Titan Medical Inc (TMDIF)

[66Mustang]

Just catching up; stuck in meetings this morning and more to come this afternoon...

The article provides a nice reminder of a few things, including the ever-present question of "Why would Medtronic care if Titan raises $18M?" Unless it was so MDT or one of their hidden partners could get a leg up on the share acquisition process, all I ever could come up with is that MDT wanted to ensure Titan had funding to get through their joint development program. But if that funding was in question up front and Titan was at risk of going under due to those development costs, it would have been logical for MDT to take over Titan at that point of desperation. So alternate theories still don't really add up.

As for subsequent posts on this topic (Times, SPORT, Dice) all valid points but mostly ongoing questions. There would certainly be some benefits to not only redundant use of hardware designs for production costs, common training, surgeon feel across multiple platforms... but being able to pick and choose which features to deploy across an entire product line. Maybe MDT liked our camera and imaging system and rolled that into Hugo - maybe less of a schedule hit because it isn't the surgeon interface or patient interface, and as noted, we haven't really seen any noticeable change to Hugo's design from September 2019, but that wouldn't be easily recognizable as different. For surgeon controls, who knows... maybe MDT prefers their original Hugo hardware and the Enos delay is that those hand controls are being adapted to Enos!

Other benefits to shares hardware across platforms can lead to additional competitive advantages in the market. My understanding is that a hospital upgrading from a da Vinci Si to an Xi can't even use the freaking drapes they had in stock. Everything new, nothing interchangeable, maximize customer costs - nice business model when you have no real competition. So if MDT listens to ISRG customer complaints, maybe they will intentionally deploy as much commonality and re-usability in their systems and accessories to have a true economic advantage, especially with a system like Enos which was initially designed for lower budget organizations.

All IMO, as always; and... Thanks to all who continued this line of conversation in a friendly and professional manner! Would like to catch up on additional thoughts when I get a chance!


Message in reply to:
This article sums up my opinion nicely. I’m pretty sure Medtronic is using Titan to keep Hugo development moving along as their own developers needed help while struggling with working remote. There’s probably not much more to it than that.

https://www.medtechdive.com/news/medtronic-titan-medical-robotics-development-license-agreements/579198/