Abbott Laboratories ABT

The business

Four businesses, and only one of them is why anyone owns this. Medical Devices is $5.85B a quarter at a 34% segment margin, and inside it sits the continuous glucose monitor, a small disc a diabetic wears on the arm that replaced the finger prick. Diagnostic Products runs the tests hospitals and labs order. Nutritional Products is Similac and Ensure. Established Pharmaceuticals sells branded generics into emerging markets.

In March, Abbott paid $20.6B in cash for Exact Sciences, the cancer screening company behind the mail-order colon test, and funded it with $20B of new borrowing. That transaction is the reason the numbers below look the way they do.