Good morning, everyone. Welcome. I'm Robbie Marcus, the Med Tech Analyst at JP Morgan. Really happy to introduce our next session with Abbott Labs and the CEO, Robert Ford. Robert, thanks for joining.
Thanks for having us.
I wanna start out, 2022 was an interesting year for everyone. Turn the calendar page, we're now in 2023. Thought it'd be good to start off with how you see the world, the outlook for Abbott this year.
Sure. I mean, I think you change from one month to the other, one day to the other. It doesn't all go away. I'd say, you know, I'm not gonna give any kind of specific guidance for Abbott today. We'll do that in a couple of weeks, but I can give a general sense of, you know, that macro piece which we've been talking so much about in 2022, and the trajectories of Abbott and the businesses. I'd say, obviously, tough environment over the last two years, especially the last 12 months, whether it's especially for U.S. multinational companies, whether it's FX, you know, and the movements we saw there, especially certain currencies, we hadn't seen that movement in decades.
Supply chain, inflation, labor shortages, I mean, we all know those. I think what I can say about those that kind of had an impact for us, you know, they still remain headwinds, but if you look at where we are today versus the trajectories on these topics, where we were in Q3, for example, for me in our business, in terms of what we're seeing is definitely an improvement, in terms of, you know, trends and what we're seeing with those factors. I am seeing positive momentum. Still headwinds for us, without a doubt.
If I look at where we were in Q3 and where we are now, I think the momentum on those is starting to kind of move on the positive side. We'll have to see. I think from an Abbott perspective, as we go into 2023, there's a lot of opportunities for growth, and I see a lot of growth for Abbott going forward. If you look at our device portfolio, for example, we made a lot of investments during the COVID period, you know, taking advantage of our position with COVID testing and made the investments in a lot of great new technologies that are either just about to launch in the early stages of launching or launching into 2023.
I think that provides us a great growth momentum. I look at our branded generic pharmaceutical business focused in emerging markets that has sustainably driven top-line growth in the double digits, low double digits, high single digits. I expect that kind of growth to continue just because of the attractiveness of those markets. In our diagnostics portfolio, yes, I'm sure we'll get into this somehow during the day here, yeah, COVID testing will come down. There's no doubt of that, there will still be COVID testing. There'll still be pockets of demand, we're seeing that now. There's still a need for COVID testing.
What I do like about our non-COVID diagnostic business is we've been able to make the investments, and they come out of COVID stronger than actually where they were pre-COVID, whether it's investments we've done in R&D, the capital that we've invested into those business. That's been a very great strategy for us over COVID. On the nutrition side, obviously, we're working through all the supply disruption that we had in last year on the infant formula side. The team has done incredible progress, working incredibly hard. The number one focus that we had during that process was really to make sure that we could get the product back on shelves. We're starting to see, you know, product getting back on shelves.
Inventory levels are starting to build. They're not where they need to be, but I can see that, you know, normalizing itself here, as we go into 2023. Also on the adult side of our nutrition business, a lot of growth opportunity in the adult side. We saw a lot of acceleration of new consumers coming into the category, over COVID, and that was a category that Abbott has, you know, on average, 60%-70% market share around the world. That's a great opportunity also for us in terms of growth acceleration. Overall, you put all that together, Abbott, you know, going into 2023 has got great momentum across all of its business units.
You know, we used to really kind of look at, you know, that kind of high single digit growth pre-COVID. I kind of see that same high single digit growth as we go into, as we go into 2023. Very positive there. On the P&L side, you know, there's obviously challenges, as I said, in the beginning here regarding, you know, input costs with inflation, you know, some supply chain disruption that occurred in 2022, and there's been some friction on the gross margin line, but the team's done a really good job at attacking that, you know, those cost increases, whether it's in our operations, or, you know, in areas that we could pass on some of that increase in costs on our pricing.
We've been able to do that too. I think I would say on the investment side, I mean, that's the key part of our strategy during COVID, which is it's a lot of leverage that we'll see in the P&L into 2023, where we'll be able to have this, you know, strong growth rate going into 2023 with all the different elements that I just described. Because we did a lot of investment into those business during COVID, you know, we'll be able to see, we don't have to put the same amount of investment into the R&D and SGA line to be able to deliver that top-line growth because we somewhat forward invested during COVID. We'll see a lot of leverage on the P&L on those investment areas.
