Align Technology, Inc. (ALGN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

June 4, 2024

NASDAQ US Health Care conference_presentation 37 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Brandon Vazquez

analyst
#1

All right. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Brandon Vazquez, for those of you I've never met, I am the covering analyst here at William Blair of Align Technology. I'm required to tell you to please go to www.com williamblair.com, sorry. williamblair.com for a full list of disclosures and conflicts of interest. We are happy to have Joe Hogan, CEO; and John Morici, CFO from Align with us here. Who are going to go over some slides with us and then we'll have a breakout session following. Thanks.

Joseph Hogan

executive
#2

Thank you. Good afternoon. Thanks for attending. I feel like I got to say something energetic to get this room going, but I'll try to keep it clean as much as I can. Few things to walk through kind of just a series of slides on Align Technology that where we've been and where we're going and try to call out what I think are the important points. But along the way of -- first of all, in 27 years. It's hard to believe we've been moving teeth for 27 years. It started as a startup in San Jose, California back in 1997. It's kind of a counterintuitive invention when you think you can move teeth with plastic. At that point in time, it's only metal that people thought that you could move them. But actually, it's a smooth and constant force that all you have to do to apply to the teeth in the right way to get them to move. And that was the foundation of it. The only way to really make that product was to 3D print a mold, which is what we've been doing for 27 years. We're the world's largest 3D printing business. And we say that just based on thermal polymer. So thermal polymers, which you use with an STL process. You shoot a laser basically bath the clear liquid and the parts come out of that piece. But we actually make negatives. And then we vacuum form plastic over top of that because we had invent a plastic that could actually move teeth and I'll talk about the chemistry of that and why that's so important over time. When you look at the slide, basically, green in general as a product, and then you can see as in all, and then a lot of software that we've developed with the product line over the years. This has been a gradual evolution, I would say, when we opened, we probably could do 30% of the cases, more like a SmileDirectClub kind of did when they kind of started in their demise. We've been able to move to 90% of the -- and then most recently with the launch of Invisalign Palatal Expander, we call IPE, we now can do 100% of the cases that are out there. And this is not like a stretch or anything like that. It's just we've done 20 million cases. We had the algorithms. We know how it works. We have the right materials. IPE is the first direct 3D printed device. It's not a negative that we top of it. And so we feel like we've gone the whole gamut. I think what's interesting about this slide more than anything is you can just see the history of innovation in the industry. And we build on this, I'll talk about scale later on, and we talk about how important scale is in this business on three specific pillars and I'll get into it. But it's taken us years and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to scale in plastics, to be able to scale in the 3D printing, the scale in clinical will be able to how to do worse in an education standpoint overall to get us to the point that where we are today. You can see in 2024, we talk about iTero Lumina, I have a slide on that. We'll go through it. But it's -- this is not like an iteration in scanning technology. This is a brand-new platform in the sense of the dental industry overall, and it's been well received in the first quarter. and I'll talk about in the next step. iTero multi-direct capture technology. We'll explain that, too. We have a smile video out recently. We have a smile check we've had over the years where you can take a picture of a patient, and you can show what the patient looks like after the treatment. Now we actually have a video piece, which is pretty compelling in the sense of that, well, you can see Invisalign Palatal Expander and I'll expand on some more. But I think if you take this away, Align is a 27-year-old company. So we've been around for a period of time, but I still feel like we're a start-up in a lot of ways. We have a lot we have learned. We have a strong foundation. We have good cash flow but we have such an underpenetrated marketplace in such an opportunity that we feel we can seize. This is a scale slide. So technology in general, we spend anywhere between $300 million and $400 million a year on technology. No one does that do though. Where I'd like to say we're a medical device company hiding out in the dental marketplace. And we're focused on one thing. We move teeth. That's it, whether we have exocad or whether they use iTero or whatever we do, our focus is how do you move teeth, both from an orthodontic standpoint or how you move it if you're a general dentist and I'll explain that in more detail. And we'll never surprise you as an investor with some stupid acquisition that's some parallel thing like we're going to get into implants or anything like that. You won't see that from this leadership team. We will continue moving teeth. We'll invest aggressively in order to do that. We won't strategically surprise you ever in that sense. This is what you're going to invest in us, you're investing in what we think we can do from a moving teeth standpoint, and the huge market opportunities that presents this overall. 