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Stryker makes medical devices and implants used in surgery, like replacement hips and knees, plus hospital equipment like beds and operating-room cameras.
Stryker sells the metal-and-plastic parts that go inside your body, plus the machines and tools hospitals use to put them there. Think of it as two big engines under one roof. The first, and by far the largest, is orthopedics and spine: artificial hips, knees, shoulders, and the screws and rods surgeons use to fix broken backs. The second is a grab bag of hospital gear — operating-room cameras, powered surgical tools, patient beds, stretchers, and even the software that runs a surgical suite. It sells almost entirely to hospitals, surgery centers, and the surgeons who work there, not to regular shoppers. Revenue runs around $24 billion a year, and the company has been growing at a steady clip, with sales up roughly 10% lately.
Hospitals pick Stryker because its implants have a long track record of lasting inside patients, and because switching to a different brand means retraining surgeons and reworking supply contracts — a real hassle. That stickiness is the quiet superpower of this business. Nobody wakes up excited to buy a knee replacement, but when they need one, they mostly buy whatever their surgeon trusts. Stryker's newer, faster-growing piece is its robot, Mako, which helps surgeons plan and perform joint replacements with more precision. It also keeps buying smaller companies to bolt on new tools — neurovascular devices, digital surgery software, and communications systems for hospital staff — rather than inventing everything itself. A recent twist: some of its hip and knee implants got caught up in broader concerns about metal-on-metal safety and post-surgery complications, a reminder that even a great device company lives with regulatory and liability risk.
Stryker was started in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1941 by Homer Stryker, a doctor who got annoyed that a hospital bed was uncomfortable, and it still calls Michigan home. It has grown mainly by buying its way into new corners of the hospital rather than by inventing from scratch, which is how it went from beds to hips to robots. The company throws off a lot of cash, and it uses that money in three main ways: buying more companies, paying a dividend, and buying back its own stock to shrink the share count. That steady diet of acquisitions plus a sticky customer base is why Wall Street treats it as one of the more dependable names in medical technology.
Saved answer · last researched 14 Oct 2026