This appeared last week:
How ResMed’s Mick Farrell turned a $7b company into a $62b giant
Family business successions are often a disaster. At ResMed, the global sleep device manufacturer, it has proven to be a winning formula.
Michael Smith Health editor
Aug 8, 2025 – 8.02am
When Mick Farrell’s dad, Peter, first invited him to come and work at ResMed, which makes breathing devices for sleep apnoea, he scoffed at the idea. Farrell, an ambitious 26-year-old consultant, was being courted by two US multi-billion dollar companies – med-tech giant Boston Scientific and biotech Genzyme – and he wasn’t interested in working for his father’s start-up, which was worth about $50 million at the time.
“He asked me to come out to San Diego and interview with his company,” recalls Farrell. “I said, ‘No offence, Dad, but your little $50 million start-up … ResMed is it? ... in the seaside hamlet of San Diego?’”
Farrell’s youthful arrogance was met with an expletive-ridden tirade from his father down the phone line. He still won’t repeat it to this day. “I am not going to quote the exact words he said back then, but it was along the lines of: ‘Listen, you arrogant little so-and-so. This is a huge opportunity for you … expletive … expletive.’ ”
But Farrell could be as stubborn as his father, so it was up to his girlfriend, Lisette, to convince him to get on the plane to San Diego and spend Thanksgiving with his dad, and while there meet with a ResMed interviewing committee. His dad wasn’t on the panel.
On the flight over, Farrell was crunching the numbers on ResMed and its potential. “I was sitting on the plane with Lisette and I said to her: ‘This company, this market, this opportunity is huge! My crazy dad is right!’”
Twenty-five years later, and Farrell, now 53, is ResMed’s chief executive. He married Lisette and they have two kids. And as for that little start-up? Well, it’s now a global company worth $63 billion, with customers in 140 countries.
Farrell is telling the ResMed origin story on a recent return visit from San Diego, where he’s lived for the past three decades, to Australia. He is speaking to me from his mum’s house in the northern beachside Sydney suburb of Manly, where he slept the night before on a fold-out bed, along with his portable ResMed CPAP device and mask. The device and mask are used to treat sleep apnoea, which is estimated to afflict almost 1 billion people worldwide.
“In the morning I wake up fired and ready to go,” says Farrell, who’s never one to miss a marketing opportunity. He also refers to some of the company’s 10,000 employees as “ResMedians”.
Farrell, who’s stocky, with a thinning hairline, talks in rapid-fire sentences, and has largely retained his Australian accent. He was born in Seattle but grew up in Sydney, before returning to live in the US.
He’s in Australia this month to see family and meet with investors after delivering a stellar full-year result for the medical device manufacturer. ResMed’s earnings were up almost 40 per cent. He has also been in Sydney to catch some footy, with ResMed a sponsor of the recent British and Irish Lions tour against the Wallabies. “I love Sydney even when it is rainy and cold. At the rugby, the rain was coming in sideways!”
Farrell, whose early career included a stint working for BHP designing water cooling systems for steel production, will have been ResMed’s chief executive for 17 years at the end of this decade. It’s a long time, according to corporate governance experts, but Farrell brushes it off.
“Despite my beautiful hairline I am only 53,” he laughs. “I have a good innings [ahead] to finish this 2030 strategy. I am looking at long-term [succession] plans and working with my fellow board of directors to think about that,” he says. “It is a big question always at public companies.”
“I fell in love with that overlap of science and altruism and the profit motive. I have never looked back.”
— Mick Farrell
The market is happy for the Farrell-lineage to continue for some time yet.
“He’s not that old. We would be pleased to see him stay for at least another five years,” says Andrew Dale, a portfolio manager at ECP Asset Management.
Bell Direct analyst Grady Wulff agrees. “I don’t think he is going anywhere,” says “He’s the person you want at the helm really. He is very hands-on in every division. The ResMed brand is in his DNA. ”
ResMed was started in 1989 by Peter Farrell, a chemical and bioengineer turned entrepreneur. He saw the potential of a new technology then under development by Colin Sullivan at the University of Sydney, which ResMed would acquire and commercialise, to treat sleep-related breathing disorders. He moved the headquarters to California in 1994 after the company outgrew Sydney, but at one stage considered relocating to Texas because the state was “too Democratic” and high-taxing. He never followed through on that threat.