5,000 people we have together that in sales, service and clinical education, I call this -- this is a door-to-door sales operation. So the first thing you have to do is stay away from distribution. When you're selling a sophisticated product like this, and it's going to change the way practices are done, you need educated salespeople and people that can really explain how this works clinically and how this works from a business standpoint, both from an orthodontic [indiscernible] standpoint and also from a general practitioner standpoint. So those 5,000 people that we have in the organization are just critical for us and being able to deliver that. Look, I worked for GE Healthcare for years. I ran GE Healthcare. John and I worked together, John was in finance at the time or whatever. We know medical devices and how it works. And there's a real advantage of that in sales because you're calling on large sophisticated organizations. They're driven by business people, not just clinicians, you have to fit in some way. When you're working with an orthodontist or GP, these are clinicians. They're not necessarily [indiscernible] people. They don't think about how you leverage variable costs versus fixed costs and how those pieces are, their clinicians, and what they doing. And it's so important that we're able to appeal to them in a sense clinically but all of those talk business-wise because we're asking to actually change the business equation, not just our clinical equation too and sometimes that's a high bar for us. We have a consumer brand, which is great. Our predecessors, Zia and the team, Tom Prescott, and it was my -- left me a great business when I took over here 9 years ago, had to actually develop a brand because there's no way we'd have ever gotten this product through orthodontists if consumers didn't come banging on the door insisting on Invisalign. And in a strange way, we created the adult market in orthodontics. Orthodontics is primarily 90%, 85% was team back in the day because adults wouldn't take wires and brackets. So many orthodontists didn't want to go digital, what they did is they adopted Invisalign to do some adults, but then they able to hold their teen patients from a clinical standpoint because they felt they can make more money on teens from a variable cost standpoint and they can. It's basically a $900 trade-off between what they pay for wires and brackets and what they pay for Invisalign. And if you don't use the economics of Invisalign from a standpoint of faster patient throughput and fewer visits to the office, then you can't realize that savings piece. The docs that do, and over 70%, 80% Invisalign are extremely profitable. They do like 3x the number of patients a year. Invisalign finishes about 6 months faster than what wires and brackets do. No emergency visits. All these things are just part of what the clinical piece is. So that brand and the brand that we push out there is a real critical part of our strategy because it forces orthodontists to take a look at us that normally wouldn't want to do that if consumers weren't pushing for it. And I hope that makes sense. The thing on this slide is through doctors. So SmileDirectClub was [indiscernible] DrSmile that was launched by Straumann in Europe or ever. There's several of them in Asia that went directly to consumers. And we didn't go directly to consumers. We had a relationship with SmileDirectClub that it's kind of historical in that way. But SmileDirectClub did two things very well. They are great marketers, and they hit a price point of like $2,000, $1,800, that attracted a lot of patients. The problem is then have any clinical efficacy. They couldn't really finish the cases did they take any patient in that way. And then secondly, we had a great legal team that would sue anybody that even came close to them, right, that anyone would challenge that particular model. But SmileDirectClub proved it. DrSmile in Europe under Straumann has proven it. We're seeing it in Asia, too. You can't make money going direct like this. You can't. You have to work this through doctors. Moving teeth is serious. It's moving tooth through bone. And you need some kind of critical way to look at that to make sure that you're not doing any harm to a patient in some way. And secondly, to really deliver the kind of care you want to do when you move tooth you really want to make it through a doctor. It's expensive. It's a pain in the ass sometimes, you think you could probably do it better if you went to a consumer, you really can't. You really have to have this technology expressed to a doctor to do it the right way. So that's our model. We'll stick with that model. We do believe in it, and we've proved, that model has been proven in several geographies and at several different scale levels not to work if you bypassed a doc. Our -- we have 4 key strategic