But both are still a long way from where they started.
Health care finished August as the best performing sector on the S&P/ASX 200, up 18.7 per cent for the month against 12.0 per cent for materials and 1.1 per cent for the index itself. Two stocks did most of the work, and both had spent years as the market’s problem children.
CSL rose 39.4 per cent across August. Meanwhile, Ramsay Health Care rose 15.7 per cent. Both moves came off results.
CSL reported on 18 August and closed 17.3 per cent higher on the day, at $157.82 against $134.60 the session before. Ramsay reported on 27 August and closed 13.7 per cent higher, at $50.06 against $44.02.
Adam Dawes of Shaw and Partners has been buying CSL through the fall. “It’s been two years of negative, negative, negative on CSL,” he said on this week’s Switzer Show.
“And so healthcare as a sector was the best performing sector in the reporting season, or for that month of August.”
It comes off the back of a rough few years for the healthcare stock. CSL has now finished five consecutive calendar years lower, and the stock is down 44 per cent over two years alone. It closed at $92.24 on 3 June this year, its lowest in two years. At $171.57 on 31 August it has recovered a long way and is still less than half what it fetched in August 2024.
The results themselves weren’t without their impairments, however. CSL booked a statutory net loss of US$2.58 billion for FY26 after US$7.08 billion of impairments, US$4.1 billion of which was charged against the Vifor business it bought in 2022. Interim chief executive Gordon Naylor, running the company since Paul McKenzie stepped down in February, called it “a year of reset”.
CSL’s own FY26 results announcement, 18 August 2026. Source: CSL.
Elsewhere, Ramsay’s numbers were better. Underlying net profit rose 19.3 per cent to $364.1 million and the final dividend rose 21.3 per cent. Chief executive Natalie Davis said “all regions improved performance”, which holds at the level Ramsay reports.
Ramsay Health Care’s FY26 Appendix 4E, 27 August 2026. Source: Ramsay Health Care.
Ramsay is back above $50 having traded at $30.60 last November. It is still 39 per cent below the $84.37 it reached in April 2022, when a KKR-led consortium was circling.
Paul Rickard of the Switzer Report is not chasing either. “I’m probably just not a buyer at the moment,” he said of CSL. “I just think it’s probably bounced a bit hard.”
