If there is any industry that can lay claim to a kind of American exceptionalism or American centricity, it’s the medical device industry. Compared even with its sister biopharma industry, the US remains a dominant presence in medical devices, representing not just the largest market in the world but also serving as headquarters to the vast majority of global medical device companies. For years, that prominence, if not dominance, seemed to give US-based giants a presumptive edge in getting to market. When first coronary stents and, soon after, drug-eluting stents came to market, US companies like Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific Corp./Guidant and Medtronic PLC/Medtronic CardioVascular quickly took the lion’s share of the stent markets in Europe, despite a fairly large group of native European stent companies, most of which found themselves relegated to a small left-over share of the market, competing on the basis of price.
Today, the US and US-based companies retain their out-sized roles in the medical device industry, in terms of both market...