platforms. We've had that for 9 years now, international expansion, patient demand, and what we call conversion, orthodontic utilization and GP dentists. So if you look at the North American market today, about 45% of our sales go through general dentists and about 55% goes through orthodontists. And remember, with the general dentist, it's not a wire and brackets discussion. It's just how that fits in their overall clinical protocol in the sense of how they want to go through patients. Our orthodontic sales force is about how do you move into a digital platform, the advantages of using digital versus analog wires and brackets kind of system. Our international expansion, we're in about 195 countries, like 200 countries now. The patient demand piece is basically our Invisalign brand. And I feel we have some very sophisticated consumer advertising. We use it all over the world. John and I both understand very well where we can advertise what kind of return we get on those advertisements. You'll see us shortly on Invisalign Palatal Expander, we'll come out with another consumer at here, July 1. It's pretty definitive in the sense of why this is a superior product versus the devices that exist out there today, and I'll talk about them on the slide overall. But that brand is really critical to us. And then the GP dentist piece, we've been very successful with general dentists that really want to use Invisalign. Our feeling is we don't want to turn dentists into orthodontists. We want to use teeth straightening in a sense of how it makes sense to help patients maintain their dentition over time. We call that ortho restorative so we can fit orthodontics into restorative procedures, and I'll touch on that briefly. So it is a different discussion with orthodontists as it is with dentists, but we've kind of free teeth straightening. It's not confined to wires and brackets anymore. We've done 20 million cases. We know we can do any case out there. We can digitize it. We can make it a lot faster and much more predictable. And it's just working with both orthodontists and dentists to approve that and to get that into their workflow. We talk about Align digital platform. We didn't make this up. This is the foundation of what we do. We actually -- we connect and we connect with patients and doctors through our brand and through our technology to start with. And then again, our brand being really important in that. Scan, we have an iTero scanner, which we had 50% of the marketplace for installed scanners that are out there. iTero is a high-end scanner. It's known for that. But it's not just a PVS replacement machine. It's actually a workflow area where doctors workflow. They can scan a patient. They can actually do a treatment plan immediately through that what we call IO simulation. You use that in order to be able to transfer that data to a lab or to us in a sense to be able to process that case. It's really a hub in what we do. But it's interesting, if you look at scanning today, about 85% of the cases we do are scan. And 15% are PVS impressions that are shipped in a box through a CT scanner or whatever. That is up from -- it was about 10% scans when I joined the business 9 years ago, and the rest of those were PVS impressions. So the market has changed really that fast. But the key here is this scanner is a critical tool in the whole process of straightening teeth. It's not just a PVS replacement. We diagnose, we diagnosed through our algorithms. And so as we scan a patient, we can immediately run a treatment plan and give the -- and a simulation to a patient and a doctor in a sense of how long -- how many aligners is it going to take and what it's going to look like. Through that scan too, we can also do some regression and say, look, we scanned this patient 6 months ago. We can show how much enamel they have lost because the light has been off in some way. And you can see we have [indiscernible] are color-coded areas to tell you where that interference is and how it's going to be. There's a whole, we call oral suite that we have within that diagnosis piece that can track patients, see how well they're doing, see if they're wearing their retainers, if they're coming offline, all those things. We have a thing with doctors, particularly GPs to scan every patient that walks in a room. And then you have this digital footprint that you can regress against every time they come and see it, they see if they're making progress or they're regressing some way in their dentition. We plan, obviously, we do a treatment plan, we've done 20 million patients. You've seen it all. We can do cases, I'll show you some pictures that you can't believe you can actually treat those. And we obviously, we treat. We have our algorithms for treatment. And then we monitor, we have -- we can monitor with iTero when the patient comes back to see if they're on track or not, but we have a product called Virtual Care with -- that connects to what's called Invisalign Practice App, which is basically an application that you can download as a patient, and we ship a lens to that patient when they're under treatment. And so once a month, they can use that lens and we take a picture of it and we run AI algorithms against it to say, are you on track. If you're on track, you don't