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Biotech / Medical : Acuson (ACN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Antonios Petropoulos who wrote (44)	10/31/1997 2:31:00 AM
From: Ron Mayer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 55

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