Friday, May 05, 2006

Bausch & Lomb BOL, is cheap.

Bausch & Lomb's stock (BOL) has been badly damaged over reports fusarium keratitis associated with one of their contact lens products.

Previous experience with product recall related problems, suggests that they tend to blow over quickly. Ultimately Bausch & Lomb is a diversified company of which their consumer contact lens products are portion of total sales. Bausch's main business is making contact lenses as well as selling equipment for ophthalmologic surgery, such a lasers and implants. None of that is affected by the recall of contact lens solutions.

Bausch's disposable contact lens business is agnostic to the lens care solutions business. The solutions business will recover in due time. In my opinion the right analogy would be Gillette's razor blade business and shaving cream business. In the meantime BOL is trading at 1.51 times book value with a forward P/E ratio of 10.6