NuVasive reported an 8.5 percent increase in second quarter revenue, hitting $281.6 million, as well as a net income of $11.5 million.
Here are seven key quotes from the second quarter earnings call, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha.
Gregory Lucier, NuVasive Chairman and CEO, on new technology adoption: "Adoption of our lateral single-position surgery procedure continues to gain momentum and is a catalyst for attracting new surgeons. Recall, this procedure was launched late last year and eliminates the need for the patient to be repositioned during the surgery, leading to improved operating room efficiency. Surgeons are seeing this as a true benefit to both patients and their practice by reducing the time in the OR and the time spent by the patients under anesthesia. The number of surgeons trained on this procedure has grown significantly each quarter, and we have seen a nice uptick in cases by those surgeons."
Rajesh Asarpota, Executive Vice President and CFO of NuVaisve, on growth for LessRay: "As it pertains to LessRay, we made good progress in converting trials to revenue in the second quarter. This piece of capital equipment has now been commercially available for about nine months, and we're starting to see contract negotiations accelerate. As we continue to refine our selling strategy, we have more trials recorded than our previous three quarters and are seeing very good traction with hospital capital allocation committees."
GL on rolling out the Pulse and LessRay technology: "As we launched, what we think is an incredible new technology, totally changing the workflows in the operating room, we want to make sure that thing is 100 percent right. So we're going to take an extra, probably 90 days just to make sure it's a longer alpha period, and a broader alpha test environment, [with] more surgeons before we open it up to all comers. I will tell you, based on our experience of looking at other automation systems in the market, they didn't take that approach, and you can hear the word that these systems are going through a fairly lengthy shakeup period. We don't have that with what we do."
GL on technologies that will be at NASS: "We will be demonstrating the next-generation neuromonitoring system. We will be demonstrating a very advanced next-generation surgical planning system with artificial intelligence embedded in it. We will be demonstrating a rod-bending technology, the next generation of Bendini. We'll be talking about imaging, and there's more to come on that that we haven't fully announced. And we will be demonstrating automation at NASS as well."
GL on surgeon utilization and growth: "We're doing well with our existing surgeons. We've doubled down on retention of those key surgeons, making sure that NuVasive is a powerful partner in their practice. And we want to get even better at that. And then, the other important thing I would say is that we've focused quite successfully on young new surgeons. Fellows, residents, coming out, building their practices, starting minimally invasive practices. We have done quite well with the younger people coming into the industry."
GL on biologics: "Biologics is important to us. It's an important element of the bag. I really, really appreciate the team we have running that now. But long term, five years-plus, our goal is to do things even more radically, to create implants that probably don't need hardly any biologics. And that is the strategy of the company and that's where we go on a long-term basis."
GL on the company's new manufacturing facility: "Internally we are focused on driving our internal manufacturing capabilities in West Carrollton to achieve the desired impact on our income statement, certainly in the second half of the year, but robustly into 2019."