Medtronic plc

What does Medtronic own?
Medtronic owns the Medtronic device portfolio across cardiovascular, neuroscience, and surgical categories, including named product lines such as Micra, Hugo, Evolut, Mazor, StealthStation, and Valleylab. It no longer owns MiniMed, which became a fully independent public company in October 2026.

Is Medtronic publicly traded?
Yes. Medtronic plc trades on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker MDT and is a component of the S&P 500. It is an Irish-domiciled company that reports as a U.S. domestic issuer.

Who founded Medtronic?
Earl Bakken and his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie founded the company in a Minneapolis garage in 1949 as a medical equipment repair business. Bakken invented the first battery-powered wearable pacemaker in 1957.

Where is Medtronic headquartered?
Medtronic is legally domiciled in Galway, Ireland, following the 2015 Covidien acquisition. Its operational headquarters and executive leadership are in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

How many brands does Medtronic own?
Medtronic operates primarily as a master-brand company. Products carry Medtronic branding with trade names like Micra, Hugo, Evolut, and Symplicity. It has fewer than a dozen standalone consumer-facing names.

Who owns Medtronic?
The company is owned by public shareholders with no controlling interest. The largest holders are index investors including Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street. Geoff Martha serves as Chairman and CEO.

Has Medtronic made major acquisitions recently?
The largest deal in company history was the $42.9 billion Covidien acquisition completed in 2015. More recently it acquired Mazor Robotics (2018, about $1.64 billion) and Affera (2022, about $1 billion). Its biggest recent transaction was a divestiture: the October 2026 separation of MiniMed.

What is Medtronic's revenue?
Medtronic reported FY2026 revenue of $36.4 billion, up 8.4%, its fastest annual growth in ten years. In Q1 FY2027 it posted $9.8 billion in revenue, up 13.7%, and raised full-year guidance.

Earl Bakken, a graduate student in electrical engineering, and his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie founded Medtronic in a Minneapolis garage in 1949 as a medical equipment repair business. In 1957, surgeon C. Walton Lillehei asked Bakken to build a device to pace infants' hearts during power outages, and Bakken produced the first battery-powered wearable external pacemaker within weeks. That product defined the company. By 1960 Medtronic was building implantable pacemakers under license from the developers at the University of Buffalo, and cardiac pacing became its franchise.

The company went public in the 1970s and used pacemaker cash flows to diversify into adjacent implantable therapies: heart valves, implantable defibrillators after the technology emerged in the 1980s, spinal devices, and drug infusion pumps. By the 1990s it was the dominant pacemaker maker in the world and had added neurological products, including deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease symptoms.

A series of large acquisitions reshaped the company between 1998 and 2001. Medtronic acquired Sofamor Danek for about $3.7 billion in 1999 to build a spine business, then bought MiniMed Inc. and Medical Research Group in 2001 for roughly $3.7 billion combined, entering diabetes care with the world's leading insulin pump maker. Kyphon, acquired in 2007 for approximately $3.9 billion, added spinal fracture treatments.

The largest deal in company history came in January 2015, when Medtronic completed its approximately $42.9 billion acquisition of Covidien, an Irish-domiciled maker of surgical instruments, patient monitoring equipment, and vascular products. The transaction was structured as a tax inversion: the combined company reincorporated in Ireland as Medtronic plc while keeping operational headquarters in Minneapolis. The deal added the Surgical and Patient Monitoring businesses that now make up the Medical Surgical segment.

Subsequent deals filled specific gaps. HeartWare, acquired in 2016 for approximately $1.1 billion, brought a ventricular assist device franchise that Medtronic later discontinued in 2021 after safety problems. Mazor Robotics, acquired in 2018 for approximately $1.64 billion, added robotic guidance for spine surgery. Affera, acquired in 2022 for roughly $1 billion, brought the cardiac mapping and pulsed field ablation platform that became the Sphere-9 catheter, now a key growth product in atrial fibrillation treatment.

Under CEO Omar Ishrak, who led from 2011 to 2020, Medtronic expanded internationally and pushed into value-based health care arguments for its devices. Geoff Martha succeeded him in 2020 and accelerated portfolio reshaping. The company exited the ventilator business in 2024, and in May 2025 announced it would separate the diabetes unit entirely. MiniMed Group priced its IPO in March 2026 at $20 per share, and Medtronic exchanged its remaining 252.8 million MiniMed shares with shareholders in October 2026, completing the separation.

Recent momentum has been strong. In Q1 FY2027, the quarter ended July 31, 2026, revenue reached $9.8 billion, up 13.7% both as reported and organically, and management raised FY2027 organic growth guidance to 7.25% to 7.75%.

Medtronic publishes an annual integrated sustainability and ESG report covering emissions, product stewardship, access, and inclusion metrics. The company's near-term and net-zero emissions targets have been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative, and it has committed to net-zero emissions across its value chain by FY2045.

Product-level ethics questions in medtech center on clinical evidence and pricing rather than the consumer categories covered by B Corp or cruelty-free frameworks. Medtronic is not a certified B Corporation, and such certifications do not apply to its sector.

The company runs device donation and therapy-access programs in lower-income markets and publishes an annual access report. Packaging reduction and reprocessing of single-use devices are active operational programs, though most progress data is self-reported rather than third-party certified.

Medtronic is a recurring member of the Fortune World's Most Admired Companies list in the medical products category and appears on the Forbes Global 2000 ranking of the world's largest public companies. It has been named to the Clarivate Top 100 Global Innovators list for its patent output, and its Micra pacemaker family has received industry design and innovation recognition. The company is a component of the S&P 500 and is widely cited as the largest pure-play medical device company in the world.

Medtronic's long product history includes several major safety and legal episodes.

The Sprint Fidelis defibrillator lead, withdrawn in 2007 after fractures were linked to patient deaths, generated years of litigation that Medtronic resolved with settlements totaling approximately $268 million. The Infuse bone graft controversy, in which Senate investigators alleged the company influenced clinical study reporting of adverse events, produced a 2012 Senate Finance Committee report and settlements exceeding $160 million, while independent reviews later confirmed the product's safety profile.

In June 2021, Medtronic discontinued the HeartWare ventricular assist device after FDA Class I recalls tied to pump failures and deaths, an episode that ended its mechanical circulatory support franchise. The MiniMed insulin pump business carried Class I recalls for the 600-series pumps in 2019 and 2020, including a cybersecurity vulnerability affecting remote dosing, and the Northridge diabetes facility received an FDA warning letter in 2021 over complaint-handling and quality systems.

The 2015 Covidien inversion remains a periodic political flashpoint over corporate tax migration. Separately, Medtronic has fought a long-running IRS dispute over Puerto Rico transfer pricing that has traveled through Tax Court and federal appeals for more than a decade. None of these matters is unresolved in a way that threatens operations, but all are part of the public record.