By Steve Holloway, Signify Research

With the new year dawning, the competitive landscape for global medical technology is mired in uncertainty. Of the “big four” vendors (GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthineers, Philips and Toshiba Medical Systems) three are undergoing radical change, creating perhaps one of most volatile competitive market environments for some time. Add to this the visible presence of new market entrants from informatics, outsourcing, consumer technology and the rapidly growing artificial intelligence sector, and one thing is certain: market change is coming.

Below, we provide our take on the latest developments and postulate as to where it could all be heading:
GE Healthcare: Back to Basics
The latest multi-billion hit to GE has more than likely forced the hand of new CEO John Flannery towards some form of major restructure. Having already outlined plans for the sale and spin-off of multiple business areas, attention will also no doubt fall on the future of GE’s healthcare business. While a sale is highly unlikely given GE Healthcare is one of the more profitable business divisions of the conglomerate, a restructured relationship with its parent, or separation into its own entity, now looks more likely.

GE Healthcare should view this not as a negative, but as an opportunity to reset its vision and strategic agenda. Too often over the last decade it has over-reached into new markets with speculative acquisitions, only to make minimal impact on market share or profitability – some have even been multi-million-dollar write-offs.

Yet, GE Healthcare still holds a very strong hand, with one of the largest customer bases globally, a thriving life-sciences division and fingers in almost all diagnostic and clinical IT markets. Therefore, it should re-focus on its core markets and maximise the potential of it s strongest assets; imaging, clinical care and lifesciences. All three of these sectors are entering a new stage of development. Value-based care models and healthcare provider need for analytics and operational intelligence offer the opportunity to significantly improve GE’s healthcare business performance.

Therefore, while the crumbling conglomerate might be faltering, which in turn may have some impact healthcare deals that are linked with other GE business units such as energy and industrial, there is little reason why GE Healthcare should not be looking to profit from its position, if it sticks to what it knows best.

Siemens Healthineers: Filling the Gaps

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