Geoffrey Martha
Chairman at Medtronic
Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. We delivered another quarter of mid-single-digit revenue growth for the ninth quarter in a row. We had strong performances in several areas, starting with 22% growth in cardiac ablation solutions powered by our PFA portfolio. Leadless pacing, neuromodulation and diabetes all grew double-digits. And structural Heart excluding congenital and US cranial and spinal technologies both grew high-single-digits. We advanced our innovation pipeline and are opening up the largest total addressable market in medtech with renal denervation.
It's an exciting time as we're stacking growth drivers on-top of growth drivers with groundbreaking innovation in some of the most attractive markets in. We overcame a short-term US distributor dynamic and delivered strong earnings power with high single-digit EPS growth coming in ahead of both consensus and the high-end of our guidance range with strong improvements in both our gross margin and operating margin. And as we look-ahead to our fiscal 4th-quarter, we expect our revenue and EPS growth to accelerate as we build-on momentum in important growth markets and continue to drive earnings leverage.
We expect our formula of delivering durable revenue growth, leveraged earnings and generating strong free-cash flow to create significant value for our shareholders. Now let's turn to the details of our Q3 business results and discuss our performance. Starting first with our cardiovascular portfolio, which grew mid-single digits overall. The highlight was our cardiac Ablation solutions business. Now we forecasted strong double-digit growth this quarter and delivered meaningful acceleration, growing 22%. Our pulse field ablation products are driving rapid growth.
We've hit a new gear on supply-and-demand for our PFA portfolio continues to accelerate. We are the only company with two PFA platforms, Affera and Pulselect, which gives us flexibility. Affera has separated itself from the pack as the most desired workhorse platform with its integrated high-density mapping as well as both PF and RF capabilities in a focal catheter. This is increasing our revenue per case as we replace competitors mapping and RF catheters. We also have PULSELECT, and as customers use this single-shot PFA catheter, they want to use it more-and-more.
Pulse gives us just a ton of flexibility to grow the market globally and compete. Across both our and Pulse platforms, customers appreciate their ease-of-use, precision, durable efficacy and now increasingly their differentiated safety profile. We believe the safety profile of our PFA technology is a significant point of differentiation competitively, and it is one of several factors that gives us high confidence in our outlook. Now looking ahead, we expect this rapid growth trajectory to continue. For Q4, we expect cash to accelerate its growth rate and deliver another strong double-digit growth quarter.
This will be a $1 billion business for us this fiscal year and we have line-of-sight to $2 billion as our PFA portfolio expands into new accounts around the world. Next, in Structural Heart, we grew high-single-digits, excluding Congenital. We continue to see good adoption of our Evolute TAVR system in the US and the international launch is off to a very good start. As we look-ahead, we have some important upcoming data catalysts as we continue to share long-term evidence on the benefits of our platform.
Our five-year low-risk data will be presented as a late-breaker at ACC next month and two-year data from our SMART trial, which is a head-to-head versus our largest competitor will be shared later this spring. Look, we're at a moment now where we've really solidified this business with product improvements, important clinical data and strong execution by the team, it's now in a really good spot. Next, in cardiac pacing therapies, we grew 9%. This business has grown upper-single digits for 10 quarters in a row now. On the strength of our leels pacemaker franchise and conduction system pacing technology.
In April, we will mark the 10th anniversary of our first micro leadless pacemaker receiving CE Mark. And now a decade later, our microfranchise continues to set the standard, delivering outstanding 24% growth in Q3, and we expect this strength to continue. Now turning to hypertension and our simplicity blood pressure procedure. We're poised to change the standard-of-care for uncontrolled high blood pressure. Medicare coding and payment is now in-place and just last month, we had a pivotal development when CMS opened a national coverage analysis.
This is exciting news as we will now have Medicare coverage in-place within the next eight months. We're activating new accounts across the US and helping them set-up simplicity clinics and establish care pathways. So they're prepared to quickly ramp procedures when coverage is in-place. And upon coverage, this will be an immediate growth driver and will become a significant source of growth for the company. Nearly half of US adults have hypertension and one in four of those with hypertension, they just don't have it under control, despite the broad availability of numerous generic medications.
So as we take a step-back, the patient population is large. The current standard-of-care just isn't working. Patients want this new therapy, physicians can easily do the procedure and health systems support it. The opportunity here is just massive, and we're poised to be the leader in addressing this large and unmet need. And as we look at the overall cardiovascular portfolio, taking all of these growth drivers together, we expect its growth to meaningfully accelerate in the quarters ahead, starting with Q4. Turning to our neuroscience portfolio, which also grew mid-single digits this quarter.
