Danaher entered the second half of 2026 having spent its cash and issued roughly $6.6 billion of new long-term debt. It then closed the acquisition of Masimo for about $9.8 billion. The move pushed total assets to $92.4 billion and goodwill to $47.4 billion, and it lands in the middle of a period when core sales growth has decelerated to low single digits. The company reports a full year of 2025 sales of $24.6 billion. Diluted earnings for the year were $5.05 per share. But the year was flattered by the absence of the impairments that hit the prior year and by a clean set of disposals, so the headline earnings number overstates the pace of the underlying business.
The strategic story is a company testing whether its acquisition machine still creates value. Danaher has historically bought, integrated, and re-engineered businesses under the Danaher Business System, and it has funded that machine with debt and buybacks. The Masimo deal is the largest in a long line of them. The question for an investor is not whether Danaher can close deals. It is whether the pricing it pays, the debt it loads onto the balance sheet, and the operating leverage it extracts from the portfolio hold together when growth is slow and the cost of capital is not as cheap as it was a decade ago.