It sounds like you’re making solid progress. What’s next? When do we get back to normal in your view? And what is the new normal growth? And just to sneak in the CardioMEMS, jeez, I’ve been watching the CardioMEMS story, Robert, for over a decade, back to St. Jude days. And I always thought it was great technology. What’s Abbott’s special sauce that you’re driving such a superb performance? And where do we go from here with CardioMEMS? So why is — what’s happening? Thank you.Robert Ford I guess on the Nutrition side, I think the team has made a lot of progress. They work incredibly hard at this. Our manufacturing and our market recovery are in line with our expectations. I’ve talked about — we’ve talked about this business being between 4% to 6% in terms of the target growth range, maybe towards the upper end of that range.
And ultimately, that’s when everything kind of normalizes and you don’t have some of these comps. That’s what I expect this business to be in.Regarding CardioMEMS, this has been a little bit of a journey for us. I think we found the right combination here of what I would call making the investments that we needed to make on the clinical — generating the clinical data and the clinical trial. We’ve obviously had an expansion in our label that happened last year, but I think the biggest and most important part here is commercial execution on the ground and thinking about workflow in the hospital systems, right, managing that and addressing that and working with the hospitals to address this workflow has been probably the biggest impact that the team has had.
And then we’re going to continue to invest in more clinical data and product upgrade. So I feel great about this product.Rick Wise Great. Thank you so much.Operator Thank you. Our next question comes from Vijay Kumar from Evercore ISI. Your line is open.Vijay Kumar Hey guys. Congrats on the print this morning and I had one back, Robert, on this base EPS question. I think based on some of the numbers you disclosed, it looks like the base earnings EPS is about $4.10 in fiscal ’23, excluding COVID testing. Assuming base EPS grows double-digits, historical Abbott algorithm, we’re looking at something like $4.50ish for fiscal ’24. The variables here are of endemic COVID testing run rate, what if inflation coming down and capital deployment assumptions, right?
So if you could just parse out, is $250 million, $300 million like a right number for endemic COVID testing? And what is your current inflation, total gross inflation that Abbott has taken a hit on versus pre-pandemic? And what part of that inflation is coming down or could there be some pricing offsets in cap deployment?Robert Ford Sure. So I think you’ve got the numbers kind of in the right direction there, Vijay, if I followed all of that. And I would say, as I said, that the primary driver of that is going to be the base business performance driving that growth.Regarding COVID for 2024, listen, I’m going to need to see a little bit how the testing environment evolves. We brought down the forecast for this year based on what we’re seeing.
I’d say there is very little public investment, I would say, in testing. So it’s mostly now a private market.I think we do very well in that segment with the brand that we’ve built, not just here in the US, but overseas also. So but it may be — might be a little bit early to try and forecast what COVID is going to be next year, but I think the number you threw out there of a few hundred million dollars is maybe a good starting point. But again, we’re going to have to see how that evolves during the year. Regarding your inflation question, I’m going to ask Bob to address it.Bob Funck Yeah. Vijay, so we saw a lot of inflation, which we talked about on the last few calls, really hitting us last year, and it was probably tuned around $1 billion.
We saw some carryover inflation there into this year, but we’ve essentially been able to offset that through some of the gross margin programs we have across our businesses, which Robert talked on as well as taking some price in some of the areas of the business, again, more the — with the more consumer facing businesses. So we’ve really been able to kind of mute that carryover inflation this year, but we still have probably about $1 billion, call it, 240 basis points, 250 basis points worth of headwind currently sitting in our gross margin.Vijay Kumar Understood. And then sorry, Robert, on capital deployment, I think CSI acquisition, people thought, was on the smaller side. How are you thinking about cap deployment? And one on product side.
The Libre US number, 50% was a big number. Is there anything from a competitive perspective that’s going on? Is Abbott gaining share or is this the underlying market growth?Robert Ford I’ll talk about us. I mean I think the 50% growth there is pretty strong. We’ve been at this rate for a couple of quarters now. I think it’s a combination of our product launch and our execution and expansion of the market. So I think the 50% here is like I said I don’t know what the other manufacturers are going to — are seeing, but that 50%, I’d say that’s our growth rate, and so I think it’s doing very well. Sorry, what was your first question?Vijay Kumar On cap deployment. Cap deployment.Robert Ford Yeah. I mean, I think you guys almost feel like you want to have like some sort of model from us in terms of how we do this.
