Global life sciences giant Danaher coughed up a pretty penny to buy Masimo this week, spending roughly $10 billion to beef up its diagnostics portfolio.
The deal values medical device developer Masimo at $180 per share. The Irvine, California-based company sells noninvasive patient monitoring technologies, best known for its pulse oximetry devices and sensors. They work by emitting light through the skin to measure oxygen levels in a patient’s blood in real time.
Danaher’s hospital business is also largely concentrated in its diagnostics segment, providing equipment and software for use across labs, point-of-care testing and pathology services.
“Masimo’s advanced sensor technology and AI-enabled monitoring bring powerful new capabilities to our diagnostics portfolio. Integrating these strengths into Danaher will create meaningful opportunities to innovate for clinicians and improve decision making in critical settings,” Julie Sawyer Montgomery, Danaher’s executive vice president for diagnostics, said in a statement.
Under the deal, Masimo will become a standalone brand within Danaher’s greater diagnostics business, operating independently while strengthening the parent company’s offerings for acute care settings. Some other brands existing within Danaher’s diagnostics unit include Beckman Coulter Diagnostics, Cepheid, Leica Biosystems and Radiometer.
The transaction comes a year and a half after Masimo’s founder and former CEO, Joe Kiani, stepped down following a proxy battle between the company and activist investor Politan Capital Management. Katie Szyman, a former executive at Medtronic and BD, took over the helm last year.
“Danaher shares our commitment to investing in talent and innovation and will be an ideal fit to help power the next chapter of Masimo. Importantly, becoming part of Danaher’s Diagnostics segment will strengthen our ability to scale our monitoring technologies globally and accelerate our mission of delivering Masimo innovations that empower clinicians to transform patient care,” Szyman said in a statement.
From Masimo’s lens, the acquisition gives the company greater global scale and commercial reach, which will likely accelerate adoption of its monitoring tools, noted Michael Abrams, managing partner of Numerof & Associates. He also pointed out that the deal could create value for shareholders and support future company growth by integrating Masimo with other diagnostics businesses.
“Becoming part of a diagnostics ecosystem helps Masimo reinforce its positioning as a pure‑play medtech company after shedding consumer audio assets and resolving major patent disputes, positioning for focused growth in acute care,” Abrams stated.
He views the deal as both defensive and offensive for Danaher. Defensively, it diversifies the company beyond its traditional drug development tools into the more stable, steadily growing acute care market.
On the offensive side, the deal gives Danaher access to Masimo’s profitable devices and sensors, which will allow the company to play a more of a role in ongoing patient care and expand its presence in hospital technology, Abrams said.
Overall, he sees the deal as part of a broader industry trend toward consolidation, with large companies pursuing scale and diversifying their product offerings.
“Increasing value is placed on non‑invasive monitoring technologies that integrate into hospital workflows and diagnostics ecosystems — areas forecasted for continued growth,” Abrams stated. “Larger strategics, like Danaher, are doubling down on vertical integration across the care continuum: diagnostics to monitoring to analytics.”
The deal is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close in the second half of this year.
Photo: 0shi, Getty Images
