Abbott Laboratories

Abbott Laboratories is an Illinois health-care company that sells medical devices, diagnostic tests, nutrition products, and branded generic medicines into more than 160 countries, and it generated $44.3 billion of revenue in fiscal 2025. It is one of the few large-cap med-tech names that is genuinely diversified: four reportable segments, 89 manufacturing plants, and roughly 115,000 employees, about two-thirds of them outside the United States.

This is a story about a proven compounder that has just made its largest bet in a decade. Abbott spent the COVID years with a diagnostics franchise that swung from a multi-billion-dollar testing windfall to a shrinking drag, and a medical-devices franchise — anchored by the FreeStyle Libre continuous glucose monitor — that quietly became the profit engine. In March 2026 it closed the $20.6 billion acquisition of Exact Sciences, borrowing $20 billion to do it, and converted its diagnostics business into a cancer-screening story.

The file turns on two questions that pull in opposite directions. Can FreeStyle Libre reaccelerate from the high-single-digit growth it printed in the first half of 2026, and can the cancer-diagnostics bet earn its cost of capital before the much heavier balance sheet — net debt of $27.5 billion, up from $4.4 billion at the end of 2025 — starts to constrain the rest of the company?