PARIS — Said Hilal, president/CEO of Applied Medical (Rancho Santa Margarita, California), was comfortable with the background buzz of lingua Francais while sitting in his company’s cafe-style exhibition area at the Congrès Français de Chirurgie during the French Surgical Congress . “My sisters,” he said, “were always speaking to me in the French they learned at school in Lebannon.”

For all his ease in a cosmopolitan zone, Hilal has spent his entire adult life in California and now is introducing a new company to the Old World. Worldwide, he reported the company finishing 2007 with $150 million in revenue.

“And an IPO is quite likely in 2008,” he told Medical Device Daily.

The company is currently 45% held by venture capital funds and 55% by executives and managers.

“Our venture capital partners have been very patient to hold us as a 20-year investment for what are usually 10-year funds,” according to Hilal. “But we have been financing our growth internally, which means keeping up with a 30% pace.”

A further incentive for going public is creating a mechanism for employees to trade shares in the company.

As for the European adventure begun this year with the opening of an office in France, Hilal told MDD: “I sincerely do not know if we are ahead or behind targets in Europe. It would only tell me that, as a start-up, we were either too optimistic or too pessimistic with our plan. I can say that it is working out very well and it is exceptionally rewarding to be here meeting with leading surgeons. France is a true incubator for innovation in surgical practices.”

But he acknowledged some déjà vu in the European barriers to distribution.

“When we started, the U.S. market was closed by bundling practices of group purchasing contracts used by major companies who held a monopoly product,” he said.

In 2003 Hilal testified before the House Antitrust Committee and filed lawsuits against offending companies. As a result, he said, “Where in 2003 we held less than a 3% market share for trocars, for example, in the U.S., today we are north of 20% share for total units and have passed Tyco. The saving grace here is the European Union. They are far more sensitive and assertive about monopolistic practices, as we saw with the recent Microsoft decision.

“Yet I also find in our first year in Europe that we are coming up against price and product bundling again,” he said. “Europe may be years ahead of the U.S. in some ways, but I am not at ease that the EU is monitoring fully the activities of the big groups.”

— JOHN BROSKY