I guess the best model, the only model that we’re looking at is what’s the best return for our shareholders here. So and what we found is having the — having this kind of balanced approach where we’re committed to a strong and growing dividend.We make the investments in our organic opportunities to drive organic growth and we’ve been doing those in Med Device, in Diagnostics, in Nutrition. And if there is an opportunity for M&A to able to add to the portfolio, then we’ll do that. And we announced the — our intention to acquire CSI and I think it was — fit exactly our criteria here, Vijay, which is — it’s a great strategic fit, wanted to build more of a position in the peripheral side.You’ve been seeing what we’ve been doing. We acquired a thrombectomy company about a year and a half ago, now looking at atherectomy with CSI.
So it’s a good strategic fit. They have a strong position in a growth area that we like and we believe that we can add value and felt the deal made sense financially for the company. So that kind of fits into our framework of how we look at M&A and how I’ve talked about it. So the allocation is balanced and we’ll look at what’s the best return for our shareholders as we allocate the capital.Vijay Kumar Fantastic. Thanks guys.Operator Thank you. Our next question comes from Joanne Wuensch from Citi. Your line is open.Joanne Wuensch Good morning and nice quarter. A couple of catch up questions. Can you update your guidance and thoughts on interest expense and where you are on share purchases in the quarter and plans for the year? And I’ll toss my real question in.
EPD, another quarter of double-digit growth, what is driving that? And in your view, how sustainable is that in a potentially recessionary environment? Thanks.Robert Ford Okay. I’ll take the EPD question here. Listen, I think that this is a — we’ve been doing this for many years here I would say. I think we’ve carved out this, talked about this nice little space for us in the global pharma market, which is, I’d call, fast growing emerging markets with a branded generic focus. There is a way of how to operate in this. It’s not operating the way you would operate with proprietary pharma and it’s different from operating in pure generics.And I think that what you’re seeing now is really an organization that has kind of figured out the right sweet spot on how to execute on this strategy and you’re seeing the results over the last couple of years.
We tend to really focus on local for local. We pick the right markets and we develop portfolios that are relevant for those specific markets by having local R&D, local manufacturing.So that’s done very well for us. And I think the team has done a really good job at driving profitability. So not just the top line, but also the bottom line. One of the challenges here, Joanne, is obviously FX, but they’ve actually — this group have actually driven absolute dollar profit growth in the business. So I think they’ve figured out how to do this really well, not just with portfolios, but also channels and integrating that. It is a very unique model, and I think the team has — have done a really good job at understanding it.From a geography perspective, I mean, in my opening comments, a lot of growth in Southeast Asia, a lot of growth in Latin America for us and great growth in India too.
As you know, we’ve got a large business in India there too. So I think it’s working very well. And I think it’s very sustainable too, given the dynamics of these markets. Regarding your question on interest?Bob Funck Yeah. So, Joanne, in terms of kind of net interest expense for the year, we’re forecasting a few hundred million dollars there. And then you had a question on share buybacks. As you know, historically, we do buybacks to offset dilution and so we did some buybacks in the first quarter, again, a few hundred million dollars worth of buybacks.Joanne Wuensch Thank you very much.Scott Leinenweber Operator, we’ll take one, go ahead.Operator Thank you. Our next question will come from Danielle Antalffy from UBS. Your line is open.Danielle Antalffy Good morning, guys.
Thanks so much for taking the question. Just a question on specifically two components of the Structural Heart business, the first being MitraClip. Robert, just curious about what you’re seeing in that market. That was a market that was severely impacted by both COVID mortality and hospital staffing constraints. Just curious about where you think we are in the recovery specifically in that market. You did seem to put up another decent growth quarter this quarter. And then I have one follow-up on Amulet.Robert Ford Sure. I think it was double-digit growth in the quarter. I think what we saw there was continued international momentum and I think that’s a great opportunity for us just to be able to expand the technology internationally. We have a new manufacturing site that we invested in that’s up and running and I think that will give us the opportunity to be able to expand this more internationally.
So I think that’s a great growth driver for us.And then recovery in the US. As I said, I think some of the systems have figured out how to manage the staffing shortage. Our teams play an important role in that also. So I think that, listen, I’m cautiously optimistic here that this part of the ramping up of MitraClip has been addressed.From our side, we continue to focus on driving the patient referral funnel. I mean that was probably one of the areas that got shut down that we were starting to build. So I’m starting to see good momentum there on building those patient referral funnels. So –Danielle Antalffy Okay. That’s great. And then on Amulet, the question I have there is really about where you think you are in the launch. I mean, that’s a product that very high growth market, but let’s be honest, you launched, I think, that product during Omicron, right?