In Cranial and Spinal Technologies, we had another strong quarter with 5% global growth, including 8% growth in the US as we won another point of share. And I've been saying for some time now that the basis of competition in the spine market is rapidly changing. And you saw yet another example last month when a major competitor decided to get-out of the spine business. We're causing this disruption. We're causing this disruption with our arsenal of differentiated enabling technology, including AI-driven pre-op planning software, imaging, robotics, navigation and powered surgical instruments and we recently expanded into pre and post-op imaging through our partnership with Siemens Health and.
Look, surgeons have to make a choice and they're standardizing with the company that can offer them this full complement of innovative technologies. And those competitors that can't or can only offer certain pieces, while we're seeing them either struggle or just exit the market altogether. Our differentiated best-in-class able ecosystem is attracting the best buying surgeons as well as the best reps and distributors from competitors. And as these dynamics continue to play-out and we continue to expand our innovation lead, we expect our CST business to deliver sustained above-market growth.
Next, neuromodulation grew 13% well-above the market. And just like in spine, our game-changing innovation and strong commercial execution is disrupting the competitive dynamics. The closed-loop sensing technology that we've developed for both pain stem and brain modulation has been a big engineering feat. We now have therapies that can be personalized at-scale, which is better for patients and can lessen the load on the healthcare system. And it raises the bar on what it takes to compete, which is evident in our Neuromod growth.
In pain stem, we grew 12%, including 17% in the US on the strength of our Inceptive closed-loop spinal cord stimulator. On-top of being the smallest and thinnest SCS device, Inceptiv instantly adjusts based on neural responses to keep the therapy at an optimal dose. And it has the best full-body MRI conditional access on the market, which is a very important feature for patients with chronic pain. In brain modulation, we grew 15%, including 26% in the US, driven by the adoption of our Percept DBS systems. Percept and its brain computer interface technology is transforming treatment for patients with movement disorders like Parkinson's essential tremor, dystonia and epilepsy.
Last month, we received CE Mark clearance for our adaptive DBS for people with Parkinson's. With this groundbreaking technology, percept devices through a software upgrade can become personalized, fully closed-loop systems with real-time automatic therapy adjustments based on brain activity feedback. Now we expect this launch to drive continued above-market growth for our Brain mod business in the quarters ahead. Now turning to our Medical-Surgical portfolio, let's discuss our performance in Surgical. This quarter, we experienced a change in US distributor buying patterns, which had a couple of hundred basis-point impact on our surgical performance.
We expect this to resolve as we start fiscal '26. Apart from this distributor dynamic, our US hospital customer purchasing direct from us and through distributors has been stable. And while we continue to see market and competitive pressures in our stapling franchise, we're offsetting this by winning share with our Ligashire advanced Energy products globally and by driving strong high single-digit growth in emerging markets. With our Hugo soft-tissue robotic platform, we're approaching some important milestones, including entering the US market, expanding indications, adding features and enhancing system performance.
In international markets, utilization continues to increase and we've more than doubled Hugo procedure volume year-over-year. In the US, we are on-track to submit for FDA approval for Hugo with urology indications by the end of next month. I also have some new information to share with you today. We have finished enrollment in our hernia and benign studies. Further, we recently received FDA approval to initiate our GYNE Oncology ID study and are actively moving that forward. We're also making progress adding features and instrumentation.
We just completed our first cases using our ICG fluorescent imaging and we expect to add our vessel ceiling technology to Hugo later this calendar year. So in total, we are confident in our path forward. Hugo will be a growth driver for our surgical business in fiscal '26 and a meaningful growth driver for Medtronic in the mid-term. Finally, in diabetes, we had our fifth quarter in a row of double-digit growth. We printed 10% growth on-top of 10% growth in the prior year. Our growth is driven by, one, the overall move of the market from standalone CGM with MDI, two AID systems and two, the strength of our Mini Med 780G system within the AID category.
We continue to grow our 78G installed-base and we're seeing very-high CGM attachment rates, as well as strong growth in consumables. In Europe, we're getting excellent user feedback on our Simplara Sync sensor, which is half the size and much easier to apply than our previous sensor. In the US, we've submitted Simplier Sync for FDA approval, and we're also continuing to make progress on the integration work with the Abbott-based sensor. We expect these two new sensors to really accelerate our US growth when fully launched.
Beyond sensors, we're also investing heavily in our robust diabetes technology pipeline, including next-gen durable pumps, patch pumps, smart pens and algorithms. We're also seeking expanded labeling for the 780G, including type-2 diabetes, which is a meaningful new opportunity. We expect to file this with the FDA here in the first-half of the calendar year. So across Medtronic, we continue to drive mid-single-digit growth and you're now seeing this translate into strong earnings power. We're delivering leveraged earnings as we focus on disciplined pricing, holding our SG&A growth below sales and realizing the benefits of our scale, including more than doubling our underlying COGS productivity.
Gary will now walk you through a deeper look at our Q3 financial performance and our outlook. Gary, over to you.