have to go back to the doctor's office. We can do -- sometimes we can do a case that's a year long with 3, it can be 14 months, 3 visits to the doctor versus once every 6 weeks for wires and brackets. You can imagine what that means for real estate and productivity and all those different things within ortho, and that's what we try to make them realize is how efficient those. And then we -- that monitoring, when that's done, then we go into retention. The retention is a very large retention business. We make the best retainers in the world, we better. We make hundreds of millions of those retainers over the years. We know how to make them and vacuum form and the material, the temperature profiles and all those things overall. So consumers and patients focus, doctors, obviously, labs are a big part when you're working with GPs because they're critical areas. But this digital platform, it's critical for us, and we invest heavily in each one of those areas and scale in those areas are really important for us, too. We talked recently about Direct 3D print. So we -- up until Invisalign Palatal Expander, everything we did was molds and then we would vacuum form over top of that mold. And just so you get an idea. So when you do that, you start with 30 mils of sheet 30 mills sheets like, let's say, a 16th of an inch, right? When you pull that down over top of a mold and as you pull it down, it's going to get thinner as it goes down. So if you start to get to canines and sizes, mowers, you ideally want to put more material on that because the thicker plastic gets the higher modules it has. It's just a function of physics. But for years, we couldn't do that, right? We know molars are tougher to use or whatever. You can 3D printed a device, you can put that material right where you want to put it. So idea of putting 40 mills on your molars and 40 mills on your canine to move them and rotate them. So a whole lot better than having 10 mills or 20 mills or as you vacuum form down. The other part about 3D printing is we have ultimate design freedom, too. If you want to put [indiscernible] us or hooks, you want to print and mandibular advancement or devices or whatever, you can do all these things that are just very difficult to do and our possible to do if you were 3D printing molds and vacuum forming as we do today, okay? The last part about 3D printing is we don't talk about it much, but 90% of the plastics that we -- the thermal polymer we use are thrown away [indiscernible] because that's never used in the -- that's just used in the fabrication of the product line. You can 3D print, you save 90% of the material that today that we just -- we have to throw away because that's part of the process. So we announced recently an acquisition [indiscernible] called Cubicure. We had a -- we have a strong partnership with University of Vienna over the years to be able to figure out a way to 3D print an aligner. We've been at the Srini Kaza, that's really driven this product. He's been at this for 23 years. He wrote his PhD on 3D printing devices about 30 years ago. We tried every way of working with existing printing companies and existing resident companies over the last 15 years to try to 3D printed liner, we couldn't do it. John and I about 7 years ago, realized we had to put a lab in San Jose in our main headquarters. We had to hire a bunch of polymer chemists and physicists to figure this out. And over a period of time, they came up with a resin formulation. It actually works. We need -- we can 3D print aligners today, we know that it will function and we have to scale this thing to hundreds of millions. We have to scale both the resin. The resin is a biosourced, it's not a petroleum-based product. We couldn't find anything that was consistent with the rest of the feed chain or food chain that you look at for polymer chemistry, I used to run divisions of GE Plastics years ago, so I kind of know a little bit about this to be dangerous. We ended up with materials that are unconventional in the sense of what has to be used. And so we're going to have to scale [indiscernible], which is going to be a challenge we know we can do it. We know it's out there, and we know it's available in bulk. It's just how we pull that bulk out. And then we have -- we own Cubicure now, and Cubicure is a special process. These are high viscosity resins. So what we process today is about the consistency of water from a viscosity standpoint. You didn't have to know what viscosity is, but it's how thick is something [indiscernible] , okay? The resins that we've found that can work with aligners are about the consistency of viscosity of butter at room temperature. So you need a completely different way of making those things in the normal STL laser printing that existed out there for years. So we have to control both ends of that chain. Long story short, we know how to do it. We have a lot of intellectual property behind that. We know there's a few companies in the world that are particularly in the dental industry, they don't afford to do this kind of work and get this done. We feel really good about our path. We'll take 2 or 3 years to scale. We feel really confident in the sense of the formulation we have and the ability to move that forward. So John might not look excited