Orange County’s reputation as a mecca for ophthalmology just got another boost as Staar Surgical Co. (Nasdaq: STAA) recently relocated its headquarters from Monrovia to Lake Forest.
Shares of the device maker have doubled over the past year for a $1.6 billion market cap, thus becoming the 22nd member of the Business Journal’s list of publicly traded companies with a value topping $1 billion.
The 37-year-old company reported record global sales jumped 37% to a record $124 million in 2018, and forecast 2019 sales will grow 20% over 2018. It had 475 full time employees as of Dec. 28.
The company last week confirmed the new headquarters location at Lake Forest; executives began relocating a few months ago.
Chief Executive Caren Mason told the Business Journal in an earlier interview OC has the right types of workers for its company, and is a good location for recruiting ophthalmic talents.
Its new headquarters are in a roughly 24,000 square foot building in an office park just off Bake Parkway that brokerage records indicate has other tenants.
It is keeping the Monrovia location, which will double its manufacturing size and still house some company executives, spokesperson Brian Moore said.
“Monrovia is still a very important facility,” Moore said. “But for recruiting ophthalmologists, Orange County is more important than Los Angeles.”
Staar joins a number of OC companies thriving in eye care, such as San Clemente’s Glaukos Corp. (NYSE: GKOS) and Irvine’s Ivantis Inc., both of which treat glaucoma.
Others making a variety of products to improve eyesight include Johnson & Johnson Vision in Santa Ana and Alcon Research Ltd. and Bausch Health Companies Inc., both in Irvine.
Happiest Patients
Staar develops lenses for vision correction so patients don’t have to wear glasses or contact lenses. Its principal products are implantable contact lenses, or ICLs, used in refractive surgery, and intraocular lenses, IOLs, for cataract surgery.
The implantable contact lenses are gaining favor in the industry: the unit grew sales last year 48% to $101 million.
The Visian ICL family of lenses require minimally invasive outpatient procedures using topical anesthesia.
“Surgeons refer to the ICL patient as their ‘happiest patients’ and 99.4% of patients in a Patient Registry said they would have the procedure again,” Mason said in February.
Staar last week announced the millionth implant of its ICL, Collamer.
“More ICLs have been implanted since 2015 than the prior 15 years of the ICL combined,” Mason said.
The company is ramping up for the U.S. launch of its latest lens, the Visian Toric ICL, which received Food and Drug Administration approval in September.
“We are planning and making initial investments in 2019, in manufacturing and facilities expansion,” Mason told analysts during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in February.
The company has a manufacturing facility in Aliso Viejo and a research and development team at its lab in Tustin.
China Focus
Mason took over in 2015, replacing former Chief Executive Barry Caldwell who retired.
Previously, she was chief executive and an adviser to Verinata Health Inc., a provider of a noninvasive parental genetic test that was sold to San Diego-based Illumina Inc. (Nasdaq: ILMN) in 2013 for $350 million.
Starr is “one of our leading (ophthalmic) companies,” said Jim Mazzo, Global President of Ophthalmic Devices at Carl Zeiss Meditec, and one of OC’s top medical device executives.
Mason “has done a great job of rebuilding the company and its significance in our space,” said Mazzo, who works out of Newport Beach.
She is in the process of rebuilding the company’s U.S. business, which suffered a blow when the FDA issued a warning letter over design and quality issues at the plant in Monrovia in 2014. The regulatory agency lifted the warning in June last year.
U.S. sales last year were only $7.3 million, or about 6% of overall revenue. Staar said it’s establishing a panel of experts to help drive confidence in its products.
The company is betting on China, the largest refractive market in the world, representing approximately one quarter of refractive procedures globally.
It reported 2018 sales in China of $46.1 million, almost triple the amount in 2016.
“We believe the high level of myopia [there], the increasing demand for the ICL … and our uniquely successful business model for our strategic partners are contributing to high-level growth in China,” Mason told analysts.
Los Angeles Business Journal reporter Dana Bartholomew contributed to this article.