On top of that, you know, we've got a very strong balance sheet that is gonna provide us a lot of strategic flexibility as we go into 2023. You know, yeah, 2022 was a difficult year. Some of those factors are still headwinds, I don't see them right now as intense as they were maybe when we were talking about them in Q3. We've got a lot of growth opportunities across these four business units at Abbott. I'm looking optimistic to 2023.
Great. Abbott is pretty unique in that it touches a lot of different aspects of the healthcare system. Maybe you could talk to what you're seeing in the healthcare environment today, both in the U.S. and around the world, and probably good to loop in COVID testing. You talked about how it's probably gonna come down. How do you see the future of COVID testing for Abbott and in general?
Well, I think we played a really important role during the pandemic with what we did, the partnerships we had with regulators, with researchers, with governments across the world. I think testing played a key role. I'm very proud of what the team has put together and the intensity and the intentionality of how we put that COVID portfolio together. Listen, it's gonna transition from what I would call pandemic testing to more of an endemic, you know, normal respiratory, seasonal kinda testing portfolio, right? One of the challenges that we had in that process is, okay, we know that this is, you know, gonna come down, the question is, how fast and what's the rate?
You know, if you look at what many expected to happen last year, it didn't happen, right? A lot of projections about how testing was gonna really kinda go down in 2022. We actually probably had a same size year as 2022 as we did in 2021. It's really about, okay, how do we factor in that transition? The reality is it's still gonna be important. It was important pre-vaccines. It's gonna be important post-vaccines. I think one of the real drivers there that when we put the strategy together is we knew that it would require scale.
We knew that it would require a different technology of just relying only on labs. We made a big bet on the rapid test side, not only here in the U.S., but internationally, and that's worked out very well. I think the view that the rapid test was the platform has kind of really worked out, and I think we'll still see some testing, either because of variants that will escape some of the immunities that people have, or quite frankly, increasing in respiratory testing around, you know, really around whether it's flu, RSV, just heard from CVS now talking about that. You know, when those increase, it actually brings along, you know, all testing. I wanna make sure that I wanna know what it is, right?
If it's not COVID, what is it? I also wanna make sure that it is that it is not COVID, right? I think we'll still see that human behavior of just wanting to know, before I go anywhere, you know, I think that that's probably where it starts to transition to, you know, to know before you're gonna go somewhere, just make sure that there's not an infection there. You'll have the, you know, you have the seasonality of that business, Q1, Q4 also. I think that's where we're heading. Obviously, it's had an impact on healthcare systems, but I think a lot of the healthcare systems have ultimately figured out how to, you know, how to manage it, and deal with it.
Obviously different situation versus where we were in 2020. I think the leadership position that we built in testing, and not just COVID testing, as I say, I think we need to start thinking about more respiratory, so flu, RSV, strep, COVID. We've got a full portfolio of products, so we test for all of those. We have lab-based systems. We have urgent care systems. We have at-home testing platforms too. Whatever this market will look like and whatever this market will be, I'm pretty confident that given, you know, given the portfolio of products that we have, the position that we have, the scale that we've built, the economic value that we do bring, that Abbott will be a leader in whatever market is gonna be.
I mean, I think it's very difficult to kind of pinpoint exactly what it's gonna look like. I still now I think we can start to model what that transition from pandemic testing to endemic testing is gonna look like. We will be a leader in this segment. Ultimately, you know, as we think about, you know, risk mitigation, it provides us a little bit of that hedge. I've talked about this also where, okay, if COVID testing and if for some reason, COVID gets worse, yeah, it could have an impact on those healthcare systems, which then have an impact on procedures.
On the flip side then, we've got a COVID testing portfolio that will be able to offset that, and vice versa. If we see very less COVID, I think then, we'll start to see even more an acceleration on the non-COVID part of Abbott too. I think we're well positioned there, and I think that our portfolio really is market leading, so we feel good about it.
Good for Abbott, bad for the Marcus family, but we've been frequent BinaxNOW users this winter.
Well, thank you.
Chalk up a couple dollars in sales there.
Yeah. Well, we were joking. We didn't know what a rapid COVID test was in 2020 when we were here.
That's right.
Just piggybacking off that, I mean, I think that's a really important part is that this notion that we've now, as consumers, learned to understand that we've got more accessibility to rapid testing you can do at home. I think that opens up a whole new testing channel. I think that's one of the benefits that we've taken advantage of during the COVID is how do we then continue this transition of being able to open up this new testing channel, pharmacies, urgent care clinics, airports. I mean, there's just a great opportunity for us, and we've seeded that market during COVID. Now, it's about how do you bring more assays and more tests into that channel that you've created.