up here, but he's very excited about this. And I talked about this. Align innovations powered by AI. Look, we put this slide in here. Everyone wants to talk about AI today. And I'd say there's two layers of AI, okay? The artificial intelligence layer that's driven by internal machine learning, we've been doing this for 10 years. We have a huge amount of Russian scientists that have helped to write our algorithms that are experts in computational math. And we've had this machine learning piece, which basically model things. And then we have our own AI algorithms that aggregate that information that will allow us to do treatment planning the way we have. When we look at the buzz on AI today, well that really helps us, as you think about copilot and things like that, that you can use for programming are huge. So our Java engineers and our C++ engineers under Copilot, Microsoft Copilot and some programs are used can be so much more productive than what they were before. So I'd like to think we are an AI-driven company before AI was existed. It's how we basically formed this company what it does. And we have a huge engineering staff that's very conversant in this, too. So we're excited about AI, but we think it's just another step in the road in the sense of tools that we've been developing over the years to help them move the business forward. Invisalign system overall. I don't want to take too much time on this. I've talked about this. But if you look at SmartTrack on the left, SmartTrack is a product we vacuum for today and we use. That's a result of about 10 years of polymer science. There's a thing in polymers that's really interesting is you want rigidity and you want flexibility. And there's -- when you look at polymers that exist out there today, having one that's rigid, but also flexible and oxymoron. So what we had to do with SmartTrack access as a 3-layer material, and the internal material as polyester and the outside materials are basically polyurethane. And we -- what we do is that's extruded together. And what happens to polyester gives you the rigidity, and the polyurethane gives you the flexibility that you really need to drive this forward. And it doesn't sound like a big, but this took Srini and the team years and be able to figure this out and find the right polymers in order to do that work. Down below, there's another product that's been used out there. It's kind of reverse engineer in this, but you see 25% lower stiffness versus other polymers that are out there. And you need that stiffness and there's a thing called hygroscopic capability, meaning when that product is in your mouth for about 5 hours, it's saturated with your saliva. And if it's not resistant to that, then someone can say, I got 40,000 modulus, but 4 hours later, it's 5,000. And it's not going to move teeth. When we see a lot of competitors out there trying to move plastic with stuff that we kind of scratch our heads with is we know what's going to happen in 5 hours after it's in their mouth. So you really have to know something about polymer science. And one of the biggest frustrations for John and I in this business is when you throw a plastic aligner on the table, you think I can do that. It looks like someone cut it out of a soda bottle in some way, right? But those polymers are very specific and designed to do a specific job that has taken us over 27 years kind of learn. Then SmartForce features. A lot of people think that our aligners are just progressive, meaning that you take an aligner out, it moves your teeth and then the next set is where the teeth goes. Actually, the way we program this is to push those teeth. So there's a certain amount of just residual force that we program inside that aligner. There's not displacement technologies is moving the teeth over, but driving that tooth forward. And often, that's the only way you can remove a molar or you can move a canine where you don't have a whole lot of material in it, is to make sure you get your loaded properly. And then the SmartStage technology on the end just means you have to know how to stage these things, right? When you move the molars, when you move inside, when you intrude, when you extrude it's just certain things you want to do as part of that process. We look at -- obviously, when you look at the orthodontic marketplace, it's 80% teens. 22 million case starts around the globe, it's 80% teens, and we break it up in primary dentition, a mixed dentition, and permanent dentition. And when you look at our most successful product to date has been Invisalign First. So it fits in that mixed dentition area. And it's basically used is called dental expansion. We can expand a patient's teeth when they're younger to make room for others. For years, we haven't been able to do what's called skeletal expansion, and that would be expanding the skeletal structure of the patient in order to create a lot more room for the tooth to drop. And that's -- it's 10% of the marketplace is IPE is skeletal expansion. About 10% has been dental expansion over the years. We also have a product that fits in the mixed dentition called mandibular advancement. And that's for Class II when our patients jaws somewhat recessed. And if you catch them during a bone growth period, which is between 9 and 12 years