Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Cisco Systems (CSCO - Free Report) closed at $108.59 in the latest trading session, marking a -1.54% move from the prior day. This change lagged the S&P 500's daily loss of 0.31%. Elsewhere, the Dow lost 0.25%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 1.38%.

Heading into today, shares of the seller of routers, switches, software and services had gained 2.47% over the past month, outpacing the Computer and Technology sector's loss of 3.14% and the S&P 500's gain of 0.87%.

The investment community will be closely monitoring the performance of Cisco Systems in its forthcoming earnings report. On that day, Cisco Systems is projected to report earnings of $1.33 per share, which would represent year-over-year growth of 33%. In the meantime, our current consensus estimate forecasts the revenue to be $18.09 billion, indicating a 21.54% growth compared to the corresponding quarter of the prior year.

For the entire fiscal year, the Zacks Consensus Estimates are projecting earnings of $5.11 per share and a revenue of $73.03 billion, representing changes of +18.01% and +15.33%, respectively, from the prior year.

It is also important to note the recent changes to analyst estimates for Cisco Systems. Recent revisions tend to reflect the latest near-term business trends. Hence, positive alterations in estimates signify analyst optimism regarding the business and profitability.

Empirical research indicates that these revisions in estimates have a direct correlation with impending stock price performance. To benefit from this, we have developed the Zacks Rank, a proprietary model which takes these estimate changes into account and provides an actionable rating system.

Ranging from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell), the Zacks Rank system has a proven, outside-audited track record of outperformance, with #1 stocks returning an average of +25% annually since 1988. Over the last 30 days, the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate has witnessed a 0.05% increase. At present, Cisco Systems boasts a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy).

Looking at its valuation, Cisco Systems is holding a Forward P/E ratio of 21.57. This signifies a discount in comparison to the average Forward P/E of 23.13 for its industry.

Investors should also note that CSCO has a PEG ratio of 1.98 right now. This popular metric is similar to the widely-known P/E ratio, with the difference being that the PEG ratio also takes into account the company's expected earnings growth rate. As of the close of trade yesterday, the Computer - Networking industry held an average PEG ratio of 1.45.

The Computer - Networking industry is part of the Computer and Technology sector. Currently, this industry holds a Zacks Industry Rank of 75, positioning it in the top 31% of all 250+ industries.

The Zacks Industry Rank evaluates the power of our distinct industry groups by determining the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks forming the groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.

To follow CSCO in the coming trading sessions, be sure to utilize Zacks.com.

Three of the largest oil companies are all set to report third-quarter financial results Friday before market open.

Here’s a look at what analysts expect from the companies and what higher gas prices mean.

Q3 Earnings EstimatesEstimates for the three oil companies are significantly higher than in the year-ago period for several metrics, according to data from Benzinga Pro.

The three oil companies reporting Friday before market open are:

BP Plc (NYSE:BP) Chevron Corporation (NYSE:CVX) ExxonMobil Holdings Corporation (NYSE:XOM) Here are the current analyst estimates for the three companies.

BP

EPS: estimate $2.62 per share vs. 85 cents per share last year Revenue: $68.09 billion estimate vs. $48.42 billion last year The company has beaten analyst estimates for revenue in three straight quarters and in five of the last 10 quarters overall. ExxonMobil

EPS: $4.08 estimate vs. $1.88 last year Revenue: $103.47 billion estimate vs. $85.29 billion last year The company has beaten analyst estimates for earnings per share in eight of the last 10 quarters, but missed second-quarter estimates. The company has beaten analyst estimates for revenue in six of the last 10 quarters, including three straight. Chevron

EPS: $4.88 estimate vs. $1.85 last year Revenue: $61.11 billion estimate vs. $49.73 billion last year The company has beaten analyst estimates for earnings per share in seven of the last 10 quarters, including in five straight quarters. The company has beaten analyst estimates for revenue in seven of the last 10 quarters, including the most recent second quarter. Higher gas prices across the country have put oil stocks in the spotlight, as they could mean increased revenue and earnings for the companies.

This may have been noticeable last quarter, when BP reported earnings of $2.22 per share, up from 90 cents a year earlier, along with its highest revenue quarter in years.

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For all three companies, earnings estimates are more than 100% higher than in last year’s third quarter, with revenue estimates also significantly higher.

While oil prices may not be at record highs, they are significantly higher than in recent years, and heightened global demand is supporting better margins.

President Donald Trump recently bragged that the higher gas prices are leading to record profits and he may have been talking about oil stocks.

With consumers hurting at the pump, oil stocks could become the villain, even though most are just doing what they’ve always done, but now getting paid more for their output.

Record Stock PricesHere are the current year-to-date stock gains for the three stocks:

BP: +40.2% XOM: +49.0% CVX: +48.2% All three are significantly outperforming the 12.5% year-to-date gain for the S&P 500.

Chevron and ExxonMobil head into the earnings report with shares trading within about 2% of all-time highs. BP stock trades at its highest level since 2014.

Strong reports could push shares even higher, though higher estimates may already be baked into the price, unlike in recent quarters.

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Photo: Shutterstock

Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

© 2026 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

Synopsys (SNPS - Free Report) closed the most recent trading day at $490.19, moving +1.72% from the previous trading session. The stock exceeded the S&P 500, which registered a loss of 0.31% for the day. On the other hand, the Dow registered a loss of 0.25%, and the technology-centric Nasdaq decreased by 1.38%.

Shares of the maker of software used to test and develop chips have appreciated by 10.8% over the course of the past month, outperforming the Computer and Technology sector's loss of 3.14%, and the S&P 500's gain of 0.87%.

The upcoming earnings release of Synopsys will be of great interest to investors. The company's upcoming EPS is projected at $4.12, signifying a 42.07% increase compared to the same quarter of the previous year. Meanwhile, the latest consensus estimate predicts the revenue to be $2.56 billion, indicating a 13.38% increase compared to the same quarter of the previous year.

For the full year, the Zacks Consensus Estimates project earnings of $15.14 per share and a revenue of $9.72 billion, demonstrating changes of +17.27% and +37.77%, respectively, from the preceding year.

Additionally, investors should keep an eye on any recent revisions to analyst forecasts for Synopsys. These revisions typically reflect the latest short-term business trends, which can change frequently. Consequently, upward revisions in estimates express analysts' positivity towards the business operations and its ability to generate profits.

Empirical research indicates that these revisions in estimates have a direct correlation with impending stock price performance. To benefit from this, we have developed the Zacks Rank, a proprietary model which takes these estimate changes into account and provides an actionable rating system.

The Zacks Rank system, which ranges from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell), has an impressive outside-audited track record of outperformance, with #1 stocks generating an average annual return of +25% since 1988. Over the last 30 days, the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate has witnessed a 0.29% increase. At present, Synopsys boasts a Zacks Rank of #1 (Strong Buy).

Investors should also note Synopsys's current valuation metrics, including its Forward P/E ratio of 31.83. This valuation marks a premium compared to its industry average Forward P/E of 17.79.

Investors should also note that SNPS has a PEG ratio of 1.42 right now. The PEG ratio bears resemblance to the frequently used P/E ratio, but this parameter also includes the company's expected earnings growth trajectory. Computer - Software stocks are, on average, holding a PEG ratio of 1.44 based on yesterday's closing prices.

The Computer - Software industry is part of the Computer and Technology sector. This group has a Zacks Industry Rank of 57, putting it in the top 24% of all 250+ industries.

The Zacks Industry Rank is ordered from best to worst in terms of the average Zacks Rank of the individual companies within each of these sectors. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.

Be sure to use Zacks.com to monitor all these stock-influencing metrics, and more, throughout the forthcoming trading sessions.

, /PRNewswire/ -- CDS Visual, part of Dover (NYSE: DOV), today announced the launch of CDS Partner Exchange™, an integrated platform that streamlines how industrial manufacturers and their business partners collaborate across critical commercial processes.

CDS Partner Exchange connects CRM, ERP, commerce, and service systems to unify channel engagement, order processing, product visualization, quoting, service, and aftermarket support into a single environment. The platform enables a more connected, automated, and scalable partner ecosystem throughout the commercial lifecycle.

"The future of partner engagement is not simply about providing access to information; it is creating a connected and automated network where manufacturers and their partners can collaborate in real time," said Anna Harkins, General Manager at CDS Visual. "CDS Partner Exchange brings together the systems, workflows, and insights that power critical commercial processes, helping manufacturers reduce manual effort, improve visibility, and deliver better business outcomes for partners."

Key features of CDS Partner Exchange include:

Self-Service Access: Provides partners, distributors, dealers, and customers with 24/7 access to view orders, alerts, and quotes through a single interface, lowering service costs while improving the user experience.Flexible Deployment Options: Offers a multi-tenant SaaS solution that can be configured as a stand-alone partner portal or integrated with existing ERP and e-commerce systems to unify product, parts, and service sales. Unified Partner Onboarding and Lifecycle Workflows: Streamlines onboarding, access provisioning, and ongoing partner management with configurable workflows.Advanced CRM-Integrated Partner Processes: Extends beyond standard CRM connectivity with workflow-driven integration, enabling seamless coordination between internal teams and partners.Deep ERP and Back-Office Integration: Natively connects partner interactions to ERP systems, eliminating transaction friction through real-time visibility into orders, inventory, pricing, and operational data.Embedded E-Commerce Experience Enhancing Workflows: Enables partners to browse products, manage favorites, and transact directly within the portal, bridging the gap between enablement and revenue execution.RFQ (Request for Quote) Workflow Orchestration: Supports structured quotation processes, accelerating deal cycles and improving pricing accuracy.Warranty and Returns Management: Simplifies the submission of warranty claims and returns with guided workflows and real-time status tracking.Content and Engagement Analytics: Provides visibility into partner activity and engagement, linking content usage and behavior to intent and outcomes.Visit cdsvisual.com to learn more about CDS Partner Exchange.

About CDS Visual:

CDS Visual, a Dover company, is a cloud-based provider of visualization, commerce, and workflow automation solutions trusted by some of the world's leading industrial manufacturers. Its visual-first engineering and commercial experience platform transforms complex engineering and product data into connected, interactive digital experiences. Since 2005, CDS Visual has helped manufacturers empower customers, partners, sales teams, and service organizations to confidently explore and configure products, identify the right spare parts, follow digital work instructions, and complete transactions faster. Together, these capabilities help manufacturers grow revenue, improve productivity, reduce support costs, and make it easier to do business. Visit us at www.cdsvisual.com and follow us on LinkedIn for more information.

About Dover:

Dover is a diversified global manufacturer and solutions provider with annual revenue of over $8 billion. We deliver innovative equipment and components, consumable supplies, aftermarket parts, software and digital solutions, and support services through five operating segments: Engineered Products, Clean Energy & Fueling, Imaging & Identification, Pumps & Process Solutions and Climate & Sustainability Technologies. Dover combines global scale with operational agility to lead the markets we serve. Recognized for our entrepreneurial approach for over 70 years, our team of approximately 24,000 employees takes an ownership mindset, collaborating with customers to redefine what's possible. Headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois, Dover trades on the New York Stock Exchange under "DOV." Additional information is available at dovercorporation.com.

CDS Visual Contact:
Cara Panaccio
(408) 550-8820
[email protected] 

Dover Media Contact:
Adrian Sakowicz, VP, Communications
(630) 743-5039
[email protected]

Dover Investor Contact:
Jack Dickens, VP, Investor Relations
(630) 743-2566
[email protected]

SOURCE Dover

New York, New York--(Newsfile Corp. - October 29, 2026) - WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of securities of Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU) between November 18, 2025 and August 17, 2026, inclusive (the "Class Period"), of the important November 13, 2026 lead plaintiff deadline.

SO WHAT: If you purchased Baidu securities during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement.

WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the Baidu class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/cases/baidu-inc-2026/join or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than November 13, 2026. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation.

WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources, or any meaningful peer recognition. Many of these firms do not actually handle securities class actions, but are merely middlemen that refer clients or partner with law firms that actually litigate the cases. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered billions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers.

DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, throughout the Class Period, defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Baidu had overstated the ability of its AI business to mitigate rapid declines in its legacy online marketing business; (2) as a result, Baidu's revenue was reasonably likely to decline; and (3) as a result of the foregoing, defendants' positive statements about Baidu's business, operations, and prospects were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.

To join the Baidu class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/cases/baidu-inc-2026/join or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action.

No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff.

Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/.

Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

-------------------------------

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/321711

Source: The Rosen Law Firm PA

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Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP Securities Litigation Partner James (Josh) Wilson Encourages Investors Who Suffered Losses In Baidu To Contact Him Directly To Discuss Their Options If you purchased or acquired securities in Baidu between November 18, 2025 and August 17, 2026 and would like to discuss your legal rights, call Faruqi & Faruqi partner Josh Wilson directly at 877-247-4292 or 212-983-9330 (Ext. 1310). [You may also click here for additional information] New York, New York--(Newsfile Corp. - October 29, 2026) - Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP, a leading national securities law firm, is investigating potential claims against Baidu, Inc. ("Baidu" or the "Company") (NASDAQ: BIDU) and reminds investors of the November 13, 2026 deadline to seek the role of lead plaintiff in a federal securities class action that has been filed against the Company.

In the latest close session, Baidu Inc. (BIDU - Free Report) was down 1.08% at $78.64. The stock's performance was behind the S&P 500's daily loss of 0.31%. At the same time, the Dow lost 0.25%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 1.38%.

Shares of the web search company have depreciated by 8.48% over the course of the past month, underperforming the Computer and Technology sector's loss of 3.14%, and the S&P 500's gain of 0.87%.

The upcoming earnings release of Baidu Inc. will be of great interest to investors. The company's earnings report is expected on November 16, 2026. The company is forecasted to report an EPS of $0.85, showcasing a 45.51% downward movement from the corresponding quarter of the prior year. Meanwhile, the latest consensus estimate predicts the revenue to be $4.61 billion, indicating a 5.18% increase compared to the same quarter of the previous year.

BIDU's full-year Zacks Consensus Estimates are calling for earnings of $4.85 per share and revenue of $18.97 billion. These results would represent year-over-year changes of -36.52% and +4.81%, respectively.

Investors should also take note of any recent adjustments to analyst estimates for Baidu Inc. These recent revisions tend to reflect the evolving nature of short-term business trends. Hence, positive alterations in estimates signify analyst optimism regarding the business and profitability.

