Santa Ana’s Advanced Medical Optics Inc., a maker of eye surgical devices and contact lens solutions, said Thursday that acquisitions helped the company grow third-quarter sales and offset the impact of a contact lens solution recall earlier this year.
The company posted a quarterly loss of $21 million, excluding costs related to acquisitions and currency hedging. That was better than the $25.9 million loss expected by Wall Street.
A year earlier, Advanced Medical had profits of $87.2 million, including gains from a legal settlement and restructuring costs.
The company also reaffirmed its outlook for rest of the year and 2008.
Third-quarter sales rose 5.6% from a year earlier to $273.2 million, driven by recent acquisitions of vision-correction surgery device makers IntraLase Corp. of Irvine and WaveFront Sciences Inc. of New Mexico.
The acquisitions boosted sales even as Advanced Medical lost business from a May recall of contact lens care solution linked to an eye infection.
Advanced Medical started selling its Complete contact lens solution again in September.
For the third quarter, sales of Complete were off 73% to $13 million, including $6.3 million in returned bottles and an estimated $32.3 million in lost sales from the recall.
“While our third-quarter results were significantly impacted by the recall, we are pleased with continued progress of our cataract and laser vision correction businesses,” Chief Executive Jim Mazzo said.
The company expects “continued progress” in quarterly results, Mazzo said.
For 2007, Advanced Medical reaffirmed its outlook of sales of $1.05 billion to $1.07 billion. In 2006, the company had sales of $997.5 million.
The company expects a yearly loss of $57 million to $69 million, versus a profit of $79.5 million in 2006.
For 2008, Advanced Medical forecasts sales of $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion and profits of $93 million to $105 million.