old, we have a product that can actually overcome that Class II in the [indiscernible]. And I'll show you some of that. We're really strong in that area. On the permanent dentition side, we have struggled in the sense of continuing to drive this through orthodontists, orthodontists use our product, they'll be running over 70%, 80% of Invisalign. They push hard through teens or whatever. But the many doctors that don't want to make that move, just try to push teens as much as possible the wires and brackets and use Invisalign for the mixed antigen piece and answer questions about that when the time comes. I want you just to -- you can look at mandibular advancement, Invisalign First, I just talked about that palatal expander. But just look at those teeth, left or right, right? Look at the one on mandibular advancement. See how those bottom teeth are really recessed behind the front. That's called a Class II. Look what happened -- this has been in about 13 months. You can make that correction with mandibular advancement. Now the opposite of that is called a [ HER2 ] device, which is a bunch of metal with the composites strapped to a kid's upper and lower jaw versus these things you can take out every night brush your teeth maintain your dentition and move forward. Invisalign First, like I talked about demo expansion, look at those teeth. I mean to me, it's amazing. I've been here 9 still in about 9 months, I you look at those overlapping front teeth. Look at it is on the right-hand side of that. It's amazing. Now look at Invisalign Palatal Expander on the right. That's the same patient. You see that tooth on the left, how it's stuck up in the upper jaw, this is about after 30 days, 9 millimeters of expansion, which is pretty severe. We do anywhere between 7 milli and 9 milli. Look at the way the teeth lay in. If you have kids or grandkids, and they're at age like 7 years old and you get this done to them in 30 days or so, that phase 2 will be so much easier. Because you just -- it's simple physics. You're just creating room for those teams to drop in. If you don't create that room in those we're going to find a way, when they come out, they look like it does on the left side. So these are incredible innovations by Align in areas that are incredibly invasive kind of process products that we're replacing in an orthodontist office specifically. There's an Invisalign Palatal Expander. The great thing about this where sometimes it takes a year or 1.5 years to figure out Invisalign case is going to land or not. We done in 30 days. it's just going to work and it works. We first launched it orthos, oh, you can't split the suture it's impossible to renew global device to split to suture, as suture is the middle of your mouth. And yes, you could use split, you want to split it as part of this process, and we readily do it. I mean we've been on trainees has been at this one for 6 years. Is it the only way we could do it with a 3D printed to get that kind of modules and capability. But we're excited about it. We're seeing good reorder rates on this right now. We're only launched in North America, in Canada and United States, however we're moving into ANZ. We'll have Europe pretty much covered in the second half of this year. That's a good uptake so far. And that the of aligner elasticity and [indiscernible] I already talked about that. You need those two things. It's critical what's inside that. Force over time is what moves those to. Obviously, safety, how we work, it's a 510(k) device, the [indiscernible] to make sure that it works and it's not an issue for patients. And it has to be aesthetic. [indiscernible] that's what we sell, right, as [indiscernible] you can move your teeth without people basically not knowing it because it's so clear. This is just a quick shot of 3D printing. That's a 3D printer. And that's printing some what we call [indiscernible] detachments. These are attachments there'll be -- we'll launch here in the next 6 months or so that allow doctors to be able to put attachments on teeth much faster, much more accurately than before. But we use the same printing device that we use that for aligners. [indiscernible], they talk about basically Lumina. This is a product that we worked on for 7 years. It is truly a breakthrough in scanning, IO scanning. When you see -- talk about these 10 -- we sold 100,000 scanners so far, we have about 30,000 unit installed base we can move. We have obviously a lot of restorative scans that are done a year like 5 million, and we do a lot through labs, too. But this is truly a medical device kind of a scanner. It -- the breadth and width of the scan is unprecedented in the marketplace. The speed needs of use is there. It's natural color. It's not augmented color like almost all the other scanners that have been in the marketplace. So I sit the team in Israel has done a terrific job on this and despite some issues, obviously, that country has had over the last year. And that's the Lumina. That Lumina is half the size and half the weight of what our previous confocal imaging piece was. That -- the record for scan on that is 40 seconds. The record [indiscernible] was about 2.5 minutes, right? And it's so good, even John and I can scan. We weren't capable of scanning before, but we actually can.

