Baxter International Inc.

Baxter International Inc. is an American medical technology company that manufactures and sells a broad portfolio of essential healthcare products — sterile intravenous solutions, infusion pumps and administration sets, parenteral nutrition, surgical hemostats and sealants, smart hospital beds, patient monitoring systems, generic injectable pharmaceuticals, and inhaled anesthetics — generating $11.24 billion in revenue from continuing operations in fiscal 2025. The company's products are used in virtually every hospital in the United States and in over 100 countries, touching an estimated 350 million patients per year.

This is a story about a 95-year-old healthcare fixture trying to stabilize itself after a decade of strategic pivots that have left it smaller, more leveraged, and fighting on multiple fronts. Baxter sold its BioPharma Solutions business in 2023 for nearly $4 billion and its Kidney Care business (now Vantive) to Carlyle in January 2025 for $3.8 billion, exiting the dialysis market it helped create. What remains is a collection of hospital-oriented franchises that hold #1 or #2 positions in most of their niches but are collectively growing slowly, carrying $10 billion in debt, and contending with the operational fallout from a Class I recall on its flagship Novum IQ large-volume infusion pump. Andrew Hider, the CEO who stepped in during August 2025, calls this a turnaround. The file turns on whether the turnaround is genuinely underway — or whether Baxter is an over-levered collection of legacy assets in slow decline.