Farrell junior would follow in his father’s footsteps. A first-class honours student at school in Sydney, he too studied to be a chemical engineer at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he had gained a scholarship, before later earning an MBA.
“I fell in love with that overlap of science and altruism and the profit motive. I have never looked back,” says Farrell.
After working for BHP, and a stint as a consultant, Farrell rang his father for career advice, which is when the job offer was made to come into what was then a family business. It was 2000, and despite the tense phone call, Farrell junior eventually joined ResMed, initially in business development and marketing roles, before eventually climbing the ladder to become head of the Americas division.
In 2013, he succeeded his father as the company’s chief executive and is credited with continuing to build the company’s market share and develop the technology in breathing machines, masks and other sleep devices. He has cemented ResMed’s place as one of Australia’s corporate healthcare success stories alongside CSL and Cochlear.
“When I took over ResMed in 2013, it was already a strong company,” says Farrell, but adds that there are distinctions between him and his father in how they operate. “There are very big differences. He was a founder and entrepreneur. I am chairman and chief executive.”
He knows the succession to become ResMed’s chief executive could be painted as blatant nepotism – he is the youngest of three children – but denies this was the case. “In the early days I had to work harder and work longer. I learnt a lot from my dad about what to do in business and ambition.
“He was big about getting as educated as you can, work as hard as you can and take your god-given talents to the world and double them. He saw some talent in me, and he didn’t want it to be wasted.
“From my mother, who was a nurse, I learnt how to make sure that while you are doing all that, you take care of people, your friends, your family, yourself. That balance of intellectual ambition and care and love.”
Resmed founder Peter Farrell saw the potential of the technology under development at the University of Sydney to treat sleep-related breathing disorders, which he acquired and commercialised. Peter Rae
Peter Farrell, who stepped down as ResMed’s chairman in 2023, declined to comment on his son. A company spokeswoman said he no longer does media interviews and is enjoying his time on the golf course.
For a man who makes his living out of those who suffer from insomnia and poor sleep, there’s not much that keeps Farrell junior awake at night. And understandably, because right now he is riding high.
ResMed’s dual-listed shares hit a record $45 on the Australian Securities Exchange last week. During Farrell junior’s tenure, ResMed’s market value has grown from $7 billion to $62 billion.
“ResMed’s market cap growth over his tenure says it all,” says Anna Milne, a deputy portfolio manager at Wilson Asset Management. “He has transformed the company in a number of respects. ResMed has shifted from being a primarily hardware-focused CPAP device manufacturer, to a sleep and respiratory care global leader. His focus on technology and data has been ahead of its time.”
If there is something that worries Farrell, it’s technology and cybersecurity threats for ResMed, which has 23 billion nights’ worth of patient medical data in the cloud.
“In California, people fail all the time and get back up again, and people say you are learning.”
— Mick Farrell
He shares an anecdote about a recent meeting he had with technology leader Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, who is personally worth $US150 billion from the success of his semiconductor company.
“I was at this small event with 20 CEOs and Jensen arrives with his cool leather jacket, and he is worth a couple of billion dollars more just that morning. You know me, I’m talkative, so I made the mistake of being the one in the group to ask him a question.”
Farrell’s question was about how to engage your board in strategy, but Huang said the premise of his question was wrong. He said it was impossible to have a five-year fixed strategy in a world where artificial intelligence was changing things daily.
What does the future hold for ResMed?
“I realised ResMed isn’t going to be the world leader in machine learning and AI, but we will be the world leader in applying Generative AI in the field of sleep health.”
Technology is where Farrell is focused for ResMed’s future. He’s less concerned about government regulation or the Trump administration’s whipsawing on global tariffs, which has caused headaches for so many multinationals.
He says the regulatory and political upheaval occurring under the Trump presidency is not a problem for ResMed, which he argues is tariff-proof. He says ResMed, which manufactures sleep devices and masks in Australia and Singapore, is protected under an international agreement called the Nairobi Protocol, which guarantees duty-free treatment for products that help people with disabilities.
Still, Trump administration observers would argue that it is remaking the world order in ways that were once unthinkable.
Farrell, a Republican, cites Ronald Reagan as the US president he most admires. He has not met Trump yet, but expects to in his new role as chairman of the Advanced Medical Technology Association, a global trade association.
“I haven’t met Donald himself, but I think it is quite possible over the two years as chairman, I will be shaking hands with the head of the ministries of health in Europe and maybe the president as well.”
