Heart-device firm targets India, China

Singapore: Medtronic Inc, the world’s largest maker of heart devices, plans to hire about 600 people in India and China as it seeks to double the sales contribution from emerging markets within five years.

The hiring will begin in the year starting on May 1 and about 80% of recruits will work as sales representatives, Jean-Luc Butel, president of Medtronic’s international business, said in Singapore. Attracting and training enough sales staff is creating a “natural bottleneck” that’s constraining growth in emerging markets, he said.

Medtronic is counting on an enlarged sales force in the world’s two most populous nations to help boost the proportion of revenue it gets from emerging markets to 20% from less than 10% now, said chief executive William A Haskins. The Minneapolis-based company said on February 22 it would cut employee numbers by up to 5% after global sales of pacemakers and defibrillators fell.