2 Healthcare Names That Could Get a Big Boost From Earnings

Key Points

• An acceleration from last quarter's 4% year-over-year growth in nutrition segment sales could help boost Abbott Laboratories' revenue performance.
• Intuitive Surgical's preliminary fourth-quarter earnings results led to a modest dip in share price, perhaps due to middling forecasted da Vinci procedure growth for 2026.
• Still, overall adoption and revenue growth rates remain high, and the temporary decline may be an opportunity for long-term investors.

Active traders expect companies in the healthcare sector to experience significant share price spikes tied to milestones in the development of new therapies and medical products. The volatility in some corners of the sector makes it a high-risk, but high-reward, opportunity. Another potential catalyst for share price movement—and potentially significant movement at that—is healthcare sector earnings reports. The two companies below may be poised for growth (either immediate or longer-term) depending on the signals their earnings reports send upon release in late January.

Analysts Expect Abbott to Overcome Nutrition Sluggishness

A $211-billion healthcare giant that provides diagnostic tools, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and more, Abbott Laboratories NYSE: ABT is known for its continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), cardiac, and vascular products.

Despite some ups and downs in its share price, Abbott has come out essentially even over the last 12 months, with a 4.3% return that has underperformed the S&P 500.

For the third quarter of 2025, Abbott met analyst expectations with earnings per share (EPS) of $1.30 but came in more than $31 million short on revenue, despite sales climbing by about 7% year-over-year (YOY).

Preventing Abbott from seeing stronger revenue performance in the third quarter was its nutrition segment, which only experienced a YOY sales improvement of 4%.

Another key headwind was the Chinese market for diagnostics, which have suffered as a result of tariffs and other trade issues. Still, the somewhat lackluster top- and bottom-line performances may hide some strong points in Abbott's business as it headed into the final months of the year, including a 17% YOY increase in CGM product sales to $2 billion.

Investors will watch whether new high-protein and low-sugar launches for Ensure and Glucerna can reignite category sales growth. It's likely that they will provide a boost to the segment and could help to accelerate sales overall.

Given Abbott's earlier issues with volume-based procurement programs hindering diagnostics sales in China, it is perhaps less likely that the company will have been able to overcome the prior quarter's concerns. That may not matter too much, however, if Abbott continues to do well in its medical devices and pharmaceuticals, and in diagnostics sales in its core lab business, excluding China.

Wall Street expects the company to rise to the occasion with its end-of-year earnings, as analysts at Barclays, Evercore ISI, and others have all reiterated Buy ratings or boosted price targets in recent weeks. Wall Street sees ABT shares rising 21%, with 19 analysts rating the company a Buy, compared with four Holds.

Intuitive's Preliminary Earnings Dip Could Be a Hidden Opportunity

Intuitive Surgical NASDAQ: ISRG is of comparable size to Abbott, though its product lineup is different, being narrowly focused on robot-assisted surgical equipment and systems. Notably, investors already have an idea of what to expect at the company's fourth-quarter earnings thanks to preliminary results issued on Jan. 14, 2026. Thanks to an aging population and growing demand for minimally invasive surgical procedures, the company's total quarterly worldwide procedures surged by 18% YOY.

Intuitive's popular da Vinci system has continued to post impressive adoption rates, helping to drive fourth-quarter revenue growth of 19% YOY to $2.87 billion. And yet, despite a number of impressive performance metrics already available to investors, the market responded to these preliminary results with a modest sell-off of ISRG shares.

Likely contributing to the dip was somewhat lackluster 2026 procedure growth guidance, as Intuitive expects da Vinci procedures to climb by only 13%-15% in 2026, a slower pace than 2025's 18% YOY improvement.

Still, Intuitive's long-term prospects are incredibly strong, not only because of continued strong demand for its products but also because of the company's often-overlooked pipeline of imaging drugs and other therapeutics.

If Intuitive's official fourth-quarter earnings provide a fuller picture of the company's strengths heading into the new year, shares may rebound after the earlier dip. Beyond that, analysts are still largely bullish on the company in the near-term, with 18 calling ISRG shares a Buy compared to nine total Sell and Hold ratings, with consensus upside potential of more than 16%.