How does a medtech company top its “best year ever”? According to Dexcom, by adding another half-billion dollars in revenue, growing the customer base by upwards of 30% and collecting a handful of regulatory clearances for new product launches.
The continuous glucose monitor maker reported those and several other wins this week in its year-end financial report. For all of 2021, it tallied up $2.45 billion in revenue, up 27% from its $1.9 billion total in 2020, a year that CEO Kevin Sayer had previously described as the company’s best ever.
The company’s 2021 earnings also top its own forecasts for the year. While wrapping up 2020, Dexcom offered a prediction that the next year’s revenues would fall between $2.21 billion and $2.31 billion, representing year-over-year growth of up to 20%. It upped those expectations toward the end of the year, suggesting in its third-quarter earnings report that the full year’s revenue would inch closer to the $2.425 billion to $2.45 billion range—a range that it ultimately maxed out.
Those rising revenues were helped along by another record-setting year of growth in Dexcom’s patient pool. Patient volumes both in and outside of the U.S. clocked in at the high end of the 30% to 40% range, Chief Financial Officer Jereme Sylvain said during a call with investors on Thursday.
Perhaps Dexcom’s most important achievement of 2021, according to Sayer, was the publication of data demonstrating the effectiveness of its G7 CGM sensor. The system was shown to produce blood sugar readings with a mean average relative difference of just about 8% compared to those of standard glucose meters.
The G7 device is about 60% smaller than the preceding G6 model and is designed for use by patients with either Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes to track their glucose levels.
“We set out in 2021 with a few key goals in mind: to complete the clinical and regulatory process for G7 and prepare for significant launches, to validate health and economic outcomes for Dexcom CGM beyond the intent of insulin using population, to broaden access to Dexcom CGM globally through evidence, advocacy and leveraging our growing scale and efficiency, and to strengthen our product portfolio for future growth through differentiated software capabilities,” Sayer said during Thursday’s call.
“Our progress on all these initiatives contributed to a great 2021 and have us looking forward to a big year ahead in 2022,” Sayer added.
Once again, the G7 sensor will be at the top of Dexcom’s priorities for the upcoming year. It submitted regulatory applications in both the U.S. and Europe at the end of 2021 and is already expecting the EU’s CE mark clearance to come through any day now.
“We’re down to the last steps for CE mark—literally, procedural-type discussions with documentation that will take place in the near term,” Sayer said on the call. “We’re very confident that we’ll get the CE mark very soon, and then we will start our limited launch in Europe and then roll out to the full launch after that.”
Meanwhile, he said, Dexcom has had “initial dialogue” with the FDA about the submission and isn’t expecting any delays in the stateside regulatory process, helped along by the “great clinical data” it was able to include in the submission.
Overall, if things go according to schedule with the regulatory agencies and the rollout of the G7 sensor, Dexcom is forecasting another bump of up to 20% in its full-year 2022 revenue, bringing the total up somewhere between $2.82 billion and $2.94 billion.