Executives from Stryker and Johnson & Johnson are on the hunt for deals, despite a turbulent environment, they said at AdvaMed’s The MedTech Conference.
By: Ricky Zipp, Senior Editor – October 8, 2025
SAN DIEGO — Medical device dealmaking has been fairly quiet for most of 2025. Aside from a few bursts of activity, medtech companies have not spent money as they typically have, partly due to macroeconomic factors like higher interest rates and unpredictable tariff policies from the Trump administration.
While M&A may be slower this year, executives from Stryker and Johnson & Johnson see M&A as a crucial part of their business strategies — and they are ready to make deals.
“M&A is a huge part of our strategy. It is part of our offense,” Stryker CEO Kevin Lobo said during a Tuesday panel at AdvaMed’s The MedTech Conference. “We have 22 different business units. They average about a billion dollars of revenue. They’re all hungry. They all have … people that sit in their business units hunting deals.”
Stryker has been one of the industry’s biggest spenders in the past several years. In 2024, the company completed seven acquisitions, according to Lobo. This year, Stryker purchased Inari Medical for nearly $5 billion, the largest medtech deal of 2025 so far.
J&J has also been a big spender. The healthcare giant has shelled out more than $30 billion for medtech acquisitions since 2022, including $16.6 billion for Abiomed and $13.1 billion for Shockwave Medical.
After the massive spending spree, J&J still has an appetite for dealmaking.