Maybe switching gears a bit, one of your largest and fastest growing businesses at Abbott is Libre. Diabetes is still a under-penetrated market around the world, fast growing, and the Libre CGM platform is a leading device within this market. Maybe you could talk about Libre today, the future of Libre, and we'd also love to hear about Lingo, your new product that's using the same form factor to look at different analytes in the body.
Sure. Well, I think the Libre story is still very early. I mean, there's been... we've written a lot of chapters, but I think the book is still very long. I think fundamentally, we have to go back to how we thought about this. We had to really change our mindset, to think about the opportunity that we had with this platform, and to think a little bit differently about how we traditionally would go after med tech companies.
You know, when you've got 400 million people around the world, living with diabetes, you know, 90% of them outside the United States, over 100 million of them doing testing, you're not talking about the, you know, the, the population sizes that we usually talk about in med tech, you know, a couple 100,000 , single-digit million patients. We really had to think differently about it. Our strategy here was really simple. We wanted to build a consumer-friendly, intuitive, one-piece disposable sensor, invest a lot in manufacturing technology and scale, that we could then have a cost profile that would allow us to price for, affordability and accessibility, in a very different way than what we would traditionally go after the market.
That's proven to be, you know, as you said, very, very successful. I think that if you look at the growth of the CGM market before Abbott, you could probably extrapolate it and say, "Hey, this is a very good, you know, growing segment in healthcare." If you look at Abbott's entrance into the market back in 2017 and look at what that's done to the category, it significantly increased the category. I think the Abbott team has done a really good job, you know, at executing that, and you can see it in our numbers. You know, obviously, there are things that we're gonna do better. You know, my team knows they never get the full high five.
It's always a high four, 'cause there's always something that we can, we can always do better, and we kinda continue to push ourselves 'cause we need to. You know, 4.5 million users roughly, at an annual recurring revenue of just under $1,000 a year, and you can do the math on that in terms of where we're at. You know, we've made significant, you know, our bottom line grows, just as, you know, faster than our top line, and that's putting in the CapEx investment, putting in the R&D investment, putting the SG&A investment. It's doing very well.
Like I said, it's still, you know, when you think about that 100 million population segment, you know, we're here talking about, you know, 4 million-5 million, and being the, you know, the leader there, I think that there's a lot to do. We've built a strong portfolio. We've just launched Libre 3 into the U.S. during Q3. It's our third generation, you know, one-piece disposable sensor. You know, our competitor is on their first generation, and I think that we've got a lot of opportunity here for growth. I've said this a couple times, I think Libre will be a $10 billion product in the next five years. That obviously implies roughly a 15% annual growth rate.
There's really kinda three areas that I see that drive that growth rate. First of all, is really continuing to have the leadership position that we have in the patient segment that is historically benefited the most from CGMs, and that is the heavy insulin user, whether it's MDIs or pump patients. You know, we are the leader, definitely, when it comes to the MDI population, so those injecting insulin without the use of a pump. I've talked about how we are gonna be working to be able to bring a product, to be able to look at that pump segment, you know, albeit a smaller segment, but nonetheless, an extremely important segment.
We've already announced at the end of last year our first pump integration in Europe. We've done all of our clinical work to support our filing with the FDA on our Libre 2 system. And, you know, we'll be able to then, once we work through that approval process, we'll then be able to work with the different pump companies and bring that technology. But I think that strategy really just kind of puts us as catch-up mode. One of the things that, you know, we've learned how to do and do very well is how can you actually put more analytes on a single sensor. And, you know, we announced this at the ADA last year.
We're working on a dual sensor, a glucose plus ketone sensor. As I talk to a lot of the key opinion leaders in terms of the go-to sensor for a pump connected system, if you can be able to bring that ketone measurement, that continuous ketone measurement, into the algorithm, it provides additional safety features. Because when, let's say, you've got an interruption in insulin delivery, the first analyte to pop is ketones. That's about 30 minutes before.
I think that's gonna be a great opportunity for us to be able to look at that, you know, heavy insulin user segment. The next segment in the strategy then is really the Type 2 and the basal segment. That's the majority of people with diabetes. I would say this is a great opportunity to be able to not drive growth, but also to be able to bring outcomes. If you do a lit search on all the clinical trials that have been done with Type 2 basal patients, you'll see Libre predominantly in those studies, and we're able to show reductions in A1C, reductions in time in hyperglycemia, and great opportunity here. There's probably a couple key milestones next year.