Our research demonstrates that these adjustments in estimates directly associate with imminent stock price performance. To utilize this, we have created the Zacks Rank, a proprietary model that integrates these estimate changes and provides a functional rating system.

The Zacks Rank system ranges from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell). It has a remarkable, outside-audited track record of success, with #1 stocks delivering an average annual return of +25% since 1988. The Zacks Consensus EPS estimate has moved 15.95% lower within the past month. Baidu Inc. is holding a Zacks Rank of #5 (Strong Sell) right now.

Investors should also note Baidu Inc.'s current valuation metrics, including its Forward P/E ratio of 16.4. This denotes a premium relative to the industry average Forward P/E of 14.82.

It's also important to note that BIDU currently trades at a PEG ratio of 3.13. The PEG ratio bears resemblance to the frequently used P/E ratio, but this parameter also includes the company's expected earnings growth trajectory. The Internet - Services was holding an average PEG ratio of 0.94 at yesterday's closing price.

The Internet - Services industry is part of the Computer and Technology sector. This industry, currently bearing a Zacks Industry Rank of 174, finds itself in the bottom 30% echelons of all 250+ industries.

The Zacks Industry Rank gauges the strength of our industry groups by measuring the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks within the groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.

To follow BIDU in the coming trading sessions, be sure to utilize Zacks.com.

Oracle (ORCL - Free Report) ended the recent trading session at $139.56, demonstrating a -3.45% change from the preceding day's closing price. The stock's change was less than the S&P 500's daily loss of 0.31%. Meanwhile, the Dow experienced a drop of 0.25%, and the technology-dominated Nasdaq saw a decrease of 1.38%.

Coming into today, shares of the software maker had gained 5.27% in the past month. In that same time, the Computer and Technology sector lost 3.14%, while the S&P 500 gained 0.87%.

Investors will be eagerly watching for the performance of Oracle in its upcoming earnings disclosure. The company is expected to report EPS of $1.88, down 16.81% from the prior-year quarter. Alongside, our most recent consensus estimate is anticipating revenue of $21.31 billion, indicating a 32.68% upward movement from the same quarter last year.

For the annual period, the Zacks Consensus Estimates anticipate earnings of $8.13 per share and a revenue of $90.5 billion, signifying shifts of +6.55% and +34.36%, respectively, from the last year.

Any recent changes to analyst estimates for Oracle should also be noted by investors. These revisions typically reflect the latest short-term business trends, which can change frequently. As such, positive estimate revisions reflect analyst optimism about the business and profitability.

Our research suggests that these changes in estimates have a direct relationship with upcoming stock price performance. To utilize this, we have created the Zacks Rank, a proprietary model that integrates these estimate changes and provides a functional rating system.

Ranging from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell), the Zacks Rank system has a proven, outside-audited track record of outperformance, with #1 stocks returning an average of +25% annually since 1988. Over the last 30 days, the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate has moved 0.21% higher. Oracle presently features a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy).

Digging into valuation, Oracle currently has a Forward P/E ratio of 17.79. This valuation marks no noticeable deviation compared to its industry average Forward P/E of 17.79.

Also, we should mention that ORCL has a PEG ratio of 0.84. The PEG ratio is similar to the widely-used P/E ratio, but this metric also takes the company's expected earnings growth rate into account. Computer - Software stocks are, on average, holding a PEG ratio of 1.44 based on yesterday's closing prices.

The Computer - Software industry is part of the Computer and Technology sector. At present, this industry carries a Zacks Industry Rank of 57, placing it within the top 24% of over 250 industries.

The Zacks Industry Rank assesses the strength of our separate industry groups by calculating the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks contained within the groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.

To follow ORCL in the coming trading sessions, be sure to utilize Zacks.com.

, /PRNewswire/ -- Kimberly-Clark Corporation (NASDAQ: KMB) ("Kimberly-Clark"), a core S&P 500 component, announced today that it has closed its previously announced private offering (the "Offering") of senior unsecured notes in a combined aggregate principal amount of $4.9 billion (collectively, the "Notes"). The Notes were issued by Kimberly-Clark in five tranches: (i) $750,000,000 aggregate principal amount of 5.100% Notes due 2028, (ii) $1,000,000,000 aggregate principal amount of 5.300% Notes due 2029, (iii) $1,250,000,000 aggregate principal amount of 5.450% Notes due 2031, (iv) $750,000,000 aggregate principal amount of 5.650% Notes due 2034, and (v) $1,150,000,000 aggregate principal amount of 5.800% Notes due 2036.

"This transaction marks another milestone in the creation of a global consumer health and wellness leader," said Kimberly-Clark CFO, Nelson Urdaneta. "The new company offers an opening balance sheet structured for financial flexibility, consistent with Kimberly-Clark's long-track record of disciplined capital management. Our combination of synergy-driven earnings growth, strong free cash flow and scheduled debt maturities will enable de-leveraging on an accelerated basis to levels consistent with our current credit ratings."

The Offering was conducted in connection with the previously announced proposed acquisition ("Acquisition") of Kenvue Inc., which remains subject to the satisfaction of certain customary closing conditions. Kimberly-Clark intends to use the net proceeds from the Offering, together with cash on hand and/or borrowings under its commercial paper program, to fund the cash consideration payable in connection with the Acquisition, and to pay related fees and expenses. Kimberly-Clark expects to use any remaining net proceeds from the Offering for general corporate purposes.

The Notes have not been registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), or securities laws of any state or any other jurisdiction. Accordingly, the Notes are subject to restrictions on transferability and resale and may not be transferred or resold except as permitted under the Securities Act and other applicable securities laws, pursuant to registration or exemption therefrom. The Notes were offered and sold only (a) to persons reasonably believed to be "qualified institutional buyers" (as defined in Rule 144A under the Securities Act) in compliance with Rule 144A under the Securities Act and (b) outside the United States to non-U.S. persons in compliance with Regulation S under the Securities Act.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or purchase, or a solicitation of an offer to sell or purchase, the Notes or any other security. No offer, solicitation, purchase or sale will be made in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction.

About Kimberly-Clark

Kimberly-Clark (NASDAQ: KMB) and its trusted brands are an indispensable part of life for people in more than 175 countries and territories. Our portfolio of brands, including Huggies, Kleenex, Scott, Kotex, Cottonelle, Poise, Depend, Pull-Ups, Goodnites, Intimus, Plenitud, Sweety, Softex, Viva and WypAll, hold No. 1 or No. 2 share positions in approximately 70 countries. Our company's purpose is to deliver Better Care for a Better World. We are committed to using sustainable practices designed to support a healthy planet, build strong communities, and enable our business to thrive for decades to come. The KMB stock is a large cap growth and value stock and core S&P 500 equity held by more than 400 Exchange Traded Funds. Kimberly-Clark is considered a dividend aristocrat, having paid a cash dividend to shareholders for 92 consecutive years and increased its dividend for 54 consecutive years. To keep up with the latest news and learn more about the company's more than 150-year history of innovation, visit the Kimberly-Clark website.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release, including statements relating to the Acquisition and the intended use of net proceeds from the Offering, constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and are qualified by the inherent risks and uncertainties surrounding future expectations generally. There can be no assurance that these future events will occur as anticipated or that our results will be as estimated. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. Forward-looking statements based upon the expectations and beliefs of the management of Kimberly-Clark as of the date they were made and speak only as of the date they were made. We undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements. Some of these forward-looking statements can be identified by words like "anticipate," "approximately," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "outlook," "plan," "possible," "potential," "predict," "project," "seek," "should," "target," "will" or "would," the negative of these words, other terms of similar meaning or the use of future dates.

The assumptions used as a basis for the forward-looking statements include many estimates. Many factors outside our control, including risks and uncertainties around the Acquisition, could affect the realization of these estimates. Additional information and factors concerning these risks, uncertainties and assumptions can be found in Kimberly-Clark's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including the risk factors discussed in Kimberly-Clark's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, as updated by its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and future filings with the SEC. Forward-looking statements included herein are made only as of the date hereof and Kimberly-Clark undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, or any other information in this press release, as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, or to correct any inaccuracies or omissions in them which become apparent. All forward-looking statements in this press release are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement.

SOURCE Kimberly-Clark Corporation

Key Takeaways UPS and FedEx stocks have rallied following strong Q3 results and raised financial guidance.UPS offers a cheaper valuation and significantly higher dividend yield than FedEx.FedEx boasts stronger earnings growth and stock performance, potentially justifying its premium.
Shipping giants United Parcel Service (UPS - Free Report) ) and FedEx (FDX - Free Report) ) are drawing investors' attention after both companies delivered better-than-expected quarterly results this week and raised their financial outlooks.

UPS stock has surged 13% this month, with FDX rising more than 7% amid improving earnings prospects and increased optimism surrounding the holiday shipping season.

With both companies benefiting from cost-cutting initiatives and improving operational efficiency, which stock offers the better combination of growth, value, and dividend income?

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

UPS vs FedEx: Q3 Results & Raised Guidance

UPS reported Q3 adjusted earnings of $1.69 per share, beating expectations of $1.63 by nearly 4% but declining from $1.74 in the year-ago quarter, which benefited from a one-time $0.30-per-share gain from a sale-leaseback transaction.

Still, UPS’s Q3 revenue increased roughly 7% year over year to $22.85 billion and exceeded estimates of $22.25 billion.

Encouragingly, UPS raised its full-year revenue outlook to $92.6 billion from $91.2 billion and increased its adjusted EPS guidance to $7.28 per share, up from $7.22 previously. The company also lifted its free cash flow target to $6.1 billion, reflecting improving network efficiency and profitability.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

Meanwhile, FedEx posted Q3 adjusted EPS of $3.74, easily surpassing expectations of $3.24 by 15% and increasing 28% from $2.93 a year ago, excluding the impact of its FedEx Freight spin-off.

Revenue from continued operations jumped 12% to $22.85 billion and surpassed estimates of $22.33 billion, supported by higher shipping volumes, improved pricing, and cost reductions.

FedEx also raised its fiscal 2026 adjusted EPS guidance to $18.00-$18.60, compared with its previous forecast of $16.90-$18.10. Furthermore, management now expects revenue growth of approximately 12%, up from its previous forecast of 11%.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

Stock Performance & Valuation ComparisonFedEx has delivered stronger longer-term share-price performance, gaining 24% over the past year compared with UPS's 12% advance.

FDX has gained a respectable 30% over the last three years, trailing the S&P 500 but far outpacing UPS's 23% decline. UPS's underperformance reflects a combination of post-pandemic shipping volume declines, restructuring costs, and greater vulnerability to broader macroeconomic headwinds.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

While FedEx has shown stronger momentum, UPS offers the more attractive valuation, trading near 13X forward earnings compared with 15X for FDX, although both trade at attractive discounts to the benchmark S&P 500.

Trading around $106 a share, UPS's discounted valuation could offer greater upside if its restructuring initiatives generate sustainable earnings growth. However, at over $300 a share, FedEx's accelerating revenue and earnings growth may still justify its modest valuation premium.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

UPS & FDX Dividend ComparisonDespite its underperformance in recent years, UPS has a significant advantage for income-oriented investors, offering an annual dividend of $6.56 per share and a compelling 6.2% yield.

While UPS offers nearly four times the dividend yield of FedEx, its annual payout represents over 90% of management's projected 2026 adjusted EPS, raising questions about future dividend growth and sustainability.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

In comparison, FedEx currently pays $4.88 annually, yielding approximately 1.6%.

That said, FedEx offers a more conservative payout ratio that is under 30%, offering greater flexibility to return capital through share repurchases, including $2 billion in buybacks completed between June and September.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

Conclusion & Strategic ThoughtsBoth UPS and FedEx appear attractive following their upbeat quarterly results and improved financial guidance.

UPS may be the better choice for value and income investors, given its cheaper forward earnings multiple and substantially higher dividend yield. Conversely, FedEx looks more appealing for growth-oriented investors, supported by faster revenue growth, stronger earnings momentum, and its ongoing transformation initiatives.

For now, both stocks land a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) following their sharp rallies, with further upside potentially hinging on upward revisions to FY27 earnings estimates after their strong Q3 results.

First Solar (FSLR - Free Report) came out with quarterly earnings of $5.3 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $4.64 per share. This compares to earnings of $4.24 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items.

This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of +14.22%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this largest U.S. solar company would post earnings of $2.74 per share when it actually produced earnings of $3.92, delivering a surprise of +43.07%.

Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates three times.

First Solar, which belongs to the Zacks Solar industry, posted revenues of $1.23 billion for the quarter ended September 2026, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 6.24%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $1.59 billion. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates just once over the last four quarters.

The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call.

First Solar shares have lost about 32.5% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 13.1%.

What's Next for First Solar?While First Solar has underperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock?

There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately.

Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions.

Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for First Solar was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and the current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $5.70 on $1.66 billion in revenues for the coming quarter and $17.63 on $5.07 billion in revenues for the current fiscal year.

Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Solar is currently in the bottom 25% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1.

One other stock from the same industry, T1 Energy Inc (TE - Free Report) , is yet to report results for the quarter ended September 2026. The results are expected to be released on November 12.

This company is expected to post quarterly loss of $0.12 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of +85.9%. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has been revised 9.5% lower over the last 30 days to the current level.

T1 Energy Inc's revenues are expected to be $274.83 million, up 30.6% from the year-ago quarter.

Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ:GILD) reported third-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company's third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

DaVita (NYSE:DVA) reported third-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

This transcript is brought to you by Benzinga APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/ for a consultation.

View the webcast at https://app.webinar.net/Q9G4E8oWJew

SummaryDaVita Inc. reported a third quarter adjusted operating income of $561 million and adjusted earnings per share of $3.82, with full-year guidance narrowed to an adjusted operating income range of $2.175 billion to $2.25 billion.

The company highlighted the successful pilot and upcoming national rollout of Expanded HD dialyzers, which promise significant improvements in patient care and mortality rates, though financial benefits are expected to materialize in the back half of 2028.

Integrated Kidney Care (IKC) performed ahead of expectations, with an increase in guidance for adjusted operating income to at least $65 million for 2026, aided by a new partnership with Humana and improved savings rates.

