Alcon sales begin to rebound after pandemic year
Alcon reported worldwide sales of $1.9 billion for the fourth quarter of 2020, a 2% increase on a reported basis and a 1% increase on a constant currency basis compared with the fourth quarter of 2019.
For the full year, net sales totaled nearly $6.8 billion compared with nearly $7.4 billion in 2019.
Surgical net sales in the fourth quarter increased to $1.1 billion, a slight increase from the fourth quarter of 2019, which was attributed to adoption of the PanOptix IOL and the launch of the Vivity IOL. Surgical net sales decreased for the year from nearly $4.2 billion in 2019 to $3.7 billion in 2020.
Vision care net sales increased to $797 million in the fourth quarter of 2020 compared with $777 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. This was driven by sales of reusable lenses and Precision1 contact lenses and the ongoing launch of Pataday allergy relief drops. Vision care net sales for 2020 decreased 4% to $3 billion.
Following the release of these financial results, Healio/OSN talked with Alcon CEO David J. Endicott about how the company has adjusted to the pandemic 1 year in and how he sees the industry moving forward.
Healio/OSN: Looking back on the past year of the pandemic, how would you say that Alcon weathered the storm, and what lessons did you learn as the leader of an organization?
Endicott: I think Alcon weathered the storm quite well largely because we spent a lot of time thinking about two things. One was how do we take care of our employees and keep them safe and involved in the company while they are sometimes at home, sometimes not even able to work, and the other one was how we handle our customers and how we make them feel during this stretch of time. If I take those individually, I will say that I feel really good about the responsiveness of the 23,000-plus people who work here. We kept everybody employed, we paid everybody who worked at a manufacturing facility to be there, even when we were not making anything because volumes fell off, and we still paid everybody full time. So, we tried our best to kind of create a circumstance in which people understood that we were in this together — we were going to get through it.
I am also proud that we kept almost all our major strategic initiatives on track. If you think about Alcon’s separation from Novartis, we are going to finish that early and on budget, or under budget actually. If you think about the standup of the new manufacturing lines in Vision Care, all of those are running, and we are getting Precision1 toric out a little bit early, simultaneously with Precision1 sphere, in Europe, too. Every one of those groups found a way to get through the COVID experience, either remotely or working together, or figured out how to do things.
On the customer side, early on we looked carefully at what we could do to help. I think we were one of the first to really get on board with the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery for their online content requirements and how we could do things virtually. It felt like it was only a few weeks before ASCRS that we had to figure out how to run a meeting virtually, and we were not even sure how this Zoom stuff worked. I think our marketing teams and our sales teams did a great job, even when they were at home, calling customers and checking in with them. We have stories of our teams Facetiming customers in faraway places or even near places where they could not get in to help people fix equipment.
I have said to a lot of people, I don’t know that we will remember the details of all this 10 years from now, but I think our employees and our customers will remember how we made them feel during this stretch of time, and I think we are pretty proud of that.
Healio/OSN: How do you expect that customer interaction to evolve going forward?
Endicott: I think it is going to be a little bit more of a blended experience, and I think we have all learned a lot in the last year. Recently, we hosted a virtual ad board where we had 20 of the top surgeons in the world on a Webex, and they did not need to fly to California or New York or Texas or Geneva. They were able to fly from their kitchen to their den, sit and talk with their colleagues, and we got a lot of great information from them.
Having said that, I am glad to see some of the live meetings being scheduled again. I think people are ready to see their friends and do it safely, but at the same time, there is a human element, which is people want to go hang out with people and have a beer at the bar and just chat about what we have been through. We will likely end up in a place where we have a nice mix of both of those ideas.
Healio/OSN: Shifting gears to products, to what do you attribute the success of the PanOptix?
Endicott: PanOptix gives you a little bit better intermediate and a little bit better near balance than some of the other lenses do, and it has a better visual disturbance profile than some lenses do. I think the speed of its acceptance had a lot to do with just the knowledge of the U.S. surgeons, their colleagues in Canada and their colleagues in Europe. Once they tried it, it already had been 3 years in the waiting for the U.S.
Healio/OSN: What other products are you excited about in 2021?
Endicott: We are interested in what the Vivity IOL can do because it is the first of its kind, non-diffractive advanced technology lens in the world. We are keen to understand how surgeons will accept that. It has good distance and good intermediate, and about half of the patients are getting spectacle independence, with a monofocal-like side effect profile.
The other thing we like right now is that we are going to get a full year of effect with our new biometer, Argos, which is exciting. We think it has the potential to do a couple of things near term and longer term. In the near term, it is a faster, easier biometer to use that is as accurate as anything on the market, and I think it helps surgeons move patients along more efficiently.
Importantly for the surgeons, this biometer is going to be able to move all the biometry data to up in the cloud planner, which we are piloting this year as well.
Healio/OSN: What else would you like your customer base to know?
Endicott: We had a good return to growth in the fourth quarter in the United States, and it was largely a consequence of surgeons getting back to work and managing their staffs and their processes. We appreciate that; if there are things we can do to help, we want to. Our business is a consequence of whether or not we can support them and whether they are active in the OR.
Collapse
Read more about