2 Key Questions About Hologic’s Future Answered

There are some huge questions surrounding Hologic’s future.

First, there’s the question of whether Hologic could still maintain momentum received from the high demand for COVID-19 testing was answered by its 3Q23 earnings. And the second question is what will be the new dynamic now that Steve MacMillan, Hologic’s president and CEO, has been appointed as Illumina’s board chairman.   

The answer to the first question is that after a few years of sales that turned the Hologic into an earnings juggernaut, the Waltham, MA-based company still hasn’t settled into its new normal. Tuesday gave a clearer picture as COVID-19 testing boosts were non-existent to sales.

“In the early days of COVID, when fear and uncertainty led to closures and shutdowns, they delivered their highly accurate COVID molecular diagnostic tests around the globe, playing a pivotal role in helping get the world back on its feet,” Stephen MacMillan, Hologic president and CEO said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.  “With COVID surges and high testing volumes now further in the rearview mirror, their ongoing performance shows that they are much more than a great pandemic story.”

Hologic posted revenue of $984.4 million (-1.8% Y/Y, -1.6% xFx, 18.4% organic (ex-COVID) and adj earnings per share of $0.93 exceeded Street estimates of revenue and adjacent EPS of $960.2 million and $0.89 as Breast Health and GYN-Surgical lifted organic growth to 18.4%.

“If you go from Q2 to Q3, the gross margin declines primarily lower COVID revenue, said Karleen Oberton, Hologic’s CFO, according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha. “So again, they had over $70 million of COVID assay revenue in Q2 and just under $30 million here in Q3.”

BTIG analyst Ryan Zimmerman wrote in a research note, “management had their finger on the trigger, in hopes to raise LT guidance beyond 5% to 7%, but ultimately chose not to as too many headwinds remain such as the loss of upside from OUS markets (Russia and China), higher inventory costs running through the P&L in FY1H24, and the loss of COVID assay sales (which are margin-accretive). These dynamics are driving the key question Hologic will have to face in FY24, what will normalized underlying margins look like?”

In terms of the new dynamic created by MacMillan becoming Illumina’s board chair – well, he addressed that head-on during the earnings call.

“Let's be really clear,” he said during an earnings call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.  “I'm at Hologic through the end of my useful life in terms of what I've worked for, built for. And as a reminder to everybody, I am personally a top 15 shareholder in Hologic. So, this is my day job. This is my passion. This is my love. What I have to see is the company five minutes away, that's troubled that I thought, frankly, I could also help out in a different role, which is as Chairman of the Board.

According to the Seeking Alpha transcript of the earnings call, he added, “And I'm very proud that I think I can do both. If I didn't have the great team around me at Hologic wouldn't be able to. Frankly, over there, it's going to be about also just getting a great CEO in place. And we're making a couple of key decisions there, which are probably pretty obvious. And then it's going to be a normal Chairmanship from there. So, this is my love and my passion and frankly, where I'm fully engaged. Sometimes more than my teams would like.”

Illumina has been under mountain of scrutiny recently, stemming from its acquisition of Grail. Part of the controversy, which included a proxy battle with activist investor Carl Icahn, the gene sequencing company’s CEO ended up stepping down.

The Rise of Hologic

 The boom in COVID-19 testing resulted in unprecedented growth for Hologic. The company was able to successfully diversify itself through both organic R&D as well as strategic tuck-in acquisitions.

The company’s first year of the COVID-19 pandemic made such an impression on their readers that it was voted MD+DI Readers' Choice for Medtech Company of the Year 2020.

The following year, Hologic was again honored by MD+DI readers for its commitment to women's health, and also was selected by their editorial team as the Medtech Company of the Year 2021.

After 2 probes, questions remain over who knew of D.C. deputy mayor’s conduct

After months of conducting interviews and scouring evidence, a pair of investigations concluded that a former top adviser to Mayor Muriel E. Bowser made unwelcome sexual advances toward two female employees. But what the investigations did not fully address is whether Bowser administration officials were aware at any point over the course of several years that the adviser, John Falcicchio, was mistreating his employees.

