Abbott Went All In on Covid Tests, And It’s Just Getting Started
‘It was like a rollercoaster ride with no seatbelts:’ inside Abbott’s high-speed efforts to bring products in record time and its plan for the testing business.
BinaxNOW, a single-use rapid test the size of a credit card, can be used at home and costs as little as $5.
Source: Abbott LaboratoriesAs the world moves on to vaccines, health-care giant Abbott Laboratories is doubling down on Covid-19 tests.
Chief Executive Officer Robert Ford, who took over in March 2020 just as the pandemic hit the U.S., put all the company’s weight behind tackling the global pandemic last year, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on developing products in record time. The Herculean effort paid off financially: Abbott sold 300 million coronavirus tests in the fourth quarter alone, generating $2.4 billion in sales from products that didn’t even exist a few months earlier.