CareFusion sees Q3 profit dip in wake of Nicolet sale

CareFusion ($CFN) saw its profit dip to $31 million for its fiscal third quarter that ended March 31, down from $45 million a year earlier. The results come less than a month after CareFusion agreed to sell its Nicolet neurodiagnostic and monitoring products business to Natus Medical ($BABY) for $58 million.

The company also narrowed its full-year guidance range for adjusted diluted earnings per share from continuing operations of $1.75 to $1.85 to a new range of $1.75 to $1.80, reflecting the planned Nicolet divestiture and expectations entering the fourth quarter.

Despite the overall profit fall off, the quarter was good for the company's medical systems segment, which saw revenue increase 19%. But in its procedural solutions segment, CareFusion saw revenue dip 5% versus a year earlier to $328 million. That fall came in part because of the divestiture of the OnSite Services business in March 2011. During a call on the earnings, Kieran Gallahue, chairman and CEO, said the company hired an R&D leader for that unit during the quarter.

All in all, Gallahue seemed pretty happy with the company's results. "We continued to make good progress during the quarter on strategies to optimize our portfolio, simplify the complexity of our infrastructure and reduce expenses to fund growth initiatives," he explained in a statement.

And don't count CareFusion out of the M&A game. The company's opportunities tend to come through acquisitions of technologies that overlap its existing offerings, such as products to prevent medication errors, Gallahue told Dow Jones in March. During the earnings call, he assured listeners that the company wasn't necessarily focused on "some many, many billion-dollar acquisition," adding, "... we're using M&A as a means of building on our core, of leveraging the strength that we have in both the Medical Systems segment and the call point that we're focusing on in the Procedural Solutions segment."

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