Abbott Laboratories reported first-quarter sales of $11.16 billion, up 7.8 percent year-over-year, and adjusted earnings per share of $1.15, up 6 percent. [1] Medical Devices led the beat with 13.2 percent organic growth, continuing a streak that has carried the company since the continuous-glucose-monitor franchise matured. [2] The release also cut full-year 2026 adjusted EPS guidance to $5.38 to $5.58 — a range that prices in exactly $0.20 of dilution from the March 23 close of the Exact Sciences acquisition. [2]

The dilution disclosure is the useful part. Abbott paid $23 billion for Exact Sciences to own Cologuard, the mail-order stool-sample colon-cancer screen that has a 78 percent market share in its category and a sales force that now joins Abbott's diagnostics group. [1] Management has not pretended the math works immediately. Twenty cents in 2026. Accretive in 2028. That is the bargain they are telling shareholders to hold.

The X reading is sharper. Cologuard's unit economics depend on insurance reimbursement rates that CMS revisited in March and private payers will revisit later this year. [3] If the reimbursement holds, the 2028 accretion story holds. If it does not, Abbott bought a slower-growing diagnostics line at a premium multiple just as its own medical-devices business was pulling the company's growth curve. The company's MedTech peers — Medtronic, Stryker, Boston Scientific — spent the pandemic era buying startups. Abbott spent it buying a screening test with a TV ad budget.

The earnings call is in two weeks. The question is whether Cologuard volume is tracking the acquisition model.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco