Over the past several years, Swiss Jomed has been one of the few small European stent companies to grow into a major cardiovascular device company. Last year's successful IPO was testimony to the company's strong sales growth. But it was two deals the company did following soon after the IPO, the acquisitions of US-based MediDyne and EndoSonics, that will test whether Jomed is ready to break out of the pack and compete on a truly global scale with medical device giants such as Guidant and Medtronic.

By all accounts, the one piece missing from the puzzle for Jomed NV, the small European supplier making waves in the highly competitive field of interventional cardiology, has been a US presence. Thus, most industry observers saw the value in Jomed's merger with Endosonics as providing it with a US sales and marketing infrastructure.