I think the first one is, CMS has been public about its comment period to be able to include basal patients for Medicare reimbursement. I think that'll be more of a second half event in 2023. There's about 1.5 million people in the U.S., Type 2 basal, in on Medicare, then there's another 3 million patients on the commercial side. If you think about that in the U.S., it's a huge opportunity, I would say, for the category to be able to show the benefits and expand its use to a different patient segment. The clinical data that we've been working on, not only in the U.S., but also internationally, has kind of shown, you know, those outcomes.
I think that's gonna be the case, not just in the U.S., but I think it's also gonna be the case internationally, where you'll see more and more governments start to see the success of this technology, the real outcomes and benefits that they're delivering to that patient population and start to expand that to the Type 2 population. Then the third part, the third leg of that stool of growth of getting to $10 billion by 2028, is really looking at Libre as more than just diabetes, but as a platform. Knowing that, okay, we've shown that we can make it work with diabetes.
Can you use that platform, the investment that we've made in R&D and the capital side on the manufacturing network to be able to broaden the use of the technology outside of diabetes? I cannot tell you the amount of people that have either sent me letters that I've bumped into that don't have diabetes, are fairly healthy individuals, and have just given glowing feedback about the impact of being able to see their glucose levels on a regular basis. We announced this last year at CES that we're gonna launch a whole new platform called Lingo. It's gonna look at expanding beyond diabetes, not just with glucose, but with ketones, with lactate sensors and other types of measurements.
We have a whole separate team that's dedicated, exclusively focused on only driving that opportunity. I think that's gonna be a great opportunity, and it falls right into this trend of consumers wanting to empower themselves with their health information so they can actually modify their behaviors, and they can use that data to be able to either motivate them or, you know, provide insights for that behavior modification. I think this is a great opportunity. We're gonna launch the first version of Lingo out into Europe in the, I'd say this year. Let's call it like that. Probably in the first half. And we're really excited about what we're gonna do with that. It's a whole different go-to-market strategy.
I think that's another part of the innovation that we're gonna bring in terms of how we approach a healthy individual, a healthy consumer with this kind of technology. I think we're very early in this kind of, you know, biosensor, biowearable book. Libre has been an incredible growth driver. Quite frankly, it's been an eye-opener for us in terms of what we can actually do when we address costs through our manufacturing technology, through designing cost into the product and the opportunities that we have to be able to really broaden access to healthcare. So I think this is a great opportunity for us, and I'm very excited about executing on those three strategies.
If we look at down the road, Abbott's always investing today for tomorrow. What do you think are the most exciting pipeline products you have that investors should be on the lookout for?
Yeah, my team will always kind of look at this kind of question, you know, as if I'm gonna have favorites. I love them all. I think we've got great opportunities here. I would say, just as a step back, I mean, I've been coming to this conference for about eight years now, including the two hiatus ones, the two virtual ones, right? Just walking around, going to meetings, you know, this one here, just how exciting healthcare has becoming. It's just incredible.
I'm sure a lot of companies are coming up here and talking about their pipelines and talking about how great they are, and they should because it is just a really exciting time in healthcare, with the technologies that are developing, and our opportunity to target diseases in a completely different way. I think this is very exciting. Obviously for Abbott, it's no different. I'll talk about, you know, our children. I think what's a little bit unique about our pipeline is that it mirrors a lot of our portfolio of Abbott, right? We're diversified. We have different segments, different patient segments, different geographies, different R&D cycles, et cetera.
I think that de-risks a little bit when you think about your pipeline going forward. It de-risks a little bit. We have a mix of what I would call iterative, you know, pipeline and then some more transformational pipelines. I think it's important to have both of those because it provides that sustainability in your growth and reduces a little bit of that risk. If you look at our Established Pharmaceuticals and our nutrition business, I'd put those more in that iterative side, where, you know, they're less capital intensive, in terms of, you know, bringing these new products to market. The key here, there's less technical risk. The key here is just great consumer insights, and speed, and I think the teams here have done a really good job.
A high four to them, but a good example of that I'll say, you know, when you think about, okay, how does that look? What does that look like? You know, Pedialyte's a great example of that, where, you know, for many years it was a rehydration, you know, solution for, you know, pediatric patients that are in infection. The teams expanded that use to more on the adult side and came up with interesting products like, you know, Pedialyte Immune Support, Pedialyte Zero Sugar, Pedialyte Sport, and that, you know, has accelerated the growth in that product. Iterative R&D work is just as important when you look at some of the portfolio that we have in the product.
