STERIS plc

STERIS plc is a global provider of infection prevention, sterilization, and life sciences products and services, generating $5.94 billion in revenue in fiscal 2026 across three segments: Healthcare, Applied Sterilization Technologies (AST), and Life Sciences. The company occupies an unusual position in the medical-technology landscape: it does not make the devices that go into patients, but it makes and services the equipment that cleans and sterilises those devices, it sells the consumables that run through that equipment, and it operates the contract-sterilisation facilities that medical-device manufacturers are required by regulation to use. Roughly half of revenue is recurring — consumables, service contracts, and sterilisation services — and the company has not posted a down revenue year in more than a decade.

This is a story about a business that has methodically assembled a collection of moated, mission-critical revenue streams and then spent the last five years proving it can compound them. From fiscal 2021 through fiscal 2026, STERIS delivered average constant-currency organic revenue growth of 9% and an 11% compounded annual growth rate in adjusted earnings per share, through a pandemic, a supply-chain crisis, the integration of a transformative acquisition, a segment divestiture, and a trade war. The question now is simpler and harder: what kind of multiple does the market award a $6 billion medical-technology compounder that is structurally incapable of growing faster than mid-to-high single digits, but is equally unlikely to post a down year?

The file turns on whether the market is underappreciating the durability of STERIS's franchise — specifically, whether the AST segment's margin structure and the Healthcare segment's installed-base pull-through together constitute something closer to a royalty on global procedure volumes than a conventional medical-device income stream.