Investment in technology continues, though growth in tech spending is expected to decelerate; current investments are impacting full-year financial performance due to higher than forecasted costs.

The company is actively engaged with CMS and government agencies on policy updates, with a focus on fostering innovation and addressing economic dynamics in the dialysis sector.

Operational metrics showed improvement with a 1.2% year-over-year growth in treatment volume, although missed treatments were higher than expected in the third quarter.

Management remains committed to exploring growth opportunities in the IKC business, focusing on healthy contracts and aligned partnerships to enhance patient outcomes and economic performance.

Full TranscriptMichelle (Operator)

Good evening. My name is Michelle and I will be your conference facilitator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the DaVita third quarter 2026 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker’s remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period. If you would like to ask a question during that time, please press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then the number two.

Mr. Eliason, you may begin your conference.

Nick Eliason (Group Vice President of Investor Relations)

Thank you, and welcome to our third quarter conference call. We appreciate your continued interest in our company. I’m Nick Eliason, Group Vice President of Investor Relations and joining me today are Javier Rodriguez, our CEO, and Joel Ackerman, our CFO. Please note that during this call we may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. All of these statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. For further details concerning these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our third quarter earnings press release and our SEC filings, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, all subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and other subsequent filings that we make with the SEC.

Our forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to us and we do not intend to and undertake no duty to update these statements except as may be required by law. Additionally, we’d like to remind you that during this call we will discuss some non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures is included in our earnings press release furnished to the SEC and available on our website. I will now turn the call over to Javier Rodriguez.

Javier Rodriguez (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you, Nick. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining the call today. Once again, our teammates have delivered excellent care for our patients and solid results for our shareholders. We’re seeing meaningful progress across our clinical strategy with investments in innovation translating into better patient outcomes and stronger business performance. Our maturing Integrated Kidney Care business is a prime example as it continues to deliver clinical performance for our patients while starting to demonstrate its economic potential.

In the same spirit, our rollout of Expanded HD dialyzers marks an exciting new chapter in how we’re advancing kidney care today. I’ll share more on these priorities, review our third quarter financial performance, provide our outlook for the remainder of the year and briefly discuss policy. But first, as always, let’s begin with our clinical highlight. Today I will highlight our advancements in fluid management. We’re often asked about the clinical drivers behind our recent mortality improvements, and fluid overload is one of those critical areas we target. Because kidney failure impairs the body’s ability to shed fluid, managing fluid intake between treatment and safely moving excess fluid during dialysis requires constant vigilance for both patients and care teams.

Left unmanaged, excess fluid places strain on the cardiovascular and pulmonary systems, contributing to high blood pressure, heart failure and respiratory difficulties. By developing specialized clinical protocols combined with dedicated teammate education and proprietary digital tools, we’ve uniquely empowered our care teams to manage fluid more precisely. Through these integrated efforts, we’ve seen a 10% improvement in treatments achieving optimal fluid removal, a 5% improvement in how patients manage weight gain between treatments, and nearly five pound reduction in the average patient’s weight. These advancements are critical drivers supporting our continued mortality improvements and enhancing our patients’ daily quality of life.

Around the topic of medical, I will transition now to an update on our efforts to deliver better care for our patients through clearance of middle molecules. Last quarter we highlighted recent clinical evidence for Expanded HD dialyzers, including the potential for greater than 20% mortality improvement, along with our plans to deploy this technology broadly across our network. We have completed pilots in 150 centers for more than 10,000 patients to ensure a smooth in-center deployment at scale.

Based on this experience we learned, first, the feedback from patients and physicians was overwhelmingly positive. As background, approximately 75% of total patient census is clinically eligible for Expanded HD. This eligible pool excludes patients receiving dialysis at home or in an acute care setting, pediatric patients and patients with acute kidney injury. Adoption amongst those clinically eligible patients in the pilot was greater than 90%. Within that cohort, patients tell us they feel better after treatment and have more energy compared to prior therapy. One goal with Expanded HD is to enhance patients’ quality of life and it is exciting to hear early feedback to support this effort. Similarly, our physician partners have been overwhelmingly supportive. The buy-in from the medical community is critical to successful innovation and nephrologists have responded to the clinical evidence and are actively engaged to transform the standard of care.

We deeply appreciate the collaboration of our physician partners in our continued efforts to innovate. Second, we are operationally ready. Our teammates, systems, and supply chain are well prepared to successfully manage this transition. Over 95% of clinical teammates nationally are now trained on Expanded HD to ensure seamless care for our patients. As a reminder, the new Expanded HD dialyzers are compatible with our existing dialysis machines. As a result, we will begin our national rollout next week and expect network transition, bringing Expanded HD to the vast majority of eligible patients in November.

Finally, from a financial perspective we do not expect any material net impact on adjusted operating income for 2026 or 2027. We anticipate the positive impact of lower mortality and higher volume growth to begin in the back half of 2028 and grow over time. Most importantly, this innovation means more patients living longer, representing a key milestone in our path back to 2% or greater volume growth by 2029. Transitioning to financial performance, third quarter adjusted operating income was $561 million and adjusted earnings per share was $3.82. Joel will provide details on the moving pieces underlying those Q3 results. Taking a step back from the quarterly numbers to look at the full year, I want to highlight two trends shaping 2026 and our future performance, starting with technology. Over the past few years we’ve invested more than a billion dollars to modernize our technology platform and strengthen our capabilities across our business.

These investments are delivering tangible clinical and financial benefits, contributing to improvements in mortality, revenue operations, labor productivity, IKC care management, and pharmacy costs. I’m calling this out to highlight that our IT investments in U.S. Dialysis are higher than we forecasted heading into the year, so it represents a drag on our full year financial performance. Going forward, we expect that growth in technology investment will decelerate.

The second highlight is our results on Integrated Kidney Care, or IKC. We were above plan in the third quarter and we’re on track to outperform our original IKC guidance for the year. We made meaningful progress delivering on the patient impact we began talking about in 2021, both upstream in chronic kidney disease and for existing ESKD dialysis patients. Let me provide some color on the two operating levers which contribute to IKC’s financial performance.

First is the medical spend under management. As we have noted in the past quarters, we have been disciplined as we seek opportunities to grow this business. We’re making progress heading into next year, including our recent announcement of a Humana partnership, which will expand upstream care to approximately 10,000 chronic kidney disease patients. Second is our savings rate, which reflects our ability to lower the total cost of care and has steadily improved year over year.

This is particularly encouraging because it reflects continued gains in clinical performance as our care model matures. Our investment in technology is improving the ability of our care team to identify where and when to intervene to help our patients be healthier. Our clinical interventions are driving reductions in avoidable hospital admissions and readmissions while achieving higher rates of planned optimal dialysis transitions. These results improve patient outcomes while generating substantial shared savings for CMS and our Medicare Advantage health plan partners.

This gives us growing confidence in 2026 and the long-term economics of the IKC business. We now expect IKC to deliver at least $65 million of adjusted operating income in 2026, an increase of at least $25 million over the prior guidance. This all leads to an update on our financial outlook for the remainder of the year. With one quarter remaining in the year, we are now narrowing our full year 2026 guidance ranges. We now expect adjusted operating income within a range of $2.175 billion to $2.25 billion and adjusted earnings per share within a range of $14.30 to $15.20.

This reflects the increased guidance for IKC offset by higher U.S. Dialysis costs, particularly higher technology investments, as I previously noted. Before I turn it over to Joel, I want to briefly comment on two recent policy updates. First, yesterday CMS released the ESRD final rule. This confirms the permanent incorporation of phosphate binders into the dialysis bundle, which is a great outcome for patients and has been a successful cost saver for the government. Within the overall rate adjustment, there are more moving pieces than in prior years. The headline rate increase for large dialysis organizations is 3.5%, which is up 1.5% from the proposed rule.

Unlike prior years, this will be subject to downward quarterly adjustments after Q1. And second, a few thoughts on the Kidney Care National Plan released by HHS last week. We share the administration’s goals around earlier intervention, slowing disease progression, improving the transplant process, expanding patient choice and improving outcomes. We also appreciate the opportunity of the government to create a framework to urge further competition in this complex ecosystem.

Many of the plan will require policy development and potentially congressional action before translating into specific actions, and we look forward to working with HHS and the relevant agencies as that work progresses. I will now turn the call over to Joel to discuss our financial performance in more detail.

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

Thank you, Javier. For the third quarter, adjusted operating income was $561 million, adjusted earnings per share was $3.82 and free cash flow was $276 million. Today I’ll provide further details on the quarter’s results and some thoughts on Q4 and full year guidance. Starting with US dialysis adjusted operating income was in line with our expectations. I’ll walk you through the trilogy. Starting with volume, overall treatment volume grew 1.2% over the third quarter of 2025 and treatments per normalized day increased approximately 65 basis points year over year. Patient census increases drove the year over year growth primarily as a result of improving mortality. The census gain was offset in the quarter by an uptick in missed treatments.

As a reminder, the fourth quarter will have an approximately 1% headwind to treatment volume due to year over year day mix. Revenue per treatment was up approximately 1.1% versus the third quarter of last year and roughly flat sequentially. The year on year growth is the result of normal rate increases offset by lower commercial mix and lower phosphate binder reimbursement as expected through three quarters of the year. The impact on our exchange census from the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits continues to play out as expected.

Patient care costs per treatment were up 2.4% in Q3 compared to last year. Phosphate binder costs declined year over year as expected and partially offset the typical growth in labor expenses. Medical supply costs and professional liability expenses were higher than anticipated in the quarter. We expect these costs to revert to typical levels over time. US dialysis G&A costs were up less than 2% versus Q3 last year, excluding non-GAAP adjusted cyber expenses in 2025.

Technology spend continued to grow at more than 20% year over year in the quarter, but the non-tech component of G&A was lower in the quarter compared to last year as a result of our ongoing cost control efforts and expense timing. Turning now to IKC, as Javier noted, the business is performing ahead of our expectations. The outperformance this year is largely driven by a higher shared savings rate in our CKCC business, which is the Medicare Fee for Service demonstration project, as well as the value-based care contracts we have with Medicare Advantage insurers. This is partially offset by higher operating expenses due to higher physician payouts from our shared savings and the launch of a new CKD program with Humana.

We now expect this year’s IKC adjusted operating income to be at least $65 million, representing a $45 million improvement over last year and a $25 million improvement over our prior guidance. Turning to international, third quarter adjusted operating income was $46 million, a $20 million increase year over year. This performance is largely the result of growth and improved performance in our Latin America businesses. These results exclude a charge related to our operations in China which is not included in our adjusted operating income. The full year continues to track in line with our expectations for approximately $135 million of international adjusted operating income.

Transitioning to capital allocation, we repurchased approximately 600,000 shares in Q3 and we repurchased an additional 500,000 shares since the end of the quarter, including shares from Berkshire Hathaway. As a reminder, we repurchase shares from Berkshire each quarter as needed to bring their ownership back to 45% pursuant to our repurchase agreement. We finished September with a leverage ratio of 3.38 times consolidated EBITDA, about flat to last quarter.

Debt expense in the quarter was $150 million. In light of rising interest rates, I will remind you that we maintain three-year interest rate caps on approximately 80% of our floating rate debt for full year 2026. As Javier noted, we are narrowing our guidance ranges for adjusted operating income and adjusted earnings per share. Our new range for adjusted OI is $2.175 billion to $2.25 billion and our new range for EPS is $14.3 to $15.2. We anticipate free cash flow between $1 billion and $1.25 billion. That concludes my prepared remarks for today. Operator, please open the call for Q&A.

Michelle (Operator)

Thank you, Joel. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press STAR and then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press STAR then the number two. Our first caller is AJ Rice with UBS. Your line is open, sir.

AJ Rice (Analyst)

Thanks. Hi everybody. I appreciate the comments on the ESRD rule finalized over the last 24 hours. I know the industry had sort of felt like the rate in the original proposal for phosphate binders seemed adequate, but the underlying rate for the treatments ex-TDAPA was challenging. With the adjustments made, is there an ability to comment? One of the tricky things is how I know you guys had said the phosphate binder reimbursement would drop because ASPs were dropping in the relevant drugs.

Can you just comment on whether the drop in what they’ve included was consistent with what you’re thinking and how adequate is the move up in the rest of the rate?

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah, AJ, thanks for the question. So as you noted, it’s been 24 hours and we’re still unpacking the calculations. I’ll start with the picture which is our estimate right now, and I’ll emphasize that it’s an estimate, is that the net impact for us for the full year 27 will be 1.5 to 2%. As a reminder, a 1% change in Medicare for US is worth about $30 million a year. This is an improvement over the prior rule by somewhere north of 50 bps. And the important thing to realize is the rule works differently now than it has in the past.

Because of the change in the way that the TDAPA add-on payments are handled, they’re now recalculated every quarter rather than recalculated once a year. So the published number is really only the number for Q1. And you really have to break it into two components. There’s everything other than the TDAPA component, which is fixed for the year. And if you look at what that is for the LDOs, it’s 40 basis points and that’ll be constant for the year. And then the TDAPA component, which for the LDOs is 3.1%, that only stands for the first quarter.

And we expect that number to come down significantly in Q2 and stay down and potentially further decline over the course of the year. So we’ve got that 40 basis points locked in. That 3.5% will come down significantly and the net impact over the course of the year we think is 1.5 to 2%, stronger in Q1, a little bit weaker over the rest of the year.

AJ Rice (Analyst)

Okay. Okay, thanks for that and maybe my follow up. Interested about your comments on the IKC? It sounds like, it sounds like you feel it’s solidly profitable now you can start to grow it. Obviously you’ve got the Humana transaction. It seems like to me there’s probably a fair amount of business up for grabs. If you wanted to lean into growth in that area. Can you maybe talk about now that you feel like you’re at a consistent level of profitability, how much you might think about adding to that business?

Javier Rodriguez (Chief Executive Officer)

Sure. Let me take that one. AJ, this is Javier. We are in agreement with you. Our confidence and our capabilities both in the clinical and actuarial has now reached a point that we want to pursue more business. But as we emphasize, what you want is healthy contracts. You want your physician partners to be heavily involved. Our model of care is now scalable and you need integrated tech, which we now have. So we’ve got a lot of the pieces to the tool.

And now it’s about getting contracts and physicians that are aligned to make sure that we deliver on the care that both avoids hospitalizations and readmissions and brings down the cost.

