Medline (NASDAQ:MDLN) & Shoulder Innovations (NYSE:SI) Head to Head Review

Medline (NASDAQ:MDLN) and Shoulder Innovations (NYSE:SI) are both manufacturing companies, but which is the superior investment? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their earnings, risk, institutional ownership, dividends, profitability, valuation and analyst recommendations.

Profitability

This table compares Medline and Shoulder Innovations’ net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Medline	N/A	N/A	N/A
Shoulder Innovations	-85.29%	-37.68%	-18.63%

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares Medline and Shoulder Innovations”s gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Medline	$28.43 billion	1.93	N/A	N/A	N/A
Shoulder Innovations	$47.32 million	6.65	-$40.36 million	($218.68)	-0.07

Medline has higher revenue and earnings than Shoulder Innovations.

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of recent recommendations for Medline and Shoulder Innovations, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Medline	0	5	21	2	2.89
Shoulder Innovations	1	1	5	0	2.57

Medline presently has a consensus target price of $50.62, suggesting a potential upside of 21.23%. Shoulder Innovations has a consensus target price of $20.80, suggesting a potential upside of 36.54%. Given Shoulder Innovations’ higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Shoulder Innovations is more favorable than Medline.

Summary

Medline beats Shoulder Innovations on 7 of the 9 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Medline

