A year of transition is coming in 2022/2023, which is meant to ensure sustained, strong, and profitable growth for Ambu. The Danish medtech firm just left a tumultuous fiscal year behind, one that was marked by large macroeconomic uncertainty and overpromising.

When it comes to the latter, the guidance hadn’t taken account of Covid-19, says Britt Meelby Jensen, who took up Ambu’s chief executive mantle after Juan Jose Gonzalez made his exit in May.

”We were too optimistic in terms of speed of launch into new segments, and we did not accurately estimate the post-Covid 19 situation,” Meelby Jensen says in Ambu’s annual report published on Tuesday. ”At the same time, we had increased investments across too many areas simultaneously.”

Ambu downgraded its full-year expectations three times during the now concluded fiscal year. The last came after Meelby Jensen had started her charge of the company.

Contributing factors that have been mentioned include headwinds in China due to Covid-19 lockdowns, macroeconomic headwinds due to increasing inflation on commodities, energy, and logistics prices, and supply chain volatility. Hospital staffing shortages was also brought up.

As a consequence of a year marked by all those things and more, Ambu has had to readjust its focus and adapt its business to correspond to the current market situation. Maintaining its focus on high-value projects, Ambu is scaling down its investment to match the industry standard.

Ambu has also scaled down the commercial part of its business, ”while still ensuring our ability to provide first-class customer service,” the report states.

”Today, we have reduced the number of development projects at Ambu. Within endoscopy solutions, our eyes are set on the biggest value drivers in the four major endoscopy segments –pulmonology, urology, ear-nose-throat (ENT) and gastrointestinal (GI),” the CEO says in her statement.

New strategy

Like Ambu’s core endoscopy areas, the company’s new strategy, dubbed Zoom In, is also split across four areas, roughly corresponding to: customers, execution, sustainability, and people.

An added change is a slimmed down pipeline that will focus on fewer but more profitable projects.

The strategy also contains long-term financial expectations:

”With our new strategy, we will deliver value for our stakeholders and return to strong profitable growth. With focus and execution excellence, we aspire to deliver long-term sustainable double-digit revenue growth with continuously upward trending EBIT margins to industry levels,” writes Ambu.

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