AJ Rice (Analyst)

Okay. Okay, thanks.

Michelle (Operator)

Thank you. Our next caller is Andrew Mock with Barclays. Your line is open, sir.

Andrew Mock (Analyst)

Hi, good afternoon. Leaving the full year treatment guide alone implies treatments per normalized day would be up more than 1% in Q4 and an acceleration from the first three quarters. Is that the right way to think about the progression? And are you comfortable with that given the uptick in missed treatments you called out? Thanks.

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah. So Andrew, first your math is about right. It would involve an uptick in treatments per normalized day in Q4. I would expect that to come from two things. One is missed treatment rate reverting to a normal year over year pattern. What we saw in Q3 was missed treatment rates about 20 basis points higher than expected and higher than last year. And what we’re assuming for Q4 is that it reverts to a normal pattern. We’re assuming it’ll be consistent with Q4 of last year.

So that’s one thing. The second component driving it would be census. Census growth grew in Q3 anticipated and that census growth over the course of the quarter drives higher treatment growth per normalized day in Q4 rather than Q3. So those two things together would drive the uptick in Q4.

Andrew Mock (Analyst)

Great. And can you update us on the ACA exchange headwind in the quarter and comment on where commercial mix is tracking relative to the about 10.7 I think you were expecting in the back half? Thanks.

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

Yes, mix is down a little bit relative to the first half of the year. Very much in line with our expectations and we think we’re on track for that $40 million year over year headwind for 26.

Andrew Mock (Analyst)

Great. And finally, if I could squeeze one more in, wanted to follow up on your comments around HHS’s Kidney Care Plan released last week. What were your initial impressions and which elements of the plan do you think translate into policy? Thanks.

Javier Rodriguez (Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, thanks Andrew. As we said in our opening comment, we have a lot of things that we like about the plan and we are aligned totally and we share the goals of the administration of fostering innovation, investing in early detection and prevention and increasing access to transplant. When the plan came out, I immediately reached out to the administration and told them we want to be right there at the table and want to be part of the solution. And on each one of those, of course you can go into the sub component.

As for the part that was a bit frustrating, it’s how dialysis was portrayed in the rule. The fact is we offer world-class service and we are great economic value and this is confirmed as I travel the world and other countries really want our expertise to enter. That said, there were some positive things around what they said within dialysis, which is they want to solve for innovation in the bundle which we of course want as well. And they want to reduce regulatory burden, which we would welcome.

The part that’s a little, let’s say not fleshed out enough and we need to solve for is the economic ecosystem. 90% of patients are covered by the government insurance with roughly 1% Medicare increase for the past decade. And so there’s an assumption in there that the cross subsidy by the private insurance and the 1 in 10 is accepted by the model. And so one of the main things that they want to do is attract new capital. And in order to attract new capital we have to solve for this dynamic.

And one of the things is the government will have to pay more. If I was going to continue a little while, I got a little momentum because you hopefully can feel my passion on it is that there’s an under appreciation for the benefit of scale and expertise that as I look at our body of work over the last couple of decades we have developed and adhered to world-class protocols and best demonstrated practices. We have a dramatic reduction in mortality of roughly 25% if you measure it from the year 2000. When there’s an emergency or a disaster response, we are there.

When you look at sophisticated tech, we have it. When you look at access to rural communities, 92% of patients in rural communities are within 10 miles of our centers. And by the way, you need a counterweight to big pharma and big insurance or else costs would go up a whole bunch. So in summary, I really took a little to heart that we are part of the solution, not the problem. We welcome more competition, but I want to be clear, the limited competition is not due to how we operate but rather how hard it is to take care of this vulnerable population with high needs at 90% government mix.

And so you hopefully see the one part that got me going, but the rest of the plan I’m totally behind.

Andrew Mock (Analyst)

Appreciate all the color.

Javier Rodriguez (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you Andrew.

Michelle (Operator)

Thank you. And once again, if you would like to ask a question, you may press Star One. Our next caller is Pito Chickering with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open, sir.

Pito Chickering (Analyst)

Hey, good afternoon guys. Thanks for taking the questions. As you think about 2027, can you give us the known puts and takes as we think about modeling next year including the treatment growth that you’re seeing with the acceleration of the census in the third quarter and thoughts about treatment next year with what you learned about HCS, then the tailwinds from lower IT investments and any additional IKC tailwinds that we should be thinking about as you guys scale up?

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

Sure, I’ll take that one Peto, it’s early to give full guidance on 2027. That said, there’s certainly a few things that we can help with. On the volume side, I would say we expect volume growth in 2027 to be higher than volume growth in 2026. On RPT, we expect a headwind from commercial mix with ACA being the big component of that. And then on the cost side, I’d really call out pharmaceutical costs, which we think will come down in 2027. Binders being the biggest component of that, but not the only component of it.

You mentioned it, IT spend will not come down next year. Our expectation is it will decelerate. So the 20 plus percent growth that we’ve been absorbing for the last three or four years, we think we can get down from that. But I would expect it will continue to grow. So I’d say that’s the known stuff for next year.

Pito Chickering (Analyst)

Okay, great. And then on the HD dialyzer I think you said that all the centers will be doing it by November and expected to see a signal in mortality in the back half of ’28. But I’m curious, for the 10,000 patients that you’ve been treating so far, have you seen any indication of lower missed treatments that could impact the near term treatments? And how does this impact people on home hemo? Did they sort of come back in the center if people are having better results?

Thank you.

Javier Rodriguez (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you. And hopefully you hear the excitement in our tone in our physicians and our patients and our caregivers. This is one of the most excitement I’ve ever seen in the community. And the short answer to your question is it’s too soon to tell. This takes a while. As you can see from the studies in mortality that it takes a while to have the impact on the inflammatory side. As it relates to people switching modalities, I doubt that that will be the case.

People make modalities on a lot of other matters. And if you look at PD as a modality, it already is quite good at clearing middle molecules as an example. And so I think it will be just one other thing to consider, but I doubt that there will be shifts in modality selection.

Pito Chickering (Analyst)

Great. And the last question, because I’m getting asked this a lot, I mean again it’s back in 2027. I know that it’s way too soon for, for guidance here, but is there any commentary around just do you think that your standard growth rates that you’ve been having the last few years in business can continue next year with the headwinds and tailwinds, plus the IKC on top of that. Is that the way you’re thinking about it?

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

I think you’re right, Peto. It is too early to answer that question. Look, as we said, we think we get a better volume tailwind next year than we’ve had this year on U.S. Dialysis margins. I think we called out the headwinds, tailwinds. Headwind on RPT, a tailwind on cost. How those shake out, we’ll know more in February and then I don’t think we’ve really got much to say on either International or IKC yet.

Pito Chickering (Analyst)

Great. Thanks so much, guys.

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

Thank you.

Michelle (Operator)

Thank you. Thank you. Our next caller is Kevin Fischbeck with Bank of America.

Kevin Fischbeck (Analyst)

Great, thanks. Can you talk a little bit about the benefit to volumes that you saw from Fresenius closing sites? I wasn’t sure if there was supposed to be any kind of improvement in Q3 versus Q2 from that kind of normalizing. What did you see there?

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah, no, Kevin, that played out pretty much in Q1. So no change from Q2 to Q3 from that dynamic.

Kevin Fischbeck (Analyst)

Okay. And how do we think about the profitability? I know it’s a 2028 and beyond issue, but of the improvement in mortality from the new dialyzer, I think there’s some question about this, just, you know, kind of extending the life on dialysis. And that’s more of a Medicare, you know, as a percentage of revenue, would that be as profitable? Should we be thinking about it as if it added 1% to treatments, if it had 1% to revenue and 1% to OI, or is the growth algorithm different than that from improved mortality?

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah, so we’re still waiting for better data on this. The natural thing would be to think that just the older patients or patients are adding on a year or two and you go from an average of five or six years to six or seven. And those are all Medicare patients. The early results are that is not the pure dynamic, that there are younger patients earlier in their journey whose lives are being extended. So it’s not purely an addition of Medicare treatments.

How that shakes out, whether it’s the same mix of 10 or 11% commercial as we see overall or not? Too early to tell. But I don’t think we’re ready to conclude it’s 100% additional Medicare treatments as a result of this improved mortality.

Kevin Fischbeck (Analyst)

Okay, and then last question here. Going back to that release from CMS a week or so ago, I feel like one of the things that they focused on was the AKF exposure. Can you just remind us where that is for you, how you’re benefiting from that relationship?

Javier Rodriguez (Chief Executive Officer)

Sure. CareWell Premium Assistance, for those of you that have not been keeping up, was discussed very heavily if you go back maybe eight or so years. But we haven’t discussed it for a while, so it’s probably worth refreshing the topic. So it’s basically a system that’s been in place for many decades that enables patients, many who can no longer work full time due to kidney failure, to maintain continuity of health coverage. One of the things that’s not known is that the vast majority of patients receiving CPA use the grants to support government and supplemental coverage.

And so that’s probably assumed that for commercial. But the significant majority of commercial patients actually don’t use CPA. And for those that use it, most of them use it to retain coverage that they had before their kidney failure. So while there are many reasons to keep your private insurance, the most common is to retain it for family coverage and because there is a three times more likely odds of getting a transplant if you have commercial insurance. So I think we can all agree that those are worthy reasons to keep your insurance.

Again, just as a contextual thing, the grants are administered by the American Kidney Fund, otherwise referred to as AKF. And they have been under some major heavy examination through investigations, inspections, rulemaking and legislative scrutiny. And all have concluded that the grants benefit a vulnerable population and that the program follows the rules. And so now it’s been sort of pointed out in the plan as something to look at. We of course welcome and we will transparently go through the process again.

But one of the things that is interesting about the dynamic is that the irony that if that program is somehow or other diluted, it would actually make more patients be paid by the government. So that 1 in 10 commercial would go down. And the other thing that would happen is that it would attract less capital. And so ironically, this would be contra their intent to bring more competition to the marketplace. That said, I think your question was around sizing it and what I would just say is that in looking at it and we disclosed the numbers roughly eight years ago, the numbers have stayed completely flat.

So that range still applies today.

Kevin Fischbeck (Analyst)

All right, great. That’s helpful. Thank you.

Javier Rodriguez (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you.

Michelle (Operator)

Our next caller comes from Ryan Langston with TD Cowen. Your line is open, sir.

Ryan Langston (Analyst)

Great, thank you. On clinic capacity utilization, I think that’s been kind of steady for a few years, but still kind of well below pre-COVID levels. Do some of the initiatives you’re working on like technology, RPT and rolling out HD kind of work themselves through at some point, does pressing on this lever become more of a higher priority? And what types of things can you do to maybe increase that utilization?

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah, so look, we absolutely like to get capacity utilization up. The best way to do it is to grow our census count. We are doing that. As I mentioned before, our census count is up about 1%, a little bit more than 1% year over year. And we plan on continuing that. We do not have any plans right now to close clinics. That would be the other thing to do. So we’d like to get it up with more volume.

Ryan Langston (Analyst)

Got it. And then depreciation expense has been trending down sequentially for a few quarters here. Is this sort of a good run rate for us to kind of jump off of or might we expect that to come down a little bit in the fourth quarter? Thanks.

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

I think it’s been coming down for many years now. I think we’re getting to the point where we’re probably not going to see a lot of continued decline. So I think we’re in a reasonable spot where we are now.

Nick Eliason (Group Vice President of Investor Relations)

Michelle, can we go to the next question?

Michelle (Operator)

Yes. Justin Lake with Wolfe Research, your line is open. Justin, we can’t hear you.

William Westerfield (Analyst)

Hello? Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. Thank you for taking the question. This is William Westerfield, asking for Justin Lake. We just want to circle back to the final ESRD rates that came out last night, and LDOs were up 3.5% with much of that coming from phosphate binders and DefenCath moving into the bundle. Could you just go through for us how you view that 3.1% increase in TDAPA payments across those two drugs? More specifically, how does the $12-plus binders number compare to your current binder revenue per treatment for Medicare patients, and then for DefenCath, can you talk about how you will think about that reimbursement development across 2027 and when you provide guidance for next year?

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah, Will, thanks for the question. So I treat the two very differently: binders, very much in line with our expectation. Not much growth, not much of that 3.1% growth we think is from. We don’t have full visibility on the baseline for 2026 because it incorporates us as well as others. But we don’t think that’s really the big story in the 3.1% growth. We think it’s largely about DefenCath. And the important thing to realize on that is, because it’s a TDAPA add-on payment, it will get recalculated every quarter based on updated volume and updated ASP.

And our current expectation is that number will drop significantly from Q1 to Q2 and stay low or continue to decline through the back half of 2027.

William Westerfield (Analyst)

Okay, and then on top of that, is there something that you’re tracking to understand the utilization and how it might develop across the industry here in the second half in ’27 that could help investors get ahead of the potential changes in quarterly reimbursement for ’27? For instance, can we track trends?

Joel Ackerman (Chief Financial Officer)

I think the short answer is no. We don’t have a lot of visibility into what’s happening with the industry on that through the back half of 2026.

William Westerfield (Analyst)

Okay, thank you.

Michelle (Operator)

Thank you. And at this time I’m showing no further questions. Speakers, I’ll turn the call back over to you for any closing remarks.

Javier Rodriguez (Chief Executive Officer)

Okay. Thank you, Michelle, and thank you all for joining the call. To wrap up, let me give some perspectives on our year so far. First, our business is resilient in the face of pressure both from RPT due to ACA declines and from treatment volumes growing below our historical norm. Second is investment in innovation. We have heavily invested to modernize our technology infrastructure and we’re also in a full swing on the rollout of new dialyzers that promise to deliver step change in care with longer and higher quality of life for our patients.

Putting all this together, we’re delivering on our financial commitments with adjusted OI growth in the top half of our long term guidance and we’re working hard to finish the year strongly. It’s unusual to say at this time of year, but we won’t talk until a little while. Have a great holiday season and we’ll speak soon. Be well.

Michelle (Operator)

Thank you. This concludes today’s conference call. You may go ahead and disconnect at this time and please have a good rest of your day. Thank you.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company’s SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants’ and analysts’ statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.

© 2026 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

Palantir (PLTR -0.20%) went public via a direct listing on Sept. 30, 2020. A $1,000 investment at its earliest trading price of $10 would be worth about $19,400 today. That's an impressive six-year gain, but could it eventually turn that investment into $100,000?

