Not to hijack the thread, but did you guys hear that Dexcom is tring to buy Insulet, the makers of the Omnipod? Would definitely help their bottom line but I’m not sure how smart of a decision that would be. They seriously need to work on making their products work the full 10 days reliably. Let’s hope the G7 is more reliable. I love that the transmitter is built in.
I asked for it to be split to a new topic. Here are relevant links, but there is a lot of market BS in here:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dexcom-talks-acquire-device-firm-000318513.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-23/dexcom-is-said-in-talks-to-acquire-device-firm-insulet
Etc. This started on Monday and that means that either Insulet or Dexcom released the information, most likely “secretly” on Monday. As you will see from the reports they are all in the “market news” category and the people writing them have dip ■■■■ knowledge of what is actually going on.
In particular it isn’t clear yet whether this is hostile. Here is seeking alpha (my wife’s preferred source of misinformation):
Yesterday produced a response from bofa (according to seeking alpha):
The article is 99% marketspeak yet contrary to what bofa seem to conclude I can certainly see a reason for Dexcom to want to diversify out of the CGM market.
I’ve already stated my opinion that Dexcom’s retail prices are vastly inflated and that Abbott will force them down, but Dexcom’s market capitalization is pretty much identical to Insulet’s (30G$ vs 15G$) and Dexcom have a product line of limited application (measuring blood sugar) whereas Insulet has one of general application (delivering drugs subcutaneously).
So I draw exactly the opposite conclusion to bofa; Dexcom are making a lot of money from a lot of people and a lot of advertising hype while Insulet are making a lot of money from a very small subset of Insulet’s potential customers (just those of us who use subq insulin) and no marketing hype to speak of.
Messing either company up with what would be a merger, not a take over, is likely to be a disaster.
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I do not love that the transmitter is built in. That’s just another way for them to charge us more money. Many of us use transmitters way longer than the approved time limit by replacing the batteries and using xDrip. That will all go away and we will be forced to buy new ones.
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Dexcom quashes Insulet merger rumours
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I am 100% in favor of that change; transmitters are flakey in my experience and it has to be because the battery is flakey. I accept that there is a significant environmental cost to the change, but then I use an Omnipod and that dwarfs the Dexcom impact. Apart from that reducing the number of components in the system benefits everyone and reduces overall cost; it removes one box, the one containing the transmitter, from the whole shebang, the end user system, the supply chain, the manufacturing. Looks like a massive cost reduction to me, though it will increase the original Dexcom COGS I’m sure.
The whole supply chain thing means costs after Dexcom are significantly reduced, maybe even enough to offset the environmental impact of going from one battery every 90 days to nine. Boxes, shipping (diesel), assembly, extra work within pharmacies and, in the US, the whole insurance industry all have significant environmental impact. Now the Omnipod is a bit more difficult - 3 batteries in each pod, 30 pods per 90 days - 90 batteries, and 30 full pcbs with non-trivial amounts of electronics on them, plus lots of cute plastic gearing.