In diagnostics, as I said in the beginning, we made a lot of investments during COVID. The number one investment that we can make, I mean, we've placed a lot of instruments out into the market. The number one R&D investment we can make, the best return, is to be able to increase the menu and the assays that will go on to those instruments. I'm excited about some of the assays that we have been developing to be able to broaden our pipeline, our assay menu there. I think one of them that I'm very excited about is our traumatic brain injury assay.
It's the first blood biomarker that will be able to determine whether somebody's had a concussion and probably needs to go get it checked, you know, on a CT perspective. There's some work that we still need to do to be able to move that from the lab into a handheld, you know, prick your finger kind of blood test. You can imagine the opportunity that we have there and the impact that that can have to to society if you could be able to find out, you know, at any high school, college, sporting event, et cetera, whether, you know, somebody's had a concussion and you can, or you can at least rule out the concussion in 15 minutes.
On devices across all the portfolio, I mean, we've got exciting innovations across all of them. I'd say probably more notably to your question, I'd say Amulet on the LAA side. This is a fast growing market. We launched our product into the U.S., our Generation 1 product into the U.S. last year. We're seeing great good momentum with this product. We're already investing in our Generation 2 version of this. We've made, excuse me, we've made investments on generating more clinical trials, so clinical evidence. We're currently enrolling in a trial to be able to compare the device versus NOACs, and that will obviously open up the market also and the use of the product. I'm excited about that investment and that product.
Aveir, which is our leadless pacemaker, this is an incredible technology. It only represents about 15% of the low voltage, the pacer market, you know, it's off. We launched it in the second half of last year and seen great results from it. Obviously, the bigger market, the dual chamber market is obviously where the opportunity is for us. We've actually enrolled, completed our enrollment in a trial for a dual chamber leadless pacemaker, and this will be the first device where you have two implantable devices communicating to each other at the same time as they're implanted in your body. The results that we've seen are fantastic. I think this has an opportunity to really reset our growth trajectory in the CRM space.
TriClip, I've talked a lot about that, bring an innovation to the tricuspid valve. There's not a lot of options to treat tricuspid regurgitation. We've launched the TriClip in Europe, had seen great success. We made some modifications to the delivery catheter from the mitral product, but seen great success in Europe. We've completed our IDE trial for FDA approval. We'll be presenting the results of that in a couple of months. I'm very excited about that opportunity in terms of what it can bring in terms of care for patients.
If you think about CardioMEMS, I'd say that's probably one of those I'm very excited because I don't think we're able to really take advantage of the potential that this product has during COVID. As COVID starts to subside, I think there's a great opportunity here. We completed our trial. We've got a label expansion. I think there's great opportunity here. It's not libre. It's not entirely libre for the heart, but there's the opportunity is significant to be able to bring that kind of, you know, monitoring their pulmonary artery pressures and provide early warnings for heart failures. I think that's another great opportunity I'm excited about Navitor on the TAVI side. This will be our second generation product.
We've launched it in Europe. It's doing incredibly well. You know, we submitted to the FDA last year. We'll work through the process, but I think it really is, you know, given the data that we've seen, the kind of impact that it's had in the European systems, I truly believe that we have a real shot here at being a credible, you know, third player, into this, still very large market. I mean, you can talk about a bunch of other things like on the EP side, we're gonna be launching our TactiFlex ablation catheter together with our new mapping system that we launched last year.
We've been making investments on PFA on an internal program. On the vascular side, we'll be having readouts on imaging and using OCT imaging for coronary procedures. We'll be seeing some data come out towards the end of the year on that, in terms of the impact that that can have on outcomes. A lot of focus on the endovascular side also. We got into mechanical thrombectomy last year. We're currently in a trial where we're taking our bioabsorbable scaffold and actually looking at its application on below the knee. We have a trial enrolling there. Really looking at our endovascular portfolio as an opportunity to bring innovation and bring more alternatives for patient care there.
Neuro, just launching new systems, new indications. It's a pretty rich pipeline. It's a pretty rich portfolio. You know, I can talk about maybe some of the other technologies that are probably, you know, three, four, five years out. You know, there's also R&D work that's being done across all of our businesses to think, okay, what's next after three, four years? I think it's a very balanced pipeline, again, between iterative and more transformational. That's one of our key focuses, is how can we use our organic pipelines and the proximity we have with our customers to drive the top line.