How fast is Palantir growing? Palantir operates two data-gathering platforms: Gotham for government clients, and Foundry for commercial clients. These platforms create digital twins of a client's entire organization by collecting data from their databases, supply chain reports, sensors, internal documents, emails, financial records, social media accounts, and other disparate sources.

Image source: Getty Images.

Palantir then uses its data model, Ontology, to unify that fragmented data into an easy-to-query stream of information for non-technical users. Its clients can connect that data to third-party software and large language models (including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude) via its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) to make faster data-driven decisions. Its top customers include major defense and intelligence agencies, as well as commercial giants like Walmart, Amazon, and ExxonMobil.

From 2021 to 2025, Palantir's revenue grew at a 31% CAGR. It also turned profitable in 2023 and grew its EPS at a 165% CAGR over the following two years. The intensifying geopolitical conflicts drove the U.S. government to award more contracts to Palantir, and the growth of the AI market tethered more commercial customers (especially in the U.S.) to its platform.

From 2025 to 2028, analysts expect Palantir's revenue and EPS to grow at CAGRs of 59% and 70%, respectively. That growth should be fueled by the expansion of the enterprise AI market, new defense modernization contracts, and the monetization of AIP with subscription modules. However, its stock isn't cheap at 91 times next year's earnings.

PLTR Palantir Technologies$196.42-$0.39 (-0.20%)

NASDAQ · As of 4:00 PM ET 10/29/26

Palantir's near-term future looks bright, but it probably can't maintain those breakneck growth rates. If it matches analysts' estimates through 2028 and continues to grow its EPS at an impressive 30% CAGR over the following 13 years, its EPS would reach $94.19 by 2041. At 50 times forward earnings, its stock would be trading at $4,710 in 2040.

That would be more than 24 times its current price of $194 per share and turn $19,400 today (from a $1,000 investment in its direct listing) into about $471,400 over the next 14 years. It would also turn a fresh $1,000 investment into more than $24,000. We should take those rosy estimates with a grain of salt, but they suggest it has significant upside potential.

Leo Sun has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Palantir Technologies, and Walmart. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The company's fourth-quarter revenue projection came in short of expectations.

, /PRNewswire/ -- RTX (NYSE: RTX) announced today that its board of directors declared a dividend of 73 cents per outstanding share of RTX common stock. The dividend will be payable on Dec. 10, 2026 to shareowners of record at the close of business on Nov. 20, 2026.

RTX has paid cash dividends on its common stock every year since 1936.

About RTX
With more than 180,000 global employees, we push the limits of technology and science to redefine how we connect and protect our world. With industry-leading capabilities, we advance aviation, engineer integrated defense systems for operational success, and develop nextgeneration technology solutions and manufacturing to help global customers address their most critical challenges. The company, with 2025 sales of more than $88 billion, is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
This release includes statements related to dividends that constitute "forward-looking statements" under the securities laws. All forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Past dividends provide no assurance as to future dividends. The timing, payment and amount of future dividends, if any, could vary significantly from past dividends due to a number of risks and uncertainties. These factors include those described under the caption "Risk Factors" in our reports on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K filed with the SEC from time to time.

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SOURCE RTX

Stryker (NYSE:SYK) reported third-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

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Access the full call at https://stryker-3q2026-earnings.open-exchange.net/registration

SummaryStryker reported 7.7% organic sales growth in Q3 2026, with notable performances in MedSurg and Neurotechnology (9.1%) and Orthopedics (5.9%).

The company is facing challenges in its hip and knee and peripheral vascular businesses due to a market slowdown, cyber incident impacts, and SAP implementation distractions.

Despite the challenges, Stryker remains optimistic about the long-term potential of the joint reconstruction market and plans to launch a powered hip impaction solution next year.

Stryker completed the acquisition of Xeri Mary, expanding its sports medicine and arthroplasty support, and made a strategic investment in CMR Surgical for the Versius platform.

Q3 adjusted EPS increased by 10.3% to $3.52, driven by gross margin expansion and expense management. The company revised its full-year guidance to reflect softer market conditions.

Looking ahead to 2027, Stryker is optimistic about growth opportunities from new products and strategic initiatives, including the commercialization of AVS’s IVL platform and new data from the Peerless 2 study.

Full TranscriptLayla (Conference Operator)

Welcome to the third quarter 2026 Stryker earnings call. My name is Layla and I’ll be your conference operator for today’s call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the conference, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. This conference call is being recorded for replay purposes. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that the discussions during this conference call will include forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially are discussed in the company’s most recent filings with the SEC. Also, the discussions will include certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in today’s press release. That is an exhibit to Stryker’s current report on Form 8-K filed today with the SEC.

I will now turn the call over to Mr. Kevin Lobo, Chair and Chief Executive Officer. You may proceed, sir.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Welcome to Stryker’s third quarter earnings call. Joining me today are Preston Wells, CFO, and Nick Mead, Vice President of Investor Relations. Before I begin, I’d like to congratulate Spencer Styles on his appointment as Stryker’s next CEO. Spencer has spent nearly three decades at Stryker helping shape our strategy, strengthen our culture and drive our growth. You will have additional opportunities to hear more from him at various investor events over the next few months and I am confident you will come away with an even greater appreciation of his capabilities to lead Stryker into the future.

For today’s call, I’ll provide an overview of performance. Nick will then provide a brief M&A update followed by Preston with additional details on financial results and guidance. We will then open the call to Q&A. Turning to our third quarter performance. Organic sales growth for the quarter was 7.7% with 9.1% growth in MedSurg and Neurotechnology and 5.9% growth in Orthopedics. Our Endoscopy and OrthoTech divisions delivered double-digit performances and Medical also delivered near double-digit growth.

While we delivered solid growth in several businesses, our overall results fell short of our expectations. As Preston mentioned during an investor conference this September, we are facing challenges with our hip and knee and peripheral vascular businesses. Beginning with hips and knees, it is now clear that there is a market slowdown in the US. We are seeing slower procedural growth amid affordability concerns from higher insurance premiums and deductibles. We are also observing increased pre-authorization denials, creating additional friction and delaying patient access to treatment.

Europe and the Middle East have also remained soft amid regional disruption, strike-related delays and government funding decisions. In addition to the softer market, we have not been winning at our historical rate. 2026 has been an unusual year marked by the cyber incident in the first quarter and an SAP implementation within our orthopedics businesses in July. This is the last of our businesses to go on to SAP and while the system is functioning well, it has created a distraction for our teams and delayed our visibility of market conditions.

Although Mako sales have been strong again this year, we are behind our expectations on new product sales for Mako RPS and Triathlon Gold. The feedback on these innovations is very positive, but the cyber incident and SAP implementation have impacted our commercial execution. We are taking actions to improve competitive conversions and new product adoption. Finally, as a leader in power tools, we are excited about bringing a powered hip impaction solution to the market next year, addressing an important product gap in our hip portfolio.

We remain confident in the long-term attractiveness of the large joint reconstruction market supported by favorable demographics and expanded access through new sites of care such as ASCs. Next I’d like to give an update on our vascular business, which reflects a sequential improvement from last quarter. The third quarter included one-time revenue from our Peripheral Vascular joint venture in China as a result of achieving a regulatory approval milestone in September. This benefit helped offset the impact of lost revenue from the ongoing supply disruption that we discussed during our last earnings call. Our teams made meaningful progress restoring supply throughout the quarter and we now expect inventory levels and product availability to continue normalizing through the end of the year.

While this has been a challenging period, we remain convicted in the outlook for Peripheral Vascular as a growth business accretive to Stryker. Looking ahead to 2027, we expect to begin commercializing AVS’s IVL platform and also look forward to important data from our Peerless 2 study a FlowTriever. We are excited about our recently announced strategic investment in CMR Surgical, which Nick will cover in his section. Our updated organic sales guidance anticipates a similar overall organic growth rate for the company in Q4 as we achieved in Q3. This assumes a continuation of the procedure environment we observed this quarter as well as continued strong capital demand where we continue to maintain an elevated order book.

Meanwhile, our successful efforts on margin expansion are limiting the impact of our sales shortfall on adjusted EPS and we continue to generate strong cash flows. As this is the last of 57 earnings calls as CEO, I would have preferred to deliver better news, but we’ve demonstrated before that our business is resilient, our foundation and culture are strong and we remain confident in our ability to deliver on our long-range financial commitments. I will now turn the call over to Nick. Thank you.

Nick Mead (Vice President of Investor Relations)

My comments today will focus on M&A and will highlight two recent transactions. As announced earlier this week, we have completed our acquisition of Xeri Mary, which expands the support we can provide to specialists across sports medicine and arthroplasty. Zuri Med’s Differentiated Fiber Locker technology is designed to increase biomechanical strength and rotator cuff repair and provides a broader platform for orthopedic soft tissue augmentation.

Next, we recently announced an investment in CMR Surgical, an agreement to act as the exclusive US sales agent for the Versius platform. Soft tissue robotics is an attractive adjacency that is a natural extension of Stryker’s strengths in endoscopy, visualization and enabling technologies. Versius has been used in more than 50,000 procedures globally and its scalable design can support broader adoption of robotic-assisted surgery. With its new Versius Plus system approved indications, technology and growing global clinical experience, we believe now is the right time to partner with CMR and begin scaling the US market through a thoughtful, disciplined approach.

Together, these transactions reflect our continued focus on investing in opportunities that support durable long-term growth and value creation. I’ll now turn the call over to Preston to further discuss our third quarter performance.

Preston Wells (Chief Financial Officer)

Thanks, Nick. Detailed financial information is included in today’s press release. I’ll focus on our third quarter financial performance, the key drivers of our results, and our updated outlook for the remainder of the year. Organic sales grew 7.7% in the quarter against a strong prior year. Comparable pricing contributed 0.1% to growth while foreign currency had no impact on sales. The quarter had the same number of selling days as the prior year.

Quarter adjusted earnings per share were $3.52, up 10.3% from the same quarter last year, driven by gross margin expansion supported by operational efficiencies along with disciplined expense management. Turning to segment performance, MedSurg and Neurotechnology, organic sales grew 9.1% with growth of 9.6% in the U.S. and 7.2% internationally. Instruments U.S. organic sales grew 4.8% against a strong 15.3% prior year, comparable with double-digit growth in our interventional, spine, and surgical technologies businesses. This performance was offset by softer performance in our neurosurgical business due to the deferral of capital purchases ahead of the upcoming launch of our Sonopet 3 ultrasonic aspiration platform, which received FDA 510(k) clearance earlier this month.

Endoscopy U.S. organic sales grew 13%, supported by continued robust demand for operating room infrastructure and renovations and strong performance in sports medicine, where double-digit growth continues to be driven by its expanded range of shoulder implant products. Medical U.S. organic sales increased 10%, including double-digit performances for Sage and SmartCare businesses, while capital demand remains elevated across our portfolio. Vascular U.S. organic sales grew 13%, primarily reflecting the drivers that Kevin discussed earlier.

Internationally, MedSurg and Neurotechnology organic sales growth of 7.2% included broad strength across Endoscopy, Medical, and Instruments. Geographically, growth was led by robust performances in Australia, Germany, Canada, and India. Orthopedics organic sales were 5.9%, with growth of 6.4% in the U.S. and 4.4% internationally. U.S. knees organic sales grew 1.3% while U.S. hips organic sales declined 0.6% against strong prior year comparables. As Kevin noted, we remain focused on strengthening our commercial execution behind our enabling technology platforms and new products to restore momentum and drive share gains. U.S. Trauma and Extremities organic sales grew 4.5% against a strong 13.2% prior year.

Comparable current year growth reflected continued strong performance in upper extremities, supported by continued momentum across our differentiated portfolio, including early success of Mako shoulder on Mako 4. We are expecting strong growth for Trauma and Extremities in the fourth quarter. U.S. OrthoTech organic has increased 18%, supported by continued strength in Mako sales and robust demand for orthopedic power tools. Internationally, Orthopedics organic sales grew 4.4%, supported by knees, OrthoTech, and Trauma and Extremities, and was led regionally by Canada, Japan, Australia, Germany, and India.

Turning to margins and other income statement items, adjusted gross margin was 65.4%, up 40 basis points from the third quarter of 2025. The improvement reflected a net tariff benefit and benefits from operational efficiencies. Adjusted operating margin was 26.2% of sales, up 60 basis points from the third quarter of 2025, reflecting the gross margin improvement and continued expense discipline. Adjusted other income and expense was $91 million, down $25 million from the same quarter last year, reflecting lower debt levels.

We now expect adjusted other income and expense to be approximately $400 million for the full year. The third quarter had an adjusted effective tax rate of 16%. We now expect our full year effective tax rate to be in the range of 15.5% to 16%. Turning to cash and capital allocation, we ended the third quarter with approximately $3.3 billion of cash and cash equivalents and year-to-date cash from operations of $3.3 billion, an increase of approximately 14% compared to the prior year. During the quarter, we repurchased $1 billion of shares under our previously existing share repurchase program. Additionally, we received Board authorization for another $3 billion towards future share repurchases, which provides us additional flexibility while preserving our capacity to invest in strategic M&A growth opportunities.

Based on our year-to-date results, we are revising our full-year guidance to reflect softer hip and knee procedure trends, lingering supply constraints in peripheral vascular, and mitigation of operational execution risk related to capital equipment sales. We now expect full-year organic net sales growth of 6.5% to 7% and adjusted net earnings per share of $14.80 to $14.90. Our revised adjusted earnings per share outlook reflects continued expense discipline and gross margin expansion.

Looking ahead, we remain confident in the long-term trajectory of our business. Our diversified portfolio, leading positions in attractive markets, robust innovation pipeline, and expanding Mako ecosystem provide a strong foundation for sustainable growth. As we plan for 2027, our priorities remain focused on category leadership, advancing innovation, and driving operational excellence to deliver market-leading sales growth while continuing to expand margins and grow earnings.

We are continuing to assess market conditions, procedural volume trends, and the broader macroeconomic environment as we finalize forecasts for 2027. While we will not provide formal guidance until early next year, we do expect to deliver growth at the high end of our markets. With that, I will now open the call for Q&A.

