Cases

How clients have used CTG's management and consulting services.

In 2010, RoundTable Healthcare Partners (RTHP), a private equity firm based in Chicago, simultaneously acquired the Critical Care Systems and Ophthalmic Surgery businesses of Becton Dickinson (BD) world-wide. In Japan, both of these businesses had long been operating through BD’s Japanese subsidiary (BDJ). RTHP needed to take these businesses out of BDJ quickly without killing them. RTHP asked CTG to make this happen.
CTG set up Argon Medical Devices Japan, K.K. (AMDJ) and Beaver Visitec International Japan, K.K. (BVI Japan). We moved the related employees and other assets in from BD. We then helped to manage these companies through the difficult transition from BDJ and for several years thereafter.

AMDJ was sold in 2017 to Merit Medical Systems and merged into Merit’s Japanese subsidiary. BVIJ continues to operate to this day; but it is now owned by TPG Capital, which hired a full time general manager at the end of 2021, bringing CTG’s involvement in these activities to an end.

In 2001, ev3, Inc., was established by Warburg Pincus, LLC and the Vertical Group to acquire companies with promising products in the early stages of development in the field of neurovascular intervention. The idea was to grab these companies early when they were relatively inexpensive and roll them up into a single larger business that could eventually compete with (or be sold to) the larger companies that operate in this space. Some of the companies which ev3 acquired already had sales in Japan and for all of them, Japan was a potentially large and strategically important market. To help manage their Japan issues, ev3 hired CTG.

ev3, K.K. (“ev3 Japan”) was established in 2002 and managed by CTG until 2011 when it was acquired by Covidien and merged into their Japanese operation, which was acquired by Medtronic soon thereafter. While under CTG’s management (between 2002 and 2011) ev3 Japan recovered from Century Medical all of the regulatory approvals and distribution rights for products manufactured by Microtherapeutics. We also obtained regulatory approval to market several new products in Japan, including the ONYX liquid embolic system and the Axium detachable coil system.
In the early 1990s, Baxter Ltd., Baxter Healthcare Corporation’s Japanese subsidiary, began selling blood glucose monitoring products in Japan. These were manufactured in the USA by MediSense Inc. then a small early stage company in which Baxter had a financial interest. Feeling that this product line did not fit well with the other things that Baxter Ltd. was doing, Baxter’s management started looking for a way to spin this business off in Japan without killing it. They asked CTG to help. We established MediSense Japan, K.K. and helped Baxter to transfer into it all of the MediSense related sales, marketing, and other activities and personnel. This company was then sold to MediSense, Inc.

MediSense, Inc. hired CTG to manage MediSense Japan. In the following years, we launched several generations of MediSense products in Japan and sold these directly through our own sales force and, also in parallel, through a co-marketing arrangement with Shionogi Pharmaceutical.

Medisense was acquired by Abbott in 1996 but CTG continued to manage the Japanese subsidiary until 1999 when this business was finally rolled into Abbott’s diabetes / blood glucose monitoring business in Japan.

Acquired in 1999 by Warburg Pincus Equity Partners, Wright Medical Group Inc. completed its initial public offering in 2001. The company then made a series of acquisitions and other investments to position itself as a leader in the orthopedic extremities business, later selling its OrthoRecon Business to Microport Scientific Corporation and merging with Tornier N.V. to form Wright Medical Group N.V. which was later acquired by Stryker. All of these changes had implications for Wright’s products, businesses, and employees throughout the world, especially in Japan, where Microport’s purchase included the historical Wright entity, all of its bricks and mortar, and practically all of Wright’s former employee!

Wright first used CTG as an interface between the President of Wright’s International Business and the President of the Japanese company— formerly Wright Medical Japan now Microport Japan. Then CTG helped Wright to set up and manage a new Japanese subsidiary, which was at first mainly a repository for regulatory rights transferred from Microport Japan and Tornier Japan. At this point CTG was managing both the new Wright subsidiary and the subsidiary of the recently acquired Tornier. The sales force of the latter entity began promoting both companies’ products. These two subsidiaries were merged in 2020 and the fully consolidated Wright business was merged into Stryker on May 31, 2021.