Our mission is to make healthcare run better by delivering improved clinical, financial, and operational outcomes. We are the largest provider of medical-surgical (“med-surg”) products and supply chain solutions serving all points of care, based on total net sales of med-surg products. We deliver mission-critical products used daily across the full range of care settings, from hospitals and surgery centers to physician offices and post-acute facilities. Through our two segments, Medline Brand and Supply Chain Solutions, we offer approximately 335,000 med-surg products, including surgical and procedural kits, gloves and protective apparel, urological and incontinence care, wound care, and consumable lab and diagnostics products. We hold the leading position across several of our end markets and many of our key product families. We distribute these products through our expansive network of 69 global distribution facilities, spanning over 29 million square feet of warehouse space, and our owned fleet of over 2,000 MedTrans trucks, enabling us to provide next-day delivery to 95% of our U.S. customers. Our integrated business model and customer-centric culture drives lower costs and better value for our stakeholders. This is the foundation for our durable recurring revenue base, with our net sales having grown every year since inception of the Company at a compound annual growth rate (“CAGR”) of 18%. — We were founded in 1966 as a med-surg product manufacturer serving the hospital and nursing home sites of care. Through our deep engagement with customers, we recognized a significant gap in the market—our customers were underserved by a fragmented supplier base and faced challenges navigating a complex supply chain. We identified their need for a supply chain partner that was fully integrated, cost-effective, high-quality, and resilient. Our vision was to create a differentiated model that solved these pain points through an integrated company that combined both manufacturing and distribution capabilities and would become a trusted partner to our customers. Twenty-eight years ago, we began augmenting our platform to bring this vision to life: we invested in our distribution capabilities, continued to expand our product portfolio, and adopted the Prime Vendor model. This enabled us to serve a more diverse customer base across multiple end markets, while lowering costs and delivering superior service levels. As a result, Medline is now the largest provider of med-surg products and supply chain solutions serving all points of care, based on total net sales of med-surg products. The combination of our expansive product portfolio and our differentiated supply chain creates a force multiplier for our business. Our Medline Brand segment offers approximately 190,000 products, including those manufactured in our 33 facilities, as well as those sourced from our more than 500 global partners. Our Supply Chain Solutions segment offers approximately 145,000 third-party products and provides customized supply chain optimization services. Our entire product portfolio across our segments is supported by differentiated logistics capabilities and a dedicated and tenured U.S. commercial team of approximately 3,800 people. These capabilities and our compelling value proposition allow us to serve as a long-term strategic partner to our customers and expand the scope of our relationships over time. Our Prime Vendor relationships demonstrate our role as a trusted partner to our customers. In these relationships, we enter into long-term agreements to act as the consolidated distributor and logistics provider for these customers’ med-surg product needs. These partnerships give us visibility into our customers’ purchasing behaviors and demand dynamics, which allows us to anticipate their needs and deliver industry-leading service levels. As these relationships mature, we believe customers increasingly choose Medline Brand products for their superior value. Our Prime Vendor model is reinforced by the flywheel effect within our business where we drive cost savings for Prime Vendor customers, which, over time, supports incremental purchasing of our Medline Brand products and increases our scale. This dynamic allows us to drive further efficiencies by offering superior or similar quality to third-party products at a more cost-effective price. Due to the higher margin we earn on Medline Brand products compared to sales of comparable third-party products, we are able to reinvest in customer value while increasing our profitability. — Since our founding, we have invested in building a unique customer-centric culture with an entrepreneurial spirit. Our employees are committed to deeply understanding how our customers operate, what challenges they face, and how Medline can better support them. They also understand that relationships are rooted in trust and that we must earn the right to serve our customers every day. We focus on problem solving across the continuum of care and we deploy a team of dedicated customer success representatives to learn the complex needs of our customers. Our creative and collaborative culture consistently earns Medline recognition as a preferred employer, including Newsweek’s Greatest Workplaces, Forbes’ America’s Best Large Employers, and a Chicago Tribune Top Workplace. We have grown our net sales every year by retaining existing customers while gaining share with new and existing customers, with CAGRs of 18% since our founding and approximately 14% over the past 10 years. Notably, nearly 90% of our growth during the past 10 years has been organic. Our product portfolio predominantly consists of consumables, such that approximately 90% of our Medline Brand net sales were recurring for the year ended December 31, 2024. Our business is uniquely resilient during market downturns, as evidenced by our growth through every recession since our founding and during global healthcare crises. For example, our net sales grew at approximately 17% during the 2008-2009 financial crisis and at approximately 11% CAGR during the 2020-2022 COVID-19 pandemic. Not only does our business have a strong track record of results, but we also see significant runway for future sales and earnings growth. We are positioned to grow with our customers as healthcare utilization increases, as they build and acquire new sites, and as they further consolidate med-surg spend with Medline. In addition, we intend to further extend our leading position by adding new Prime Vendor relationships, increasing the number of non-Prime Vendor customers that choose Medline Brand, continuing our channel expansion, developing new products, executing on selective M&A opportunities, and scaling our international footprint. For the nine months ended September 27, 2025, we generated net sales of $20.6 billion, net income of $1.0 billion, and Adjusted EBITDA of $2.7 billion, representing a net income margin of 4.7% and an Adjusted EBITDA Margin of 12.9%. During that period, 48.4% of total net sales and 81.2% of Segment Adjusted EBITDA were generated from our Medline Brand segment, while 51.6% of total net sales and 18.8% of Segment Adjusted EBITDA were generated from our Supply Chain Solutions segment. For the year ended December 31, 2024, we generated net sales of $25.5 billion, net income of $1.2 billion, and Adjusted EBITDA of $3.4 billion, representing a net income margin of 4.7% and an Adjusted EBITDA Margin of 13.2%. During that period, 49.1% of total net sales and 83.5% of Segment Adjusted EBITDA were generated from our Medline Brand segment, while 50.9% of total net sales and 16.5% of Segment Adjusted EBITDA were generated from our Supply Chain Solutions segment. Our principal executive offices are located in Northfield, Illinois.