Layla (Conference Operator)

At this time, we will open the floor for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press Star five on your telephone keypad. You may remove yourself at any time by pressing Star five again. We would like to remind callers to please limit themselves to one question and one follow-up question so we can accommodate as many participants as possible. And we’ll pause just a moment. Okay. Our first question will come from Robbie with J.P. Morgan.

Your line is now unmuted. Please go ahead.

Robbie Marcus (Analyst)

Great. Good afternoon. Thank you for taking the questions. Two for me. First, Kevin, clearly disappointing to hear about the ortho market. Where do you think market growth is now? Anything the industry could do to help stem the decline? Is it extremities as well as hips and knees? And then I have a follow-up.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Thanks. Thanks, Robbie. What we saw was really a slowdown in the hip and knee portion of the market, not really extremities. Our extremities business, especially upper extremities, continues to be very high growth. So we’re not seeing much of an impact there. It’s really the hip and knee market where we’re seeing the slowdown. It’s hard to estimate exactly, but I would say market growth is kind of in the 2.5% range this year. That’s what we think, which is definitely a step down from where it has been the last six years.

And as you know, it took us a while to figure this out. There’s a lot of noise with our cyber event, noise with some of the things going on competitively, and then our SAP implementation, which really delayed a lot of order entry. So we really started to figure this out kind of in early September when Preston made his remarks at the investor conference. But this has happened before in my tenure, earlier in my tenure, where we’ve had kind of a year like this and things have turned.

So we’ll have to monitor this closely. Certainly it was a surprise for us and that is reflected in our guidance.

Robbie Marcus (Analyst)

I appreciate you not guiding for 2027 at this point. There’s a lot of moving pieces here as we think about some of the shifting market dynamics. Where do you think Stryker’s weighted average end-market growth is as we head into year-end, and any puts or takes we should be considering respective to margins? I know this is a pretty healthy margin business in ortho. How should we think about that down the P&L? Thanks.

Preston Wells (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah, Robbie. So in terms of the weighted average market growth, and we said a year ago at our investor conference that we believe we were about 6% is what we thought we were. Now, obviously, if you take into account what’s happening across the joint replacement of the hip and knee market, you know, that’s probably taken a little bit of a tick down from there. So we’re continuing to look at and understand kind of where that nets out. So I think if we have those couple of pieces, you can see, you know, we’re probably a little bit of a step down from where we said a year ago in terms of our overall growth rate.

And as I mentioned in my remarks, our goal will be, as we start on 2027, that we will perform at the high end of those markets as we go into there. Looking at the margins, you know, our expectation around margins is that, you know, we want to continue to deliver what we committed to a year ago as well. You know, we feel like we’re putting the right plans in place from an operational excellence standpoint. We’re really getting after our manufacturing element and gross margins from that standpoint, as well as just looking at other efficiencies up and down the P&L. So you’re right, the joint replacement market is certainly a more profitable gross margin business.

But overall, we feel like we’re putting the right pieces in place to continue to try to drive margin improvement year over year.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Our next question will come from Larry Beigelsen with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Larry Beigelsen (Analyst)

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. So, Kevin, given this is your last earnings call, congratulations on creating a lot of shareholder value at Stryker, and Spencer, congratulations on your new role. I wanted to start with the CMR investment, actually. Why is CMR the right partner for you? How will you and CMR compete against the big incumbent? And if you do decide to acquire it, how will you absorb the high cost of developing and marketing a competitive soft tissue robot?

And I have one follow-up.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, thanks, Larry. Look, the soft tissue robotic market is very appealing. As you know, I’ve been talking about it for years. We’ve looked at every robot around the world and had multiple looks at these robots. When Versius Plus came along, the upgraded version of Versius, we got a chance to see something that we felt very excited about. We feel it is the best robot on the market to be able to succeed in multiple sites of care. The modular nature makes it great for the ambulatory surgery center as well as working well in hospitals.

And frankly, robotic penetration is very low in general surgery. So we look at winning as being able to convert open surgery and convert laparoscopic surgery to robotic regardless of competing with the incumbent. There’s plenty of room for two players in the market, but this will work in hospitals. This will work very well for high-volume procedures like cholecystectomies and appendectomies and hernias. And so it can be a very high-volume, simple-to-use small platform robot that’s highly, highly functional.

And to your question about risk, one of the reasons we’re going about it in this manner is we want to de-risk this and have our people do the commercialization in the US as an investor but not a full owner. Our hope and our plan is that we will eventually purchase this. We’re not going to get into details about when that would be, but that is our plan. This is our bet in the soft tissue robotic place. We’re putting a lot of resources on this and that is our expectation that we will be able to take out the asset and be able to drive value for Stryker.

We’ve done this before with Mako. And we had the challenges of development; this is further along, frankly, in its journey than Mako was when we acquired Mako. And again, we’re very excited. It’s a very high-growth segment of MedTech and we believe this is going to be a winning solution that we are hopeful to acquire in the not too distant future.

Larry Beigelsen (Analyst)

That’s helpful. And Kevin, it’s been a while since the last new product super cycle. You talked about the recent Sonopet clearance. You have the Hip Impactor next year and the Peerless 2 data. What other products or growth drivers would you highlight for next year? Thank you.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Well, we have the next version of Neptune, which is our big waste management platform within Instruments that’s coming in the first half of next year. That’s going to be a very exciting launch. We have the ABS product, as you know, that we’re expecting FDA approval towards the end of this year. That’ll be a shot in the arm for our peripheral vascular business. And we have in the not too distant future — we’re not going to give you dates — we have System 10 coming for power tools.

We have 1688 coming as well for endoscopy. And so we’re going to continue to be launching products on a pretty sustained basis across. And I’m not even getting into all the smaller products that we have. Obviously we’ve acquired a great platform for sports medicine with Zurbit that’ll plug right into our existing shoulder businesses. And so there are a bunch of other products which we’ll get into later on other calls. But major platforms, Neptune — major platform; Sonopet — major platform; 1688 coming, System 10 coming. So we have a lot. And don’t forget Mako RPS is just getting started. Triathlon Gold just getting started. Medial stabilized inserts doing very well.

And so the power tool factor is very important in hips for us. That’s a really important gap to be able to do competitive conversions. Having that power tool package can be very important for us in the hip business.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Our next question will come from Joanne Wunsch with Citi. Go ahead, Joanne.

Joanne Wunsch (Analyst)

Good afternoon. Thank you. Good noon and congratulations to you both. I do have a memory of ebbs and flows in the orthopedics market and editing market. But generally, could you remind what brought us out the last time and what can be learned from that to think about bringing us out this time?

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Well, in the past sometimes it’s been tied to economic activity. So when you see economic pressures, people feeling strained financially — I mean there are patients that today are having trouble being able to make their deductible because their deductibles are higher. And to be able to fund their deductible, they’re actually living with pain a little bit longer than they would like to. So as sort of economic conditions tend to improve for the, let’s call it, average person in the market, then you start to see the demand pick up.

And frankly these diseases are degenerative, so you can delay these for a while, but the pain reaches the point where you can’t sleep at night. And so we see this as not a market that’s going to go away. It’s just there’s this temporary delay that’s happening right now and the market will come back. It’s hard to predict exactly when, but it has historically tied more to sort of economic cycles. If you go back, Joanne, I think that’s a correlation you’ll probably note.

Joanne Wunsch (Analyst)

Oh, cool, thank you. And I think just to pick up from a previous question, to say you grow at the high end of where your market growth is, we’re all going to be updating our models and talking about lots of fun stuff. Can you give us some parameters around that? Just give us some footing as we think about next year? Thank you.

Preston Wells (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah. Joanne, I would just point you back to what we said a year ago again in terms of what we think our WAMGR is across all of our businesses. We’re not going to obviously go detailed business by business, but if we look at just that overall WAMGR, then think about this new kind of reality that we’re living within the hip and knee market and that probably takes a little bit of a tick down. And then again, our expectation is that we’re going to grow faster than what that looks like.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Your next question will come from Ryan Zimmerman with BTIG. Your line is unmuted. Please go ahead.

Ryan Zimmerman (Analyst)

Good afternoon. And Kevin, 57/4 is a nice run. Congratulations on the fourth quarter. I think if you look at the implied math, you know, it shakes out to around 7.9% organic, roughly in line with kind of what you guys saw this quarter. Preston, you know, you highlighted the areas that you think are going to be weak — orthopedics, peripheral vascular, etc. Maybe help us think about what’s accretive in the implied organic growth for fourth quarter, where you’re seeing momentum, where you’re seeing strength.

It sounds like extremities is holding up nicely in some of the other MedSurg businesses as well. But just help us offset some of that weakness or where you see that could be offset.

Preston Wells (Chief Financial Officer)

Absolutely. So, I mean, again, we expect that — like I said, I think that implied number is pretty good. I think we’ll be looking at areas like trauma and extremities, as you mentioned. We expect that to have a very strong quarter. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, the other areas I would look at: Medical will have a really good quarter. So we expect that to perform well. Instruments is another area that we would expect to have strong performances as well.

And then I think the others, again, it’s just a matter of keeping par with some of what we’ve done today. As Kevin mentioned, around peripheral vascular, while we still see that being pressured, it should be a little bit better underlying in terms of where we expect that to perform also. So I think we have a few areas that we’ll certainly be leaning on as we come into the fourth quarter, and we’ll continue to work on the execution in other areas that Kevin mentioned as well, even in some of those softer spaces.

Ryan Zimmerman (Analyst)

And maybe turning to capital — thank you, Preston, for that — and then maybe just turning to capital for a minute. I mean, you’ve talked about the strength of the order book, but at the same time it’s kind of balanced by some of your other comments around capital. And so if we could step back and give us your view of capital in the market, maybe what you’re seeing. There’s been a lot of chatter about 340B and the impact to hospitals. And so would love to understand kind of where you’re seeing maybe strong capital demand at higher price points versus lower price points, etc. I’d appreciate those thoughts.

Nick Mead (Vice President of Investor Relations)

Hey, Ryan, this is Nick. I’ll take that from a capital perspective. So, you know, really there’s two components there. There’s the demand side of the capital equation and then there’s us executing on the demand. From a demand perspective, the order book remains strong and elevated. And of course, there’s nuances by business, but by and large, the capital environment remains healthy. What we’re focused on is continuing to execute on that demand from a capacity perspective.

And we’re laser focused to ensure that we have plans in place to deliver on all those businesses that Preston just mentioned in terms of putting together the full year.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Your next question will come from the line of Travis Steed with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Travis Steed (Analyst)

Hey, thanks for the question, Spencer. Congrats on the CEO job, Chris. When you think about calling out market slowdown versus the winning rate and what data points are helping kind of build out what’s the market slowdown versus the win rate. And it seems like, at least to me from where I sit, maybe things got a little worse later in September versus kind of what was being messaged at the September conference. So I don’t know if things kind of worsened over the course of September for you as well.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, look, I wouldn’t say things worsened in September. We only gained visibility to the quarter kind of in the September timeframe because there were huge delays in order entry given the change to SAP. So we only recognized it later in the quarter. But it wasn’t just something that fell off in the month of September. And the other thing I’d say is if you look at our sales, we don’t do bulk sales within our hip and knee business. And so when you see our numbers, they tend to be pretty reflective of what’s happening in the market because we don’t have that exaggeration of bulk sales.

And it’s going to be a combination. The market’s definitely slow. We know we’re not losing major bits of business to the competition. So that tells us that it’s mostly market related. But we have been gaining share at a higher rate very consistently for the past five, six years. And our teams were distracted. They clearly weren’t focused as much on this. And that’s why we think the market growth definitely declined, but we weren’t taking share the way we had been taking share in the past.

Travis Steed (Analyst)

Okay, that’s helpful. And how does the cyber impact in 26 impact 2027? Is it an easy comp? Is there ability to catch up in 27? And I just want to make sure it sounds like 6% is kind of the floor for total company growth next year. I just want to make sure I heard that correctly.

Preston Wells (Chief Financial Officer)

Yes. Let me answer your cyber question. So we haven’t gone through yet all the different quarterly splits, etc., for next year’s planning process. But certainly as you look at cyber, it’ll be something that we’ll have to talk about anniversarying clearly in the first quarter. But then we’ll also anniversary bits of the recovery throughout the year. So we’re going to have to really talk through, as we go through each quarter, kind of the impacts as we can kind of detail them out.

But the reality is for much of the cyber incident, that’s been made back up just at different points in time. And I think when we look at our performance in ’27 versus ’26, it’s really going to be a matter of looking at kind of overall performance versus the market and any market changes that are happening from ’26 to ’27. In terms of the floor, we’re not setting guidance right now, so we’re just giving a bit of an indicator as to how we’re starting to think about ’27.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, I think the takeaway is the market slowed down. In joint replacement, we’ve had this challenge with SAP that we believe we’ll be through. It affected joint replacement and also affected our core trauma business pretty significantly. We think that we’ll be through that. And the underlying fundamentals of our business in every other area are strong. Capital demand, very strong. And we have a pretty good innovation cycle. So despite this order’s takedown on the guide, the fundamentals are still very, very strong. Looking ahead,

Layla (Conference Operator)

Your next question will come from Matthew O’Brien with Piper Sandler. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Matthew O’Brien (Analyst)

Afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. And Kevin, it’s been an absolute pleasure watching you grow this business. I guess I’m still a little hung up on this hip and knee commentary about Q3 here because if I look at your Ortho tech number, that was really good. It still seems like, generally speaking, the macro environment’s really healthy. I actually talked to a CDMO yesterday. They said things are pretty steady. I’m trying to reconcile this slowdown versus all these other data points that look like they’re still fairly positive.

And what I’m really kind of getting at is it feels like this could be a very short-term blip and that the recovery could be very quick. Is that fair? Are there certain parts of the market? I don’t know if it’s, you know, private-pay patients versus, you know, versus Medicare patients or anything else like that you can point to that says this is the one area that’s really slowing down and that we could see a snapback in that area going forward.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Look, I don’t have a crystal ball, so it’s really going to be difficult to predict if there’ll be a snapback. There have been confounding data points all year on the market. I mean, one of the big hospital chains just announced their results earlier this week and talked about a significant slowdown in hips and knees, and they’re a very large operator. So that’s a data point. Then there are other data points that say it’s not as bad. So I think your point is the most accurate point is things come back, and it’s hard to predict when they come back.

