St. Jude Medical Sees 2010 Sales Rising By 7%-11%

St. Jude Medical Inc. (STJ) said Wednesday it expects sales this year to rise 7% to 11% as the company's leading business, for implantable heart-rhythm devices, rebounds from a rocky 2009 to grow faster than the market.

The company reported fourth-quarter results Wednesday while issuing its earnings outlook for the first quarter and full year of 2010. It added sales guidance during a call with analysts.

For the full year, the company anticipates sales of $5.015 billion to $5.195 billion, Chief Financial Officer John Heinmiller said. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters have projected, on average, full-year sales of about $5.05 billion.

The company is determined to "meet or exceed" its goals for 2010 sales growth, Chairman and Chief Executive Daniel Starks added.

For the first quarter, guidance for each of St. Jude's major product categories adds up to sales of $1.175 billion to $1.24 billion, which also brackets Wall Street's forecast for the period.

The company's top products are implantable defibrillators and pacemakers. Noting that St. Jude continues to expect the heart-rhythm market to grow by 4% to 6%, excluding the impact of foreign currency, Starks said St. Jude's international business beat this rate in 2009 but that the company's U.S. business was basically flat.

St. Jude's international business is on track to beat the market growth rate again in 2010 and the company is optimistic the U.S. business "will get back on track to grow faster than the market in 2010," Starks said.

St. Jude competes in the roughly $11 billion heart-rhythm market with Boston Scientific Corp. (BSX) and industry heavyweight Medtronic Inc. (MDT).

For the heart-rhythm business, St. Jude forecast first-quarter sales of $700 million to $730 million. For the full year, the company sees the business posting sales of $2.9 billion to $3 billion.

Shares of St. Jude were recently up 0.8% to $38.10 in pre-market trading.

The company's fourth-quarter results were already known following a preannouncement earlier this month, but the guidance is new. On that front the company's first-quarter earnings forecast is above Wall Street expectations and its full-year guidance is mostly above analysts' average forecast.

-By Jon Kamp, Dow Jones Newswires; 617-654-6728; jon.kamp@dowjones.com

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