Company news

Quarterly sales rose at Warsaw-based Biomet Inc., lifting investors’ sentiment that the recession-induced slowdown in orthopedic surgeries may be ending. Biomet, one of the largest makers of orthopedic implants, reported sales of $725.1 million in the three months ended Nov. 30, a 4-percent increase over the same quarter a year ago. Excluding foreign currency fluctuations, Biomet’s sales would have risen 3 percent. Still, investors took it as a positive sign for the industry, trading up the shares of other orthopedics companies, including Warsaw-based Zimmer Holdings Inc. and Michigan-based Stryker Corp. “We would view the Biomet large joint reconstruction results with cautious optimism for the broader hip and knee markets,” Derrick Sung, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., told investors Dec. 20, according to Bloomberg News. “Investors are generally pricing in no expectation for an orthopedic market recovery in 2012, so we would view any signs of such as incrementally positive for Stryker and Zimmer, the pure-play orthopedic companies.” Biomet reported that sales of its knee implants rose 2 percent worldwide, while sales of hip implants rose 7 percent, and sales of its sports, extremity and trauma implants rose 13 percent. Biomet’s figures are preliminary, and the company has not yet reported its quarterly profits.

Zimmer Holdings Inc. will start giving its shareholders a dividend in the first quarter of 2012. The Warsaw-based maker of orthopedic implants will dole out 18 cents for each share of its common stock held on March 30. Zimmer also announced that it will buy back $1.5 billion of its own stock between now and the end of 2014. Zimmer is trying to make its stock more attractive after the economy forced many patients to put off elective orthopedic surgeries. Zimmer’s share price has been stuck between $50 and $60 for most of the past two years, even though it neared $70 earlier this year. Zimmer had $553 million in cash and cash equivalents as of Sept. 30.

Eli Lilly and Co. was one of the drug firms stung by an illegal importation ring, based in Houston, which sold copies of erectile dysfunction drugs as the real thing. According to the Houston Chronicle, the ring was led by an illegal immigrant from Pakistan named Irfan Qadir, who was recently sentenced to 13 months in prison and ordered to pay about $140,000 in restitution to pharmaceutical Indianapolis-based Lilly and to New York-based Pfizer. Lilly makes the impotence pill Cialis and Pfizer makes Viagra. In the six months leading up to his May arrest, Qadir received about 8,000 pills of those two drugs, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.