You might be right. There could be a snapback. But we’re not going to count on that. As we give our guide, we’re assuming it stays where it is right now. The market stays where it is. We have seen times in the past where it came back pretty quickly. We’ve seen other times where it’s taken a little longer, and I really don’t have a great feel for when this will return.

Matthew O’Brien (Analyst)

Okay. And then just quickly, on the vascular business it did look like it popped back up here a little bit, which is great to see. Can you just talk about kind of the state of the vascular business and then your IVL plans as we go into 2017? Thank you.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah. Look, the state of the business is we have a very stable and high-performing sales organization, which was last year’s challenge. If you recall, we had a lot of salesforce challenges. That’s well behind us, and the sales and marketing organization is really solid. As we came back up after the cyber incident, we had a lot of challenges with our manufacturing facility, and that put us in a backorder, and that has been very, very painful. It got better in the last quarter.

We also had the one-time benefit which I mentioned in my opening remarks, but I’m starting to feel like IVL’s—the excitement from our customers is incredible. Customers are really excited about the technology, the mechanism of action. And it’s the same customer that also uses our other peripheral vascular products. So we believe that synergy is going to be fantastic. Not only will the product, we believe, perform very well, but we believe it’ll have a synergistic effect on the base business.

So we’re looking—we’re just waiting for the FDA approval, and the teams are already preparing for launch.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Your next question will come from the line of Matthew Taylor with Jefferies. Your line is unmuted.

Matthew Taylor (Analyst)

Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask you a somewhat conceptual but also pragmatic question about AI. You know, you’ve seen other areas of the market, and even in healthcare recently, a lot of subsectors get credit for AI and the improvements that it could bring. It doesn’t seem like that’s really happened at all in Medtech, and yet you have a couple businesses now with robotics and surgery and connected care that I would think, over time, could have significant product benefits, development benefits from AI.

So I was hoping you could talk about that a little bit—why you think Medtech hasn’t gotten credit and the kind of benefits that we could see from AI on your business and in Medtech over time.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, I think what we’ve generally seen within healthcare, and Medtech specifically, is when you have new cycles of technology innovation, it tends to take longer before it has an impact. Just the regulated nature of our industry tends to cause it to take a little bit longer. Robotics is a good example where robotics has taken hold in a lot of other industries and more recently has really started to take off in Medtech. We focused a lot of our energy on AI for innovation.

Yes, we have some productivity initiatives ongoing, but we have three FDA-approved AI products, and you referenced a couple of them when you were speaking in your question, and we have a number of other ones. Most of our product innovations that we’re launching—anything in an enabling tech world—is likely going to have some kind of AI component to it, and we’re very excited about the promise. Bringing science to healthcare and using AI to help drive that science so that when you visit a surgeon, you’re not just getting their one lived person’s experience; you’re going to be getting a wealth of data at their disposition to be able to make informed decisions, just like we do with our Blueprint pre-planning software for upper extremities. So we are investing in it. You’re going to hear more from us. It is always a little bit slower in Medtech.

That’s just the nature of innovations in a regulated industry.

Matthew Taylor (Analyst)

Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Our next question will come from Vijay Kumar with Evercore ISI. Your line is unmuted.

Vijay Kumar (Analyst)

Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my question. Kevin, maybe my first one for you. When you look at ’27 and the new products you listed out, I think in the past when we had these System 9s and 1788 launches, you called them super cycles. I’m curious, given the current environment, how would you characterize this impact of new products? Is this still something that you would characterize as a super cycle for ’27?

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, look, the phrase was important because we had a number of platforms all being launched at the same time. And what I’d say is our innovation never stops, and sometimes the timing is just all at the same time; sometimes it’s metered out over—you have a power tool launch one year, a camera launch the next year, a Mako upgrade the next year. So sometimes they’re a little bit more spaced out. They just happened to be condensed all in one sort of cluster, if you will.

But I would say that we have great innovation. Ongoing innovation gets rewarded in Medtech, and so we are going to continue to invest in innovation. And the platforms—like I’m incredibly excited about—it has some features that it’s going to be a step change. So as 16-8 was a step change, 1788 was a little bit more. I think 1888 is going to be fantastic. Then we have System 10 and we have all the other products across our portfolio that will be launching.

Neptune is a great product. That platform change obviously drives growth. So every time we do these innovations, it drives growth, and that is not changing. That dynamic isn’t changing. And the capital market’s really good. We’re seeing our order book being elevated. We’re not draining our backlog. And we’re just, frankly—if you think about Medical as a good example—LUCAS 3.5 and ProCuity are still new products. I know they don’t sound new, but these products ramp over an extended period of time just because the replacement cycle is a lot longer on beds, stretchers, and defibrillators. And so the demand for those products is very significant.

And we’re actually building extra capacity, especially in beds. The demand is very strong. And so those are still kind of new products even though they’ve been launched a little while ago because of the replacement cycle. So we feel good about our innovation. It’s alive and well in our company. And a number of those launches will occur in 2017.

Vijay Kumar (Analyst)

That’s helpful. Question one for you. I saw the buyback in the quarter. You have a new authorization for 3 billion. What’s the, I guess, philosophy behind capital allocation decisions? Right. Is this something that you would consider as more opportunistic in nature when you think about deploying capital towards buybacks?

Preston Wells (Chief Financial Officer)

Vijay, thanks for the question. As we said last quarter, given the timing of when we have our deal flow from an M&A standpoint, we would look at more opportunistic share buyback opportunities, and that’s kind of what we saw. That’s what we saw in the third quarter, and we’ll continue to evaluate that in the fourth quarter as well. But just to reiterate—Nick talked a little bit about this in his prepared remarks—capital allocation, from our standpoint, the number one priority remains M&A. And so we want to continue to put our dollars towards M&A. But just given the timing of what we’ve had this year, what we see, this does just give us the opportunity to go out and do some opportunistic repurchases of shares.

The one thing I would say, too, is it doesn’t take away from any of our firepower. I think what we’ve been able to demonstrate over the last several years is a continued increase in our ability to generate cash at a higher rate—some of it’s scale, some of it’s the work that we’re doing on working capital and other areas. And so that gives us a lot of flexibility now to go out and enhance our capital allocation in terms of how we’re thinking about where we put our dollars to drive shareholder value.

So this just gives us another lever to do that.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, I’d just like to add something about M&A. So we continue to remain a disciplined acquirer. And we had a number of targets that we weren’t able to close on this year, and some of those targets basically didn’t stall and we hope will actually come back to us as opportunities in the future. And so we do have an active pipeline, but with the sheer amount of cash we’re generating, we’re able to do these buybacks and still pursue all of the deals that we’re pursuing right now.

And we intend to remain active in M&A going forward.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Our next question will come from the line of Chris Paschall with Barclays. Your line is unmuted. Please go ahead.

Chris Paschall (Analyst)

Thanks. You mentioned mitigating execution risk related to capital equipment sales as one of the factors behind the guidance revision. Was just hoping you’d elaborate on that. Are you saying you’re just being more conservative about what’s assumed between now and year-end just to absorb any delays that might crop up, or is there more to it in terms of what you’re seeing out there in the market?

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

No, Chris, I think that’s right. When Nick said earlier with regards to capital, demand is there. We’re seeing very, very strong demand. We talked about ramping production, which we’ve been doing, and we were able to do on many of our lines, particularly around Medical. It’s just making sure that we can match that production and supply with the demand as it continues to grow. So, again, it’s a bit of just a more conservative view in terms of our ability to make sure that we are executing at the highest level to meet all the demand that is out there from a capital standpoint.

Nick Mead (Vice President of Investor Relations)

I mean, as we look at the market, we typically do not tend to over-index on one specific quarter. If you look at the trends over the past, you know, 12 months, we really haven’t seen any notable movement in share. We’ve been growing more in line with market. You know, if you look back for the past few years, we’ve certainly been exceeding market growth by a meaningful amount. And over the past couple quarters, for a variety of reasons that Kevin talked about, we’ve been growing more in line with the market.

You know, as we think about our performance moving forward, we’re excited to play offense and certainly having the hip impactor in our portfolio is going to allow us to do that in 2027 and beyond.

Preston Wells (Chief Financial Officer)

The thing I would add from a knee standpoint—Kevin mentioned this—is really just continued execution of our enabling tech strategy, really talking about Mako 4, Mako RPS, along with the new products that he mentioned with Triathlon Gold and MSI. Those are elements that we feel give us a lot of opportunity to play offense, as Nick mentioned.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah. And I’d add that the medial stabilized insert is actually doing very well and getting really positive feedback. It’s a poly insert, but there’s a demand in the market and to be able to convert business, that’s something we’re very bullish about. That start has been very good and I think that could be an accelerator going forward.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Our next question will come from Patrick Wood with UBS. You’re unmuted. Please go ahead.

Patrick Wood (Analyst)

Beautiful. Thanks, guys. Two quick ones. One, just the state of the union on the SmartCare business—like for Vocera and Care AI. I know obviously ours last quarter, but that’s been a big push this year. So that’s the first one. And the second, extremities is obviously still doing very well. What do you think it is that’s distinct about, say, shoulder, that is enabling it to sort of bat off some of the pressures that hip and knee has seen? I know the base market growth is way higher, but in your mind, what’s distinct about the patient pool that’s enabling that to remain as strong as it sounds like it is.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, so the first thing I’d say is SmartCare had its best quarter in our history this past quarter. So it was a big contributor to the growth in Medical. It’s small relative to the size of Medical in dollars, but it had very high double-digit growth in the quarter. Orders are picking up. The integration of Care AI with Vocera is smooth. We’ve moved things to the cloud. So a lot of the early integration pains that we’ve had, we’re through that, and we are very excited about the momentum—the most excited I’ve been since, frankly, we’ve done those acquisitions.

The integration is smooth, the customer experience is terrific. Virtual nursing is really becoming a common topic across hospitals to drive productivity, and Care AI is very well suited for that. So I would say I’m more bullish than ever about this. It’s taken us a while, admittedly, but we had a terrific quarter in Q3 and we expect that to continue going forward. Second part—oh, shoulder. Yeah, shoulder. Look, it’s a little bit a newer joint. If you think about hips and knees have been around a long time. Shoulder, the results from shoulder joint replacement are really terrific. In the past, they sort of didn’t have the same degree of great outcomes, and obviously we’re the number one player in that, with the Tornier implants that we have and so many innovations that we’ve launched—short stem, stemless.

We now have Mako Shoulder, that application that’s creating us. We have the pyrocarbon that’s really great for sort of a hemiarthroplasty. So we have so much innovation and we’ve sort of been scaling those innovations in Shoulder ID, which is a personalized glenoid. These are all launches we’ve had over the past two years that have kind of scaled and created tremendous differentiation in our shoulder business. So the market as a whole is growing faster and has been growing faster than hips and knees for a while because it’s a newer market where people are now seeing great outcomes, telling their friends about it.

And I think it’s going to be a very big market in the future because a lot of people are living with pain and that they get addressed. And I think that Mako Shoulder will actually potentially grow the market, as hip and knee surgeons that used to do shoulders, if they’re familiar with Mako, they may very well go back to doing shoulders again, which they potentially had abandoned in the past.

Patrick Wood (Analyst)

Thanks, guys.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Our next question will come from Mike Mattson with Needham and Company.

Mike Matson (Analyst at Needham & Company)

Yeah, thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to ask one on the commentary around the hip and knee market. I think you’re seeing two and a half percent growth. Was that kind of your estimate of the year-to-date growth or the growth in the third quarter? Because just looking at your numbers in the third quarter, it looks like you were about flat, which would imply a fair bit of market share loss. It sounds like you’re sort of saying that you think you grew in line with the market.

I’m just trying to figure out, has the market gone from low to just more flattish in the third quarter here?

Preston Wells (Chief Financial Officer)

No, so—so again, I think Nick mentioned this as well. You know, we never look at a quarter in this hip and knee market and kind of say that’s indicative of a trend. And so when we talk about two and a half, we’re really trying to understand and extrapolate over the course of the year or even the last trailing 12 months—hard to do since not everybody’s reported yet. And so we have to wait and see what that looks like. But that’s our read on the market kind of year to date—is that, roughly, we’ll call it roughly two and a half is where it’s growing.

Mike Matson (Analyst at Needham & Company)

Okay, but the message is that you think it was slower in the third quarter than the first half of the year.

Preston Wells (Chief Financial Officer)

We do think it slowed down a bit more. We do think it slowed down a bit more.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Our next question will come from Jason Bedford with Raymond James.

Elaine (Analyst at Raymond James)

Hi, this is Elaine on for Jason. Thanks for taking the question. You talked about the factors driving the ortho slowdown and I was wondering, are you seeing similar dynamics have an impact on MedSurg volumes or would you say that MedSurg is more insulated given the acute nature of the procedures?

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, the latter. We see that’s more insulated. We have not seen a slowdown there. Preston talked about our growth drivers heading into Q4 and a lot of those are on the MedSurg side.

Elaine (Analyst at Raymond James)

Okay, thanks. And I’ll have a follow-up. So OrthoTech came in a bit better than our expectation, despite the broader ortho softness. Can you talk about what enabled it to do better? And do you have an update on the progress with Mako Shoulder and Mako RPS? Thanks.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah. So yeah, we were very pleased with the OrthoTech performance. Mako growth was tremendous. And as a reminder, we have a balance between upgrades as well as brand new installations, and that balance continues since we launched the Mako 4 platform. We also had a very strong performance from our orthopedic instruments business—so those are the power tool–type business. They did very well. Capital sales there were very strong in the quarter. So those are both very good.

And then Mako RPS is off to a slow start—really good customer feedback, but we’ve got to get our salesforce playing offense, and they were a bit distracted last quarter. So we have incentives in place and a commercial offense that’s going to lean in a lot more on RPS as we go forward. And then the shoulder for Mako is getting really, really good feedback and contributing to the shoulder growth.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Our next question will come from Mike Kratke with Leerink Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Sam (Analyst)

Yeah, hi, this is Sam on for Mike. Thanks for taking our question. So it just seems like we’re hearing anecdotes of price competition getting more intense in orthopedics. So we’re just wondering what you guys are seeing out there on the pricing side and your expectation for 2027.