About Shoulder Innovations

We are a commercial-stage medical technology company exclusively focused on transforming the shoulder surgical care market. We currently offer advanced implant systems for shoulder arthroplasty. These systems are a core element of our ecosystem, which we designed to improve core components of shoulder surgical care – preoperative planning, implant design and procedural efficiency – to benefit each stakeholder in the care chain. Our ecosystem is also comprised of enabling technologies, efficient instrument systems, specialized support and surgeon-to-surgeon collaboration. Together, these elements seek to address the long-standing clinical and operational challenges in the shoulder surgical care market by delivering predictable outcomes, procedural simplicity, and efficiency across all sites of care. We believe our exclusive focus on shoulder surgical care, combined with a highly specialized commercial organization and strong clinical data, positions us well to capture significant share in this large, growing market. Shoulder pain is highly prevalent, often chronic, and can significantly reduce quality of life. The primary conditions that can result in shoulder pain and reduced functionality include osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, rotator cuff tears and shoulder fractures. Shoulder conditions are widespread, often debilitating, are commonly experienced concurrently as interrelated musculoskeletal disorders, and are estimated to result in more than eight million physician visits annually in the United States, based on data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey 2015-2016 conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”). Despite this prevalence, we believe there has been a historical underutilization of surgical treatments for shoulder care due to several factors including patient hesitation to pursue surgical intervention, insufficient technology to appropriately treat shoulder conditions, complex shoulder anatomy, perceived difficulty of surgical intervention and barriers to patient access of care. We believe the shoulder surgical care market today presents a significant market opportunity. Our initial focus within this broader market is on shoulder arthroplasty. Shoulder arthroplasty is an established surgical procedure involving the reconstruction of the shoulder joint with prosthetic implants through one of two main approaches: anatomic total shoulder arthroplasty (“aTSA”) and reverse total shoulder arthroplasty (“rTSA”). Both approaches can be performed in inpatient hospital settings and in outpatient settings, including ambulatory surgery centers (“ASCs”). A key competitive advantage of ours has been the emergence of ASCs as a cost-efficient site of care with positive outcomes relative to hospital-based care. We expect that future growth in the shoulder surgical care market will be significantly driven by ASCs as hospitals face capacity constraints and are more limited in their ability to meet increasing demand. We believe traditional implants used in shoulder arthroplasty procedures are hindered by several limitations, including poor biomechanical fit, suboptimal kinematics, difficult replacement and conversion procedures (aTSA to rTSA or stemless to stem), imprecise implant positioning due to limited surgical planning, inefficient and burdensome workflow designs and non-specialized case support. These limitations can result in continued pain, lack of mobility, postoperative complications, low rates of implant survivorship, necessity of revision surgeries and costly and inefficient procedures for healthcare providers. We developed our ecosystem with an approach to innovation that prioritizes ease of use, flexibility, predictability of outcomes and site of care efficiency, attributes we believe are critical to win in our market. This ecosystem is comprised of our advanced implant systems, ProVoyance preoperative planning technology, efficient instrument system, specialized support and surgeon-to-surgeon collaboration. Our advanced implants are comprised of our aTSA and rTSA systems, which are designed to address the unique needs of patients and surgeons, and include various, specifically designed components capable of a wide array of system configurations to facilitate different modes of operation (anatomic or reverse). Our InSet Glenoid technology serves as the foundation for our advanced implant systems and includes a novel “InSet” design that aims to reduce mechanical stress at the bone implant interface, improve fixation mechanics, enhance stability and reduce micromotion. Our implant systems leverage consistent surgical techniques and the same efficient, two tray instrumentation system. In addition to our advanced implant systems, we offer a leading preoperative surgical planning technology: ProVoyance. We believe that surgeon-level engagement in preoperative planning provides for better care for patients, and that bespoke surgical plans can help facilitate consistent positioning of implants. ProVoyance integrates artificial intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning (“ML”) to transform planar CT imaging into 3D renderings of patient-specific anatomy ahead of surgery, and is cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (the “FDA”) for preoperative shoulder planning. ProVoyance received 510(k) clearance in 2021 and is classified by the FDA as a Class II device. ProVoyance is listed on the FDA’s AI/ML-enabled medical devices list, which is a resource maintained, published, and