Boston Scientific CFO set to resign
Best engineered growth via deals
Lawrence Best , chief financial officer of Boston Scientific Corp. and the architect of much of its growth over the last 15 years, will leave his job in July, the company said yesterday.
He will be replaced by Sam Leno , chief financial officer of Zimmer Holdings Inc. , an Indiana maker of artificial knees, hips, and other orthopedic implants.
Best will leave July 6 to become a private investor in life-science companies, Boston Scientific said. He will get a $3.3 million exit package, which a spokesman said was the company's standard executive retirement deal.
In 15 years at the Natick medical device maker -- the longest tenure of any of its top executives -- Best built the firm from a Watertown maker of catheters and other medical tools to the state's biggest life-sciences firm, and one of the world's largest brand names in lucrative, high-tech heart devices.
An inveterate deal maker, Best engineered 37 acquisitions during his tenure. In a statement, company founder and chairman Pete Nicholas called him "an essential partner in the creation of today's Boston Scientific."
With a reputation as a tough, gloves-off negotiator, Best was deeply involved not just in engineering deals, but in scouting for new technology around the world. In interviews before last year's $27 billion acquisition of Guidant Corp., he said that he spent a large amount of his time as a kind of in-house venture capitalist, managing a portfolio of the company's medical device investments.
The outspoken Best wielded more power than the traditional chief financial officer. Though his salary was less than chief executive Jim Tobin's, he made $130 million by cashing in stock options in 2003 and 2004 alone, a period when the company's stock was at a peak -- far more than any other Boston Scientific executive at the time.
Best sits on the board of a handful of local companies, including Biogen Idec Inc. of Cambridge, Haemonetics Corp. of Braintree, and privately held Archemix Corp. of Cambridge.
He capped his tenure with the Guidant deal, in which Boston Scientific won a high-profile bidding war with its far larger rival Johnson & Johnson . The move got Boston Scientific into the billion-dollar business of selling pacemakers and implantable defibrillators, but also dramatically boosted its debt.
Since then, Boston Scientific has been hit with a series of problems. It has been blocked from introducing new products by a Food and Drug Administration warning over quality control. Sales of the company's flagship drug-coated coronary stents have been dented by safety concerns. And recalls of Guidant's heart devices have helped dampen the market for implantable defibrillators.
Boston Scientific's stock value has languished in the past two years, with shares now trading at around one-third their 2004 high. Yesterday they jumped on the news that Best was being replaced, gaining 61 cents, or 4 percent, to close at $16.05.
Leno presides over the finances of a smaller, more focused firm with a higher share price. With far fewer staffers and less than half the sales of Boston Scientific, Zimmer nonetheless enjoys a market value of $21 billion, not far below Boston Scientific's $24 billion.
Leno also shares a work history with his new boss, Tobin . Both worked at Baxter International Inc. , the medical supply company that has produced a number of local life-science leaders, including Genzyme Corp. chief executive Henri Termeer .
Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser@globe.com. 