Boston Scientific profits soar after recall recovery

BOSTON SCIENTIFIC, the world’s biggest heart stent maker, said fourth-quarter profit more than doubled as sales of its Taxus stent recovered from recalls last year.

Net income rose to $297 million, or 35 cents a share, from $137m, or 16 cents, a year earlier, the company said. Revenue rose 70% to $1.6 billion from $939m.

Sales of cardiac stents, the tiny mesh tubes that prop open blood vessels, rose almost fivefold to $730m from a year earlier. Chief executive Jim Tobin dispatched executives to hospitals and replaced 100,000 potentially defective Taxus devices in three recalls last year.

“They recovered from their stumble,” said Piper Jaffray & Co analyst Thomas Gunderson in Minneapolis, who has an outperform rating on Boston Scientific and doesn’t own shares, in a phone interview yesterday.

Profit excluding $122m in special expenses would have been 49 cents a share, Boston Scientific said. On that basis, analysts expected earnings to be 48 cents, based on the average of 28 estimates in a Thomson Financial survey.

Boston Scientific shares rose 86 cents, or 2.7%, to $33.06 yesterday in NYSE composite trading.