Momentum in Johnson & Johnson’s cardiovascular business continues while the company looks to regain its footing in the burgeoning pulsed field ablation market after stumbles in the launch of its Varipulse system at the top of this year.
“We are not rolling over,” J&J MedTech’s worldwide chairman, Tim Schmid, said on the company’s quarterly earnings call with investors, pointing to its decades of experience in electrophysiology and treating atrial fibrillation under its previous Biosense Webster brand. J&J’s main competition in the space is Boston Scientific, with its Farapulse system that brought in more than $1 billion in revenue during its first year on the market.
After collecting an FDA approval last November, J&J paused the initial U.S. rollout of Varipulse in January following four subsequent reports of strokes in treated patients. Operations restarted the month after, with the company saying the catheter works as intended but cautioning clinicians that risks can increase if ablations are stacked on top of another in an attempt to reach deeper tissue.
More recently, J&J said it received an updated approval from the FDA earlier this week for a new irrigation flow rate, based on the collection of real-world data. The company said more than 10,000 Varipulse procedures have been completed worldwide to date and that preliminary accounting shows a neurovascular complication rate of less than 0.5%.
For the second quarter of this year, J&J’s broader cardiovascular division reported 23.5% growth year over year, reaching $2.31 billion in sales. That includes an 11% gain in electrophysiology, with revenues of $1.47 billion being split about evenly between the U.S. and outside the country—though international sales accounted for more of the increase.
The company’s Abiomed unit was also a strong performer, with an 18.2% boost in sales of its miniaturized heart pumps, bringing in $448 million. The quarter also marked the first full year of J&J’s ownership of Shockwave Medical, with its intravascular lithotripsy catheters adding $292 million. The cardiovascular division previously listed 16.4% growth in the first quarter of this year.
On today’s call, Schmid also pitched the surgical division as a future growth driver, in both open and laparoscopic procedures, once J&J enters the soft tissue robotics space with its upcoming Ottava platform. The company announced that the bed-based robot completed its first U.S. surgery in April with a gastric bypass procedure as part of a clinical trial.
The surgery division grew a reported 2.7% to $2.55 billion, while growth in wound closure products was slightly offset by declines in worldwide energy instrument sales. J&J Vision grew 6.5% to about $1.37 billion—while orthopedics declined 0.3% to $2.3 billion, as the company’s two-year plan to restructure the division and exit certain product lines nears its conclusion at the end of 2025.
Altogether, J&J MedTech published 7.3% growth for the quarter, or 6.1% when accounting for changes in international currencies, for $8.54 billion in total sales. Including its pharmaceutical side, the company as a whole brought in $23.7 billion, for a 5.8% gain, or 4.6% operationally.
“Our portfolio and pipeline position us for elevated growth in the second half of the year, with game-changing approvals and submissions anticipated in areas like lung and bladder cancer, major depressive disorder, psoriasis, surgery and cardiovascular, which will extend and improve lives in transformative ways,” CEO Joaquin Duato said in a statement.
The company upped its projections for the remainder of 2025, increasing the midpoint of its full-year sales estimates by $2 billion to 5.4%. J&J’s stock price jumped more than 5.5% on the news to about $164.
When it comes to tariffs, J&J previously approximated about $400 million in total costs for the year. But now that some duties on China and its retaliatory measures have been delayed or lowered, the company said earlier this year that figure may be cut in half—however, with new tariffs on the EU currently in flux, and the possibility of new threats against pharmaceutical sales, the total impact is still up in the air.