“The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed,” was the headline of an alarming March 29 NY Times report, which, among other issues, noted how device giant Covidien in 2012 bought a “small California company” from Costa Mesa that had been hired to design that government fleet of life-saving respiratory machines, a product now very much in demand.
The project “ultimately produced zero ventilators,” according to the report, which notes industry speculation that Covidien had acquired OC’s Newport Medical Instruments for some $100 million “to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits.”
Those ventilators were to cost about $3,000 each while Covidien’s products went for around $10,000.
Kirk Inoue, CEO of Lake Forest ventilator maker eVent Medical—profiled in last week’s print edition of the Business Journal—found many causes for alarm in the NYT story. Inoue, who founded Newport Medical in 1981, said he hasn’t been involved with that company since 2000 when he said he was ousted by its then owner, a Japanese medical device maker. In 2006, he joined eVent Medical and bought it in 2012.
He told our Peter J. Brennan last week that Covidien was also interested in buying eVent Medical. Instead, Covidien in 2012 went with Newport Medical because it had more sales at that time.
eVent is aiming to boost production to 500 ventilators a month; they cost about $15,000 each.
Along with the Newport Medical allegations, Inoue said the NYT article disturbed him because it showed the federal government “didn’t know what it was doing” by buying home-style ventilators instead of ventilators used for ICUs.
He said the same mistake is being made when companies that have never made ventilators, like GM, are now making them. Those ventilators might be okay for home use, but definitely not in hospitals.
“I can 100% guarantee you that no doctors will use those, because those are not tested,” Inoue said.
The lipstick index is real. SeneGence’s Joni Rogers-Kante tells our Kari Hamanaka her Foothill Ranch cosmetics firm is gearing up for a sales boost—the index notes that sales of small luxuries like lipstick get a boost in down economic times. See our front-page story for more.
Likewise, Manna Kadar Cosmetics CEO and founder Manna Kadar tells Hamanaka her online business, normally about 10% of overall sales, is up 100% in recent weeks.
Rogers-Kante keynoted our Family-Owned Business Awards event last June. This year’s edition has been pushed back to October, and the keynoters are Olen Properties President Igor Olenicoff and his daughter Natalia Ostensen, a senior vice president at the real estate firm.
Olenicoff said he’s riding out the pandemic in OC, but that almost didn’t happen. The family heard about worsening conditions “when we were on our boat in the Caribbean Islands, and hurried back to a major port.” They “literally caught the last plane out of Nassau about a week ago,” he said via email.
Olen “is holding together well,” he said. “Collection [of] the rents next week may be a whole different story.”