Bowser (D) has said she had no knowledge of the allegations before the women filed complaints, and that she acted quickly to launch the investigations. Yet questions about what she knew have endured because of Falcicchio’s long-standing prominence in her political orbit, serving as her chief campaign strategist and as an adviser holding two top-level appointments.

The mayor, who easily won a rare third term in November, has helped fuel the speculation by opposing calls for an independent investigation. She also provoked criticism from members of the D.C. Council by appearing to downplay the release of key information pertaining to the scandal. When Falcicchio resigned, for example, her office announced that he was heading to the private sector without mentioning that he had been accused of sexual harassment. And when the Mayor’s Office of Legal Counsel completed its first investigation, her office released the findings at night in the middle of a holiday weekend.

“You don’t generally have this kind of conduct without people knowing about it, and it raises a lot of red flags,” said Erin Palmer, a D.C.-based attorney who has worked on sexual harassment cases and who is an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Northwest.

“For me, the primary thing is did the mayor know about this and did she care about it?” said Palmer, who ran unsuccessfully for Council chair last year. “Or does she just want to keep it quiet?”

The mayor, according to a statement provided by an aide in response to questions from The Washington Post, was shocked by the accusers’ complaints and had “no knowledge of the activities prior to receiving the allegations.”

“Moreover, she has never received nor have there been any sexual harassment complaints — formal or otherwise — related to Mr. Falcicchio,” according to the statement emailed by Tomás Talamante, her deputy chief of staff.

The statement acknowledged that while “there were instances” when the release of information pertaining to Falcicchio “could have been handled more smoothly,” the administration “worked to quickly release as much info as possible given the sensitive legal and personnel issues.”

The MOLC’s investigation focused narrowly on the veracity of the two complainants’ claims that Falcicchio made unwelcome advances, sent explicit messages and retaliated against them for rejecting him. To assess the allegations in the two probes, a MOLC investigator interviewed the accusers and more than 30 current and former D.C. government employees.

As for more general claims, such as the first accuser’s allegation that Falcicchio used “the workplace as a ‘dating pool,’” the MOLC asserted in its report that a “more detailed investigation and analyses would be needed” to assess “hiring practices and promotions.”

A demand for a broader probe is partly what drove the D.C. Council in mid-July to enact emergency legislation requiring the Office of the Inspector General to hire an outside law firm to review the MOLC’s inquiry. Lawmakers also questioned whether the MOLC, which reports to the mayor, was independent enough to investigate her closest aide.

In a June 27 letter to the inspector general, who also reports to her, Bowser cited several allegations she described as “outside the scope” of the MOLC’s investigation — allegations that included “sexual or attraction based hiring” — to ask the office “to consider whether a management review could help ascertain” whether policies “need updating.”

At the same time, even before the MOLC had finished assessing the second accuser’s complaint, Bowser made plain her opposition to an outside investigation. She contended that the city’s 2017 sexual harassment policy established a protocol that made the MOLC the appropriate entity to lead the investigation. She also raised the specter of an outside investigation costing taxpayer funds.

On Monday, after the MOLC released its second report, the mayor told reporters that her view of the Council’s emergency bill had not changed. Falcicchio, she pointed out, had resigned and the MOLC had substantiated the two accusers’ sexual harassment allegations. Nevertheless, after demurring at a news conference about whether she would sign the legislation, she did so later that day.

Tom Lindenfeld, a former Bowser campaign strategist, said if he were advising the mayor he would have recommended that she call for an outside investigator from the start to neutralize concerns about the probe’s credibility. “By keeping the investigation internal, it made more people in the public wonder about it,” Lindenfeld said. “Let someone else do the investigation. Keep your hands off of it. Whatever the facts are, you’re not going to change them.”

But those scandals did not linger as long or have the magnitude as the one involving Falcicchio, who served as her $230,000-a-year chief of staff and deputy mayor for planning and economic development. His ties to Bowser extend back to the early 2000s when both helped Adrian Fenty (D) become mayor.

