ultrasound imaging. Some of their significant competitors
include ATL, HP, Toshiba, GE. I like comparing them against ATL,
since both companies focus on high-end ultrasound systems and both are
similar in size (I think both hava a market cap of ~500-650M, revenue
of about 400Mil in last year, etc). Many of the other competitors
do so much business in other areas that it's hard to compare them.
Acuson recently came out with a couple of new systems called Sequoia
and Aspen. You can read more about them on their web site. The
doctors I spoke with consider them technologically very impressive,
having excellent image quality, but rather expensive compared to
other systems. The hope, of course is that superior image quality
gives doctors better diagnostic information.
One thing to watch out for is that the stock just crashed badly
(which probably explains why noone's still here ;-)).
The biggest day of the crash happened somewhere around the time
that Acuson announced orders have been "negatively impacted" by
the state of international markets; and DMG downgraded the company.
So far, we're trying to figure out how bad this news really is;
and how much it will affect the company.
[This paragraph is just my wild speculation.] On one hand, this looks
bad because international sales were a quite significant piece of
their business (about a third). On the other if I remember right from
a few years ago, international sales focused on lower priced systems
and if Acuson is now focusing on the more expensive Sequoia and Aspen
systems, I would have expected them to have a shift to a larger
percentage of domestic sales anyway. It'll be interesting to see the
next few quarter's reports to see how international sales vs domestic
sales do.
Longer term, I think what really matters is how people who actually
use the system - sonographers, radiologists, and cardiologists
mostly, think of the Sequoia and Aspen products compared with the
competitors systems. If you know how to ask any, I think the people
here would be quite interested in hearing the opinions.
Good luck, and of course it's best do your own research first.
Anyone have anything to add?
Ron |