periodically updated by the FDA to identify AI/ML-enabled devices that have been authorized for marketing in the United States through any of the standard paths to market for medical devices, although it is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all such devices that incorporate AI/ML. We believe the differentiation and value proposition of ProVoyance is validated by high utilization rates across procedures using our advanced implant systems. For example, for the three months ended June 30, 2025, we estimate an implied utilization rate for our ProVoyance technology of approximately 98%, based on 1,478 surgical plans created using ProVoyance technology and 1,503 implant systems sold during such period. This implied utilization rate is based on real-world data from our customers during such period, as ProVoyance technology tracks and reports each surgical plan that our customers create, and the actual number of implant systems sold during the respective period. A key component of shoulder arthroplasty procedures are instrument trays, equipped with the specific instruments, supplies, and equipment needed for the surgery. We have developed a proprietary two-tray instrument system designed to enable interoperability between our aTSA and rTSA systems and a range of humeral stem options. We believe our efficient, two tray instrument system can enable surgeons and staff to reduce operating room footprint, procedural setup time, sterilization time and expense, and procedural complexity. To best support our surgeon customers, we have built our commercial organization around their unique needs. Our commercial organization is comprised of a dedicated commercial leadership team that drives our internal commercial efforts with an exclusive focus on shoulder care, a Customer Experience and Medical Education (“CEME”) team that enhances surgeon engagement and training and a network of independent distributors. These three key components of our commercial organization work in tandem to form a commercial flywheel that is designed to build and reinforce relationships with surgeons and other stakeholders in the shoulder surgical care market, accelerate adoption, and enhance long-term retention. We leverage our team’s decades of experience developing and launching novel shoulder surgical care technologies to identify the unmet needs of patients and surgeons and develop solutions to address those unmet needs. With respect to our advanced implant systems, we commenced development efforts with our InSet Glenoid in 2009 and received 510(k) clearance in 2011. We commercially launched an initial aTSA system with our InSet Glenoid in 2016. Since this initial launch in 2016, we have successfully launched a wide range of new technologies to enhance our ecosystem and provide surgeons with the tools and support needed to deliver quality outcomes for patients requiring shoulder surgical care. For example, we commenced development efforts for our InSet PLUS Augmented Glenoid in 2019 and received 510(k) clearance in 2020. We commenced development efforts for our rTSA system in 2019 and received 510(k) clearance in 2021. We commenced development efforts for our short stem, stemless and I-Series humeral stem system options for our aTSA and rTSA systems in 2017, 2019 and 2021, respectively, and received our primary 510(k) clearances in 2018 and 2022, with an additional 510(k) clearance in 2024 for use of our primary I-Series humeral stem for use with anatomic fractures. Each of these devices is classified by the FDA as a Class II device. We have a robust pipeline of new technologies in various stages of development and evaluation, including the anticipated expansion of our humeral stem line, indication expansions into fracture and revision, and implants tailored for metal-sensitive patients. For example, we commenced development of InSet 70, InSet 135 and InSet 185 stems to expand our I-Series humeral stem line in 2024, and we anticipate pursuing FDA clearance of these stems, as needed, over the next twelve months. We are also evaluating expansion into adjacent areas in shoulder surgical care, which may include sports medicine and shoulder trauma markets. We have contributed to numerous publications that we believe evidence and strengthen our position as a leader in shoulder surgical care. There is a significant body of clinical evidence that supports the safety, efficacy, and durability of our implants in shoulder arthroplasty, including our InSet Glenoid technology. For example, a retrospective long-term follow-up analysis of patients who received our InSet Glenoid was published in the Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery in 2019, which demonstrated a 72-point improvement in the mean American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons (“ASES”) outcome score, statistically significant improvements in pain scores and range of motion, with no surgical complications, no cases of glenoid loosening and no revision surgeries performed at a mean follow-up time of 8.7 years. We are committed to continued investment in obtaining further clinical evidence with the support of surgeons who are recognized as thought leaders in shoulder surgical care. We believe these efforts will continue to generate a substantial body of clinical evidence that will drive increased awareness and adoption of our products. We were initially formed on July 1, 2009 as Shoulder Innovations, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company. Our principal executive offices are located in Grand Rapids, MI.