Preston Wells (Chief Financial Officer)

Yes. From a price perspective, we’ve maintained kind of our same expectations through the year. I mean, we expect modest price across the entirety of our portfolio. That’ll likely come more on the MedSurg side—we’ll get some positive price—and on the ortho side, you know, we’re trying to hold as much price as possible, but we’ll end up in a slightly negative position, which is not significantly different than where we were last year. And so from our perspective, we’re not expecting anything significantly different than that.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, you know, we—I picked up some noise in the market around prices going down because of bulk sales. So there is some activity. It’s not happening at Stryker; we don’t do bulk sales. We report our price—we actually report price, which not everybody does in our market. And so that’s what I hear. Outside of that sort of base business, normal contracting, it’s a pretty stable pricing environment. So that’s the noise that we hear, but it certainly doesn’t apply to us.

Sam (Analyst)

Got it. Helpful. And then just on the vascular side, you know, can you provide any color on how much in share loss during this interim disruption you kind of view as temporary versus potentially more durable, and you know, how difficult it may be to get back any lost share in accounts that have been disrupted.

Nick Mead (Vice President of Investor Relations)

Yeah. So what I would say is we feel really good about being able to get back on offense, as Kevin mentioned. And so anything that we feel like we’ve lost we believe is temporary and that we’ll be able to get back out and start winning that business back. Certainly having AVs and launching that product sometime next year will be a big help as we continue to build out and diversify the portfolio to have a winning offense in ’27.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Our next question will come from the line of Richard Newitter with Truist. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Richard Newitter (Analyst)

Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe just the first, congrats on the CMR Surgical deal. I guess maybe you could just tell us why that asset. Kevin, you’ve talked a lot in the past—you don’t feel rushed, you guys are going to make the right decision—and just maybe also as you answer that, the why now, why that asset? And then why not just purchase it outright? Thank you.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, I think I sort of mentioned this earlier in the call, but an outright purchase comes with a lot of risk and then huge costs for continued ongoing development. And we have to make sure that this is going to be a commercial success in the United States that really will determine the ultimate success of CMR. And so we are going to actually run the sales office in the United States and we know how to run sales. So we believe it will be very successful.

But we don’t want to put all our eggs in this basket. It’s a high-risk kind of a deal. There’s still ongoing development. They have a really strong team. They’ve changed to Versius Plus, which has been excellent. We’ve been talking to this company for a long time, for many years. We know them very, very well. We’ve watched their trajectory. They have about 10-plus years of experience, and time over target in robotics is actually really important.

We saw that with Mako. Having all those years under their belt before we acquired it was massively helpful. But we don’t want to just jump in here. Unlike Mako, which had implants attached to it, this is a pure adjacency and it’s not something we wanted to rush into necessarily. And it’s just a risk we felt we didn’t need or want to take at this time and also put a lot of other financial pressures onto the rest of our portfolio. So it’s financially de-risked, operationally de-risked. But we like the partner. We have a great relationship with their leadership.

And the Versius Plus—the improvements that they made to that system—we always liked the design, the modular nature, easy to move around between rooms. So great for the ASC or great if you have a lot of surgeons that want the robot. Today, there’s many surgeons that would love to use a robot, but they don’t have one in their hospital. And this is, as I said, great for those high-volume procedures that’ll switch from being laparoscopic and open into robotic.

So the feedback—we did surgeon testing, a lot of evaluations—and feedback was really positive. We hired a medical director on as part of the endoscopy team, Dr. Santiago Horgan, who is very famous, and he looked at every single robot. He was our chief advisor on this, but also used a panel of surgeons to assess all different robotic technologies. There were a few that we liked and this one was the clear winner. But not jumping in, all told, is because it’s a new space, it’s a pure adjacency.

There is obviously a large incumbent and we have to be able to prove the U.S. success. But our plan is this does work and that we do eventually take it. Yeah, well, for now we’re going to hold off making any comments until we see it in the marketplace. But we love our solution, which of course has multiple applications on the same robot, which this will not have, and obviously proven success. Robots aren’t easy and as we’ve seen with other offerings in the marketplace, it takes a little while to get it to start to perform in a decent way. And we have the leading platform. We looked at this company, obviously, earlier on, but I’m going to reserve judgment and wait till we see what happens.

Let’s see it come to market. And all I can say is robots are hard and it’s not something that I’m really afraid of in the near term. But we’ll see.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Our next question comes from Matt Blackman with TD Cowen. Your line is now open.

Matt Blackman (Analyst at TD Cowen)

Hi, thanks for taking the question. Kevin, just one for you and then one for Preston. You were talking about CMR a few times in the call, but I’m just curious if you could give us maybe a deeper view on where you think the biggest opportunity is. Is it just conversion from lap or open? Which bucket do you think has the largest opportunity? And maybe how should we think about the potential for you to integrate your tower with CMR? You mentioned 1888 is coming.

It’s a step change versus 1788. Just curious if that really helps you go deeper in existing surgery suites. Does it seem to help you?

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah. So the second part of your question I’m really not going to answer because we haven’t bought the company and, in fact, we haven’t even closed our agreement, but it will close shortly. But we’re going to work with CMR. It’s still their company. We’re an investor, we have a stake in the company, and we have a board seat with the company. But we’ll work with them. You do need a tower with their robot and, obviously, if we’re commercializing the robot, chances are we’re going to try to partner with our tower.

But there are a lot of synergy opportunities and we will work with them on some of those synergy opportunities. And then ultimately, when we eventually acquire this, then we’ll be able to talk at length about our plans. So for now it is a relationship that we have with them and we will show them things that we can collaborate on. But ultimately they’re going to have to agree because it is still their company. Definitely the biggest opportunity is conversion of laparoscopic and open to robotic. That’s where the biggest opportunity is. Again, it doesn’t mean that we won’t be chosen in some cases versus the competitive offering. But that’s really not the prime focus. There are a lot of procedures done today and laparoscopic isn’t easy. Laparoscopic suturing is not easy. Robotics will make these procedures easy to perform and we think that’ll drive much higher adoption of minimally invasive surgery.

Matt Blackman (Analyst at TD Cowen)

Thank you. And Preston, earlier in the call I think someone mentioned that there was a China JV revenue ahead in the quarter. Just wondering if you might be able to quantify it for the quarter.

Preston Wells (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah, so yes, we did get a one-time benefit out of our joint venture in China. As a reminder, this was a joint venture that was based when we purchased Inari. We aren’t calling it out specifically. What I would just say is the underlying business—the ongoing underlying peripheral vascular and vascular business—is about in line earlier in September and similar to the performance and impact that it had on the business in second quarter.

Layla (Conference Operator)

Our final question will come from Vic Cho with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is now unmuted.

Vic Cho (Analyst at BMO Capital Markets)

Thanks for squeezing me in. Just a quick question for you on ZuriMED. I’m just wondering how that FiberLock technology expands the soft tissue augmentation portfolio and anything you can share around revenues and timelines. Thank you.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Look, it’s a little early for us to share much on revenue and timelines. What I’d tell you is it’s a very differentiated performance product. It has an open system in terms of the type of material that you’re able to attach to drive that fixation. We love the applicator. The applicator is almost like magic the way it applies the fixation—really designed—and we think it’s going to be an absolute winner. As you know, this is an area that rotator cuffs have a lot of failures.

And this additional augmentation will provide tremendous clinical benefits. And it has been a fast-growing part of the market. We did not have a solution for this and we looked at similarities and we passed on them because we didn’t feel they were differentiating enough. And this one is the one we feel will be an absolute winner. We already have, and the timing is just perfect. We can launch all these shoulder products and now we have this augment as well.

So it’s really something that we’re excited about. We’ll share more details as we launch it in terms of success, but I do believe it’s going to be a winner in the market.

Layla (Conference Operator)

There are no further questions. I will turn the call over to Kevin Lobo for closing remarks.

Kevin Lobo (Chair and Chief Executive Officer)

Well, thank you all for joining our call and thanks for all the time we’ve had over the years. We look forward to sharing our Q4 and full year 2020 with you. The next earnings call. Thank you.

Layla (Conference Operator)

This concludes the third quarter 2026 Stryker earnings call. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company’s SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants’ and analysts’ statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.

© 2026 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

Black Kow expands to retailers nationwide and launches new organic products for gardeners  | Source: Scotts Miracle-Gro Company (The)

MARYSVILLE, Ohio, Oct. 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company (NYSE: SMG), home to North America’s leading consumer lawn and garden brands, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of the Black Kow brand from Organics Management.

Following a successful licensing partnership established in January 2026, the Company exercised its purchase option to bring Black Kow fully into its core Gardens portfolio. Known for its iconic yellow bag and trusted for generations, Black Kow is the leading brand of naturally composted cow manure and organic soil amendments. By integrating Black Kow into ScottsMiracle-Gro’s expansive manufacturing and distribution network, the acquisition transforms a regional favorite into an accessible brand for gardeners from coast to coast.

Strategic Integration Pillars: Driving National Distribution and Product Growth

The addition of Black Kow extends ScottsMiracle-Gro’s commitment to organic, regenerative gardening solutions through three core initiatives:

Nationwide Retail Availability: Expanding Black Kow’s footprint beyond its traditional eastern U.S. base into retail outlets nationwide.New Ready-to-Use Organic Mixes in fiscal 2027: Thanks to rapid innovation by ScottsMiracle-Gro scientists, launching new, premixed organic potting, raised-bed and in-ground soils powered by Black Kow compost, delivering upon the growing consumer demand for natural gardening solutions.Single-Ingredient Soil Builders: Expanding the portfolio of single-ingredient amendments tailored to DIY growers who prefer to customize their own soil mixes. Financial Impact and Strategic Fit

“The Black Kow acquisition is an important milestone in our multi-year SMG 2.0 growth plan,” said Nate Baxter, president and CEO. “It is a testament to our tuck-in M&A strategy, taking a trusted brand with strong consumer loyalty and integrating it seamlessly into our core business. This transaction is expected to improve our leverage ratio and contribute to sales and profitability growth in year one. Black Kow will create sustainable value for our shareholders while meeting growing consumer demand for organic gardening solutions.”

Portfolio Synergies with Miracle-Gro

Sadie Oldham, vice president and general manager of the Gardens business, added, “I am incredibly excited to lead the integration of Black Kow into our Gardens portfolio. The synergies between our Miracle-Gro and Black Kow brands are undeniable. Black Kow’s heritage as a trusted, natural soil amendment complements the performance-driven nutrition of Miracle-Gro, giving us a highly differentiated product mix. We are uniquely positioned to deliver a complete, premium gardening solution to every type of grower.”

About ScottsMiracle-Gro

With approximately $3.3 billion in sales, the Company is home to North America’s leading consumer lawn and garden brands. The Company’s brands are among the most recognized in the industry. The Company’s Scotts®, Miracle-Gro®, Ortho® and Tomcat® brands are market-leading in their categories. For additional information, visit us at www.scottsmiraclegro.com.

For investor inquiries:
Brad Chelton
Vice President
Treasury, Tax and Investor Relations
[email protected]
(937) 309-2503

For media inquiries:
Tom Matthews
Chief Communications Officer
[email protected]
(937) 844-3864

Republic Servs (NYSE:RSG) reported third-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company's third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

Coinbase Global earned third-quarter adjusted net income of $719 million, up 66% from $433 million a year ago, largely due to a recovery in the cryptocurrency market.

Coinbase said it earned $2.51 a share in the latest quarter, although it wasn't immediately clear if that compared with the 6-cent-per-share profit that Wall Street analysts had estimated. Revenue of $1.20 billion trailed the $1.233 billion expected by analysts polled by LSEG.

Net income at the San Francisco-based platform surged thanks to the value of its volatile cryptocurrency investment portfolio, which can swing wildly even when the composition of the underlying holdings are little changed.

The third quarter value of Coinbase's crypto investment portfolio climbed due to a resurgence in the digital asset market. The price of bitcoin — often used as a gauge for all crypto assets — rose 39% in the three-month period ended Sept. 30 and the flagship cryptocurrency recently changed hands at roughly $80,809. 

Building beyond bitcoin In the third quarter, Coinbase deepened its push into non-crypto products and services, including artificial intelligence integrations for traders, tokenized real-world assets and prediction markets.  

In July, VP of product Max Branzburg told CNBC that Coinbase would debut an "everything exchange" spotlighting tokenized stocks and other real-world assets, derivatives trading, prediction markets and early-stage token sales. The trading platform also introduced Coinbase for Agents in early October, supporting users that want to use ChatGPT, Muse or other AI agents to manage their portfolios or research and trade various assets.

Coinbase also expanded its prediction market offerings, making a wider range of event contracts available to users.

In the third quarter, prediction markets revenue grew to more than $200 million on an annual basis, while the number of traders on those markets increased 60% compared with the second quarter.

The video-game company said average daily users were down 9% to 138 million, and engagement hours fell 15% to 34 billion.

Roblox (NYSE:RBLX) reported third-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company's third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

Strategy (MSTR -2.44%) earned $19.5 billion in the third quarter, or $44.75 per diluted share, and almost all of it came from the rising price of the bitcoin (BTC -2.53%) it holds. Shares were flat in early after-hours trading. The profit tells you bitcoin rebounded, not that the business improved. The measure that matters went the wrong way, because each share now holds less bitcoin than it did in January.

Key NumbersNet income: $19.53 billion, up from $2.79 billion a year ago.Gain on digital assets: $20.91 billion, up from $3.89 billion a year ago.BTC Yield, the change in bitcoin per share: negative 3.7% year to date.Total revenue: $125.4 million, down 3% from a year ago.What It MeansStrategy marks its bitcoin to the market price every quarter, and the change runs straight through earnings. That means a record profit mostly tracks the price of the coin, while the small software business barely moves the result.

Bitcoin per share is the real scorecard for this company, and it is shrinking. Strategy grew its pile of coins 26% this year, but its share count grew even faster, so each owner's slice got smaller.

MSTR Strategy$141.62-$3.54 (-2.44%)

NASDAQ · As of 4:00 PM ET 10/29/26

Cash is also flowing out to defend the company's preferred stock. Strategy spent about $2 billion this year buying back its STRC preferred shares while they traded below face value. It has also sold some bitcoin to help pay for those buybacks and for preferred dividends, so a company built to pile up bitcoin is now selling some to prop up its own credit.

What to Watch NextWatch whether BTC Yield turns positive next quarter. Also track how much bitcoin Strategy sells to cover dividends and STRC buybacks.

David Kretzmann has positions in Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.