Zimmer Biomet is a medical device company that designs, manufactures, and sells orthopedic implants and surgical technologies. Its core business revolves around replacement joints for knees, hips, and shoulders, along with products for sports medicine, trauma repair, and robotic-assisted surgery. The company is headquartered in Warsaw, Indiana, and its devices are used by orthopedic surgeons worldwide.
Joint Replacement Implants
The largest share of Zimmer Biomet’s business comes from artificial joints. When cartilage in a knee, hip, or shoulder wears down to the point where pain and stiffness become debilitating, surgeons replace the damaged joint with a metal-and-plastic implant designed to restore movement. Zimmer Biomet manufactures complete systems for these procedures, including the implant components themselves plus the specialized instruments surgeons use to size, cut, and position them during surgery.
Its flagship knee product is the Persona Personalized Knee, which comes in a wide range of sizes intended to match each patient’s anatomy more closely than a one-size-fits-most design. The company also makes hip replacement systems (both the socket and the stem that fits into the thighbone) and shoulder replacement implants, including reverse shoulder replacements used when the rotator cuff is too damaged for a conventional design.
Sports Medicine and Soft Tissue Repair
Beyond full joint replacements, Zimmer Biomet sells a large portfolio of products for repairing soft tissue injuries. These are the anchors, screws, and suture devices that surgeons use during arthroscopic procedures, where they work through small incisions with a camera rather than opening the joint fully.
The sports medicine lineup covers rotator cuff repairs (using knotless, all-suture, and biocomposite anchors), ACL reconstruction in the knee, meniscus repair, shoulder labral repair, biceps tenodesis, and AC joint stabilization. The company also offers hand and wrist anchors, including what it calls the smallest soft tissue anchor on the market, the JuggerKnot 1.0 mm Mini Soft Anchor. Hip labral repair products round out the portfolio, giving surgeons fixation options for the cartilage rim of the hip socket.
Trauma and Extremities
When bones break, surgeons often need plates, screws, rods, and nails to hold the pieces in alignment while they heal. Zimmer Biomet’s trauma division manufactures these internal fixation devices for fractures throughout the body. The extremities side of the business covers joints that fall outside the big three (knee, hip, shoulder), including the elbow, foot, and ankle. These products range from fracture fixation hardware to small joint replacement implants for severely arthritic ankles or elbows.
Craniomaxillofacial and Thoracic
A smaller but distinct part of Zimmer Biomet’s business focuses on the skull, face, and chest. Craniomaxillofacial (CMF) products include plates and mesh used to reconstruct facial bones after trauma or tumor removal. Thoracic products are used to stabilize the rib cage, often after chest wall injuries or certain surgical procedures. These devices use many of the same fixation principles as the company’s orthopedic hardware but are engineered for the thinner, more complex bone structures of the face and chest.
ROSA Robotic Surgery Platform
Zimmer Biomet’s push into surgical technology centers on ROSA, a robotic-assisted surgery system. The ROSA Knee System pairs with the company’s Persona knee implant to help surgeons plan and execute knee replacements with greater precision. Before surgery, the system uses imaging software called X-Atlas to convert standard 2D X-rays into a 3D model and predict implant sizing. During the operation, the robotic arm guides bone cuts based on a customized plan, reducing the variability that comes from freehand technique.
Key features include OptimiZe Planning, which creates a patient-specific plan for implant positioning based on the surgeon’s balancing preferences, and OptimiZe Tracking, which lets the surgeon make cuts without physically pinning a cutting guide to the bone. There is also a kinematic alignment mode that uses bony landmarks to position the implant in a way that aims to restore the knee’s pre-arthritic geometry. ROSA systems are also available for hip replacement and spinal procedures, though the knee application is the most prominent in the company’s current lineup.
ZBEdge Digital Health Ecosystem
Zimmer Biomet has built a connected technology platform called ZBEdge that extends its role beyond the operating room and into pre-operative planning and post-surgical recovery. Several tools sit under this umbrella:
- Persona IQ (The Smart Knee): A knee implant with embedded sensors that automatically collects movement data from the patient after surgery, enabling remote monitoring without requiring the patient to wear an external tracker.
- mymobility Care Management Platform: A smartphone-based system that connects patients with their care team during recovery. The company says it has helped reduce in-person physical therapy visits and emergency department visits by enabling more efficient remote check-ins.
- WalkAI Predicted Progress Exceptions: An AI tool that builds a personalized prediction of each patient’s walking speed 90 days after surgery. It flags patients who appear likely to fall behind expected recovery milestones so surgeons can intervene earlier.
- OrthoIntel Orthopedic Intelligence Platform: A data analytics layer that links intraoperative measurements (like how “tight” or “loose” a knee feels during surgery) to post-operative outcomes (like step counts), giving surgeons feedback they can use to refine future procedures.
- OptiVu Mixed Reality: A visualization tool within the ZBEdge ecosystem that uses mixed reality for surgical planning and navigation.
The broader idea behind ZBEdge is to create a data loop: plan the surgery with imaging software, execute it with robotic assistance, monitor recovery through connected implants and apps, then feed that outcome data back to improve the next patient’s plan.
What Zimmer Biomet No Longer Does
Until 2022, Zimmer Biomet also operated spine and dental implant businesses. It spun those divisions off into a separate publicly traded company called ZimVie, which now independently manufactures spinal fusion hardware and dental implants. Since the spinoff, Zimmer Biomet has focused entirely on its core orthopedic segments: knees, hips, sports medicine, extremities and trauma, craniomaxillofacial and thoracic, and its robotic and digital surgery platforms.
How It Makes Money
Zimmer Biomet sells its products primarily to hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers. Revenue comes from the implants themselves (which are single-use, so every joint replacement generates a new sale) and from the instruments, robotics platforms, and digital tools that support those procedures. The company also earns revenue through service contracts on its ROSA robotic systems. Because joint replacements are driven by an aging population and rising rates of osteoarthritis, demand for the company’s core products tends to grow steadily over time rather than swinging with economic cycles.