John Morici

executive
#3

That's true.

Joseph Hogan

executive
#4

We can actually do it now. And you could see 3x wider field of view. So it's perfect for IPE because you can want to scan the whole pallet. You have to see the pallet in order to make IPE 50% smaller. Superior visualization is primarily around the [ Christmas ] of the image and the color. Every other scanner out there has to augment color for one reason or a moment. So with that, I'll turn it over to John, and I'll talk to you about the good stuff here.

John Morici

executive
#5

Yes. Just a little bit of an update. Obviously, just a few weeks ago we released our Q1 numbers, and we're very pleased with our results. We beat the consensus revenue and margin as well as our high guide. You look at Q1 being up 6% or so on revenue year-over-year. What we actually saw, as Joe described, the new scanner that we had, we actually saw sequential improvement from Q4 to Q1 in our scanner business, systems and services, up sequentially. Typically, with the capital equipment, you expect fourth quarter to be higher. But I think with the new scanner and the benefits that brought was really good performance. And we're executing in what we've talked a lot about as a relatively stable environment. When we look at things globally, obviously, certain markets better or worse, but overall stability that we continue to see, and it's a good thing, 2022, 2023, parts of that were not as stable, more stable now. And then coupled with the new products, a lot of what Joe just talked about with Lumina with helping the systems and services and then Invisalign Palatal Expander really helps with some of the new products and being able to go to market to be able to help grow in this market. And really, what we saw after Q1 and we looked at Q2 in terms of where we think we're at, we upped our guidance on that and then looked at the total year, and said, what does that actually mean? So we saw the strength in Q1, being able to couple that in with our guidance in Q2, we took the year up to -- on a midpoint basis, up 7% revenue year-over-year. So we're starting to see some of that progressive improvement that we would expect. We're that stable. The economy is, stable market that we're seeing and then the new products, being able to help deliver on those and we're seeing it in the results. You can see just a few pages just on revenue, where we've been and what we're trying to get to kind of building off of for Q1, and we expect to be able to see, see that. Obviously, we're driven a lot by our volumes, very close attention to what our volumes are. And really, that's a reflection of the new products that we have, what we're doing to try to go to market. And so we're pleased with some of that performance there. And now what we're trying to do is increase those volumes. So we have team season coming up. North America really hits in the second and third quarter. Third quarter is big for China from a team standpoint. So we really want to improve some of the go-to-market activities that we have to be able to drive that volume, and that's a reflection in our numbers. But volume is very important for us from a clear aligner standpoint, that really helps drive our revenue. So if you look at the segments that we have between Americas and international, you can see kind of the growth. We're good. We're happy with some of the quarter-over-quarter numbers. That's something that we look at closely to see are we seeing some of the seasonality that we expect as you start to go through the year. I wouldn't say it's fully back to how things were prior to COVID, but getting better, which is a good sign. So that's good for us to see, and we want to continue to help drive that with a lot of the new initiatives we have with new products as well as what we're trying to do go to market and really get to the right spot here. We're also seeing a lot of good growth on our non-case revenue, so some of the work that we're doing from a retention standpoint where you sell the Clear Aligner that goes into treatment, but then when somebody gets out of treatment, they're going to need a retainer to make sure their teeth don't move or revert back. So we're seeing a lot of good work around that. Some of the work that we're doing from a subscription standpoint that we call doctor subscription program, where doctors can sign up for a certain amount of aligners that they want to use. They use them however he or she wants to use them. Sometimes they use them for just a relapsed, mild relapse or what we call a touch-up case, where they need 3 or 4 or 5 sets of aligners to kind of move those teeth back to where they need to be. But the majority of what they use it for is retention. They want to be able to -- instead of making them themselves or going to a lab, they use us to make these retainers for them. It gives them the right price points. It alleviates some of the do-it-yourself that they're doing within their labs to be able to -- or in their offices to be able to create those those retainers, and it's something for us that gives us incremental volume from a touch-up standpoint as well as incremental business from a retention standpoint. So it's been a good program for us. You mentioned a little bit about the systems and services. So you can see the benefits that we saw in terms of what the scans could. We know that and the model has held for a number of years and continues is if a doctor has a scanner in his or her business, we know that they're going to do more Invisalign cases. It just lends itself to that digital ecosystem