When SpineMarketGroup published its first post in July 2009, the spine business went by other names. Synthes was still a proud, independent Swiss company; three years later Johnson & Johnson would buy it for nearly $20 billion and fold it into DePuy. Zimmer and Biomet were two separate firms competing against each other — they wouldn’t become Zimmer Biomet until 2015. NuVasive was growing north of 50% a year, taking on a Medtronic that looked untouchable, while Stryker consolidated its brand and Globus Medical, not yet public, was the aggressive house that would, years later, end up buying NuVasive itself.
Below the giants churned the other half of the industry, the half that rarely makes headlines. Lanx, founded in 2003 and strong in minimally invasive surgery with its ASPEN device, would be bought by Biomet in 2013. LDR, the French maker of the Mobi-C, would pass to Zimmer Biomet in 2016 for about a billion dollars. Spinal Elements — born as Quantum Orthopedics in 2003, an early champion of PEEK — would change hands and names in 2017. That world of mid-sized companies, absorbed, rebranded and sometimes erased, is where you actually see the industry’s pulse.
But if anything has reshaped this market over seventeen years, it wasn’t an acquisition. It was an idea. Enabling technologies — navigation, robotics, intraoperative imaging — have rewritten the rules. In 2009 the conversation was about the implant: the screw, the cage, the material. Today, more and more, the implant is almost beside the point; what gets bought and sold is the platform around the surgery. Medtronic with Mazor, Globus with its Excelsius, and behind them a race to integrate software, data and imaging. The playing field has shifted from the operating room to the ecosystem, and that is probably the deepest change we’ve covered, issue after issue.
We follow the spine business and explain what its moves actually mean: who’s buying whom, what sits behind each quarterly result, what changes when a new technology enters the OR. We write opinion pieces. We cover the spine markets of individual countries and the companies operating in each. And we go through the products and their competitors, category by category. For the executive, the distributor, the investor and even the surgeon who need to understand the market — not just hear the news.
Seventeen years. Thanks to those of you who read us, and thanks as well to the sponsors. The spine industry will keep making news; we’ll keep explaining what it means.