Falcicchio resigned nine days after the first accuser, who works in the deputy mayor’s office, filed a complaint that he had twice made physical advances toward her without her consent and had masturbated in front of her. She provided the MOLC investigator, as well as The Post, hundreds of pages of electronic messages she said she had exchanged with Falcicchio, including one in which he sent her a video of himself masturbating.

The second complainant, also an employee of the deputy mayor’s office, alleged that Falcicchio on five separate occasions in 2020 made unwanted advances toward her, including four times at his apartment where she had gone for work “at his direction,” according to the summary of the investigation. She and the first complainant both claimed that Falcicchio had retaliated against them by mistreating them at work.

While the MOLC substantiated the women’s harassment claims, it determined that insufficient evidence existed to prove the allegations of retaliation. The MOLC findings did not identify either accuser. Neither Falcicchio nor his attorney, Grace Speights, have responded to multiple requests for comment.

With violence in the city monopolizing the public’s attention, it is an open question how closely Washingtonians have followed the scandal. Yet among community leaders, those attuned to local politics, and Bowser loyalists, Falcicchio’s fall has been an enduring focus of conversation and social media chatter.

Tricia Duncan, chair of an Advisory Neighborhood Commission that includes Spring Valley and Foxhall Village, said that in her community the investigations of Falcicchio have “busted through to the people who don’t pay a lot of attention to local politics.”

“People are texting about it,” she said. “It has reached the kitchen table.”

Terry Lynch, a Mount Pleasant-based civic leader and a longtime Bowser supporter, said the allegations against Falcicchio have not altered his general view of the mayor as a competent leader. “A boss can’t control the personal behavior of their employees,” he said.

Nevertheless, Lynch said he finds the allegations unsettling and feels a sense of betrayal that a trusted Bowser confidant had purportedly acted improperly. “My concern is that there will be more coming out as to what his behavior was,” Lynch said.

Falcicchio has remained the subject of prolonged attention in part because the second of the two investigations only ended July 31, more than four months after the allegations first surfaced. The complaints are likely to generate more news as further developments unfold, including if one or both women receive financial settlements from the city.

But Bowser drew added attention to the scandal by appearing to downplay key developments. For example, the mayor announced Falcicchio’s departure on March 17 in a single sentence at the bottom of a lengthy news release about staff changes, thanking him “for his years of service to the District as he transitions to the private sector.”

It would become known three days later, on March 20, that the mayor by then had received the harassment complaint from Falcicchio’s first accuser and launched an investigation.

“It was almost to a T exactly what you shouldn’t do in crisis communications,” said Bryan Weaver, a longtime Democratic activist. “Once you say he has left to go to work in the private sector, you’ve set yourself up for failure and opened yourself up to a series of questions. Why wouldn’t you say there are these allegations and John offered his resignation and then say this is unacceptable behavior?”

The mayor also prompted questions about the MOLC investigation’s credibility when her administration released the summary of the first report at a time when it would draw minimal notice — on a Saturday night during a holiday weekend. After The Post contacted the mayor’s spokesperson that night, the MOLC released a statement from the mayor at 11:25 p.m. and provided a link to the report.

The release’s timing prodded council members to raise the volume on their demand for an independent investigation.

Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5), who initially described the timing as a “pedestrian attempt” to “downplay the findings of a damning report,” said additional scrutiny by an independent investigator could help settle unanswered questions.

“It has been surprising the way the mayor has tried to divert attention from this case,” he said. “I hope that an independent investigation will fully investigate beyond where MOLC stopped and send a message to others that cases of sexual harassment will be taken seriously regardless of who makes the allegations.”

Yvette M. Alexander, a Bowser ally and former council member, said the criticism of the mayor is overblown, given Falcicchio’s departure and the mayor’s legal office substantiated the accusers’ harassment claims. “What else could she do?” Alexander asked. “She had the investigation and the investigation had its findings. She did what she needed to do. People are trying to create more drama when everything was done right.”

Palmer said that when it comes to ethical questions in government “things need to look above board in addition to being above board.”

“There may well be nothing wrong here with what she knew, but the way this has rolled out looks weird,” she said. “I don’t know why you wouldn’t outsource it. Then it’s not your mistakes, it’s someone else’s. I don’t know why you would want responsibility for that.”