A cyberattack that shut down ordering, shipping and manufacturing at Stryker for weeks cut into the company’s first-quarter results.
CEO Kevin Lobo told investors Thursday that the cyberattack “meaningfully” affected Stryker’s growth.
“The cyber incident had a big impact on our results and affected each of our businesses differently given their varied go-to-market models and processes to record revenue,” Lobo said. “This resulted in distortions in our first-quarter results that will normalize over the course of the year.”
Stryker did not provide a total figure for how much the cyberattack impacted sales last quarter, and the company declined to comment on the figure for MedTech Dive.
Stryker reported sales of $6 billion in the quarter, representing year-over-year growth of 2.6%. The growth rate is significantly lower than Stryker typically reports. For example, the company grew net sales between 10% and nearly 12% in every quarter last year.
RBC Capital Markets analyst Shagun Singh wrote in a note to clients Friday that Stryker missed consensus estimates for organic sales by about $317 million.
Despite the impact on first-quarter sales, Stryker maintained its full-year guidance of organic sales growth in the range of 8% to 9.5% and adjusted earnings per share in the range of $14.90 to $15.10.
Executives on the call were confident that any business lost during the first quarter would be made up over the rest of the year.
“There is going to be some level of recovery in Q2, and then we will see some additional recovery in the rest of the year, ultimately getting to the full-year guide number that we mentioned,” CFO Preston Wells said.
Stryker was hit by the cyberattack on March 11. The company’s global Microsoft environment was disrupted, and ordering, shipping and manufacturing were shut down for weeks. Operations were not restored until the first week of April.
The attack has been claimed by an Iran-linked threat actor tracked as Handala, according to Check Point Research. Along with the operational disruption, the group claims to have wiped thousands of servers and mobile devices, and stolen data.
Lobo said the cyberattack wiped 40,000 laptops. He added that the company lost some procedures due to operations shutting down, and some sales reps were unable to get into hospitals. However, Lobo maintained that the company didn’t lose overall business.
“We've come out of this very strong,” Lobo said. “There isn't really any business I could think of that we've lost.”
Stifel analyst Rick Wise backed Stryker’s long-term prospects despite the cyberattack’s effect on the first quarter.
“The Stryker first quarter did fall short of Consensus expectations due to the mid-March [Stryker] cyber incident,” Wise wrote in a note to investors. “However, healthy end-market trends and an expected rest-of-2026 business recovery suggest Stryker is still poised for a strong growth year ahead.”
J.P. Morgan analyst Robbie Marcus was similarly confident about Stryker’s future.
“Numbers are not moving up on this print, but Stryker is still one of the highest quality, consistently fastest growing companies in MedTech, and one we think investors will gravitate towards now that the worst is behind them,” wrote Marcus.