I guess, one of the benefits of COVID is that you now have a very large cash pile on the balance sheet from selling COVID tests. Love to hear your thoughts on how Abbott can use the capital to maximize shareholder value and its priorities.
We've always taken a balanced approach. We think about investing in both the Abbott business to deliver long-term kind of growth prospects and at the same time balancing that with driving value to shareholders. If you look at, you know, between 2020 and the first nine months of 2022, we delivered about $14 billion back to the shareholder in the form of dividends and buybacks. That's, you know, critical to us is our commitment to a strong and growing dividend. We've increased it 40% versus 2020. Just announced 9% increase in 2023. That's important for us. You know, buybacks, we've historically really just focused on, you know, offsetting dilution.
I think with the St. Jude Medical and the Alere acquisition, we didn't do a lot of that. I'd say the last couple of years, we've done a little bit of catch up there. First nine months of this year of 2022, we did about $3 billion of buybacks and, you know, got the flexibility to do more if it makes sense for our shareholders. You balance all of that with, okay, we can also still invest in our business, right? We're investing capital to be able to build manufacturing capacity on all these great opportunities that I've talked about, whether it's Libre, whether it's cardiovascular, whether it's neuromodulation.
We've just announced at the end of the year, a half billion dollar investment in a new and former facility here in the United States. We can balance this. We can deliver to the shareholder, and we can still invest in the long term, by fortifying our positions in, you know, in our business. That leaves us, you know, plenty of firepower for M&A. I think we are in that position where we've got a lot of strategic flexibility. I've talked about this quite a bit in terms of we'll two kind of key factors in terms of making those decisions, obviously, you know, strategic fit. Talk about we don't wanna do anything that's gonna dilute our growth rate, our top line.
So anything that kind of fits strategically into these areas, probably a little bit more focused on devices and diagnostics. That's where we see a lot of opportunity, a lot of good targets to be able to add, and then gotta make sense financially for our shareholders. That's another key gate here to be able to make it happen. Like I said, there's a lot of great targets out there that maybe in 2021 and in 2022, you know, didn't, at least to the first half of 2022, didn't make a lot of sense financially. A lot of those targets now start to make a little bit of sense. I think, you know, we'll always have this balanced approach in terms of how we deploy our capital.
If we see targets that make sense for us strategically, financially, we are in that position where we've got plenty of firepower on our balance sheet to be able to do that. I don't think that, you know, when we talk about our long-term growth plan, I don't feel that we need to do M&A to be able to get there. I think we've got a lot of organic opportunity, so then that just puts us in an opportunity to be, okay, a little bit more opportunistic in terms of seeing these opportunities that come our way.
With the last few minutes, I'll leave you with a question. You know, people are concerned about the economic environment around the world. Abbott has a really unique set of businesses that a lot of other companies don't have replicated in one. How do you think your company would weather a difficult economic environment given the mix of businesses?
Well, I mean, I think healthcare in general has been a little bit more resilient to those recessionary periods. I think that we've always talked about, you know, when we talk about the diversity of the Abbott portfolio, we've always talked about it in terms of being able to have a lot of shots on goal for growth and then protect on the downside, right? We really didn't have a moment of downside until COVID happened to be able to kind of prove that out. I think that the portfolio moved from, you know, a nice bullet point or talking point to really showing in essence, what it can do during during, you know, a shock to the system. You know, obviously we had our institutional-based businesses, our diagnostics, our device portfolios, those got more impacted.
On the flip side, our consumer-facing business got actually accelerated, and that was able to kinda offset. Of course, that wouldn't have been enough, and COVID was a great opportunity. COVID test was a great way to kinda offset that. I think in general, it's proven to be very resilient because of that diversity. It's not just diversity of technologies of business, it's diversity of geography. It's diversity of, you know, we're not overly reliant on a single product, on a single platform. We have a diversity in our payer mix, where we still have a nice portion of our business that is consumer paid.
That diversity, I think is what really has set us apart in terms of being able to kinda navigate those more tougher times. You know, yeah, there's a lot of forecasting of what could happen. I think that we're well positioned because of that diversity and everything, and everything that I've outlined here in terms of the pipeline and the products that we have.
Well, great. We're out of time. Thanks, Robert. Appreciate the time.
Thank you.