Medtronic's Ishrak Is Getting Hometown Love

Medtronic CEO Omar is the executive of the year, according to a Twin Cities-based publication. Ishrak earlier this year also handily topped a Qmed poll asking readers to pick the best medtech chief executive.

Qmed Staff

Omar Ishrak--who has run Medtronic since 2011--is the 2016 Executive of the Year in the Twin Cities, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal recently announced.

Ishrak masterminded Medtronic's $48 billion merger with Covidien, which moved the company's official headquarters from Minnesota to Ireland. But the Business Journal notes that Medtronic has since added 350 new jobs to the North Star State, where the company is operationally run. (Here's a full timeline of the Medtronic-Covidien deal.

Medtronic is promising even more Minnesota job growth in the future, even as it cuts up to 175 jobs in Ireland.

The Business Journal isn't the only place where Ishrak has been getting a thumbs up. Earlier this year, Qmed readers picked Ishrak as the top medtech CEO. Ishrak garnered more than half of the 228 online survey votes.

Twin Cities Business magazine named Ishrak its 2015 Person of the Year.

Since Ishrak took over, Medtronic's stock has doubled in value, presently trading around $77 per share, and the company's revenue was up 19% during its most recent fiscal year ended April 24.

Even with the Covidien deal behind it, Medtronic has been spending more than $1 billion on acquisitions mostly focused on early technologies in the U.S. CardioInsight, which Medtronic bought for $93 in June,  has a single-use, disposable multi-sensor "vest" to capture electrical heart signals from the body surface. The vest was designed by Nottingham Spirk (Cleveland), which created a sleek advanced cardiac mapping technology from what was initially a crude prototype.

Chris Newmarker is senior editor of Qmed and MPMN. Follow him on Twitter at @newmarker.

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