Do we like them?

Do we like Johnson & Johnson?

US healthcare giant making prescription medicines and medical devices (MedTech); it spun off its consumer arm, Kenvue.

Our score: 5 out of 10. Mixed. It makes real medicines and is investing heavily, but it is still fighting a long run of talc cancer claims and has paid to settle opioid cases.

J&J is one of the biggest healthcare companies in the world. Its CEO, Joaquin Duato, has run it since January 2022 and became chairman in January 2023. Under him it now focuses only on medicines and medtech, after spinning off its consumer products business as Kenvue.

The big shadow is talc. In its own SEC filing, J&J says it has won some talc trials and lost others, many of which were reversed on appeal. It says it has set aside about $3.7bn for talc matters. It still insists the powder is safe, but it stopped selling talc-based baby powder globally in 2023.

In July 2026, J&J announced a proposed resolution of the remaining ovarian talc claims, about 76,000 of them. It says it has already settled roughly 95% of filed mesothelioma lawsuits. Juries are still handing down verdicts in individual cases, and J&J still wins some of them.

Opioids are the other black mark. J&J paid to settle claims in several states, including up to $230m to New York, and agreed to quit the opioid business. It said the settlements were not an admission of wrongdoing. Separately, an Oklahoma judge ordered it to pay $572m in 2019, and J&J said it would appeal.

On the plus side, J&J is spending heavily on US factories and has struck a pricing deal with the Trump administration. We'd call it a serious, useful company with a big legal cloud still hanging over it, so we land in the middle at 5.