After parting ways with its diabetes franchise nearly three years ago, BD is slimming down even further with a plan to divest its diagnostic and biosciences businesses as the company nears the finish line in its five-year “BD 2025” strategy.
The “New BD,” as the company describes it, will continue on as a pure-play medtech company with its enterprises in medical essentials—such as its ubiquitous hardware for collecting blood samples and delivering IV medications, which number in the tens of billions of units per year—as well as its interventional devices and connected care programs, with the latter including the recent acquisitions from Edwards Lifesciences.
The company will also retain its pharmaceutical systems unit, to be renamed biopharma systems, with its focus on developing delivery devices for the makers of drugs and biologics—including GLP-1s and patient-operated injectors, which BD has estimated will grow into a billion-dollar business by 2030.
Meanwhile, the outgoing combination of diagnostic solutions and biosciences will span a catalog that brought in about $3.4 billion in 2024 sales. It will include tests for infectious disease and cervical cancer screening as well as flow cytometry instruments and single-cell multiomics tools used in research.
“We believe the separation will position New BD as a differentiated MedTech leader and enable optimized investment to accelerate our innovation pipeline and ongoing margin enhancement through BD Excellence to further fund growth,” President and CEO Tom Polen said in a statement.
“We believe Biosciences and Diagnostic Solutions is expected to deliver substantial value as a pure-play leader in life sciences and will be well-positioned to execute on its unique and compelling solutions and growth opportunities,” Polen added.
The company said the separation decision has been in the works since early 2024 and will support the future New BD in its plans to pursue more tuck-in acquisitions, while focusing primarily on healthcare providers and patient end markets. All together, its divisions brought in about $17.8 billion in 2024.
The BD 2025 plan, which kicked off in 2020, set goals of long-term, compounded annual revenue growth of 5.5% or more while focusing on high-growth and high-margin markets.
BD's board of directors has approved the transaction and said it is open to pursuing a spinoff or an outright sale, among other options. The company said it expects to announce more specifics by the close of its 2025 fiscal calendar, ending Sept. 30, with the move being completed by the end of the year to follow.
BD also reported its first-quarter earnings results for fiscal 2025, with companywide revenues of $5.17 billion equating to a 9.8% reported gain, or 3.9% organic when accounting for currency changes and the impact of acquisitions and divestitures during their first 12 months.