Farrell’s sanguine approach to government is a marked difference to his father, who was very outspoken in criticising governments, both in Australia and the United States, over high taxes, excessive regulation and overspending.
It’s not to say that Farrell doesn’t have views. He’s just not as outspoken as his old man. For example, he believes that in Australia, more could be done by politicians to support interactions between industry and universities.
He says ResMed does its best to capitalise on Australia’s innovative talent. “We have our advanced engineering next to our advanced manufacturing here, and we can teach and learn from [our offices in] Singapore and San Diego.
He would also like Australian state and federal governments to be more pro-business. “Support more Peter Farrells! Don’t put artificial caps on research and development or amortisation incentives,” he says. “Other governments aren’t thinking that way and so want to partner, support small companies and entrepreneurial companies.
“In California, people fail all the time and get back up again, and people say you are learning.”
Farrell’s tenure at the top of ResMed hasn’t been without its hitches or challenges. There was a clinical trial failure in 2015 when US regulators ruled that a new form of sleep therapy the company was testing endangered patient lives, sending ResMed plummeting 18 per cent.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted international global supply chains, making it a challenge for ResMed to manufacture and supply customers. Then, governments spanning the US, Singapore, Germany and Australia demanded it supply ventilators to them as it had manufacturing operations in those countries.
There has also been the arrival of new technology, such as wearables and AI, to which the company has had to adapt and capitalise on to keep driving sales.
More recently, the challenge has been the explosion in demand for miracle weight loss drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, often simply known as GLP-1s, which caused a sell-off in the shares of companies such as ResMed. There was some early evidence that those weight loss drugs could also reduce or cure sleep disorders, but this is not proving to be entirely the case.
Farrell has data showing patients going to doctors for weight-loss drugs but also deciding they would address their sleep problems by buying ResMed devices. ResMed’s shares, which are listed on the ASX and the Nasdaq, are now double the price they plunged to in late 2023 on the back of concerns about those weight-loss drugs.
“It might be premature to say they have shrugged off the threat of GLP-1s,” says Wilson Asset Management’s Milne. “This threat remains. But we have come a long way in the last two years, where the hype was at its peak. I believe we are at the very start of the next phase for ResMed, one of customer centricity.”
Getting lucky and staying lucky
Still, unexpected competition and changes in technology are what concern analysts about ResMed’s future, and they, like Milne, are still watching and waiting to see what the full impact of the mass takeup of GLP-1 drugs will be.
In response to those concerns, Farrell likes to quote American business author Jim Collins. “Good luck and bad luck happen to all companies equally, but the successful ones have return on luck,” he says.
A lucky time was when ResMed was able to capitalise on a disastrous product recall by its main rival, Philips, in 2021 due to safety concerns about foam used in one of its products. ResMed swiped Philips’ lost market share as hundreds of millions of devices were recalled, and the gains have been permanent because it has taken Philips years to make the replacement or repair kits.
“We would never have guessed COVID, the supply chain crisis, or GLP-1s,” says Farrell. “We never expected Philips to drop the ball so badly. They have been sent off the field for four years now.”
Farrell is focused on his 2030 strategy, which is to drive high-single digit revenue growth annually, invest 7 per cent of revenue into research and development, and expand ResMed’s sleep offerings by using data to help people battling insomnia. It is also expanding into the fast-growing ventilation and oxygen therapy market.
Farrell’s strategy includes some ambitious targets, which sound like marketing slogans, such as the plan to help 500 million people sleep better. ResMed says 144 million people now use its products, and it has 27 million cloud-connected devices in the market.
ResMed’s investors are backing Farrell and his strategy. “The real strength of a CEO is to take a high-quality business and continue to drive it and improve returns,” says ECP Asset Management’s Dale. “Mick’s been a very good custodian of high-quality assets.”
Bell Direct’s analyst Wulff agrees and sums it up another way. “He has taken what was just a sleep apnoea company into this new monster, which has so many different revenue streams.”
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A great story of a huge Australian success!
I can remember when Resmed was just an experimental idea being pushed by some friends in the laboratory next to me while I was doing my BSc(Med) in 1970-71.
Rather a pity I did not go and work with them but I had my experiments to do (in my BSc(Med)) and a medical degree to get! Certainly a commercial path not followed – but always watched with interest!
I suspect Resmed has to be the biggest thing ever to come out of Sydney University, as it heads for a market cap. of US 50 Billion
And I was there when it started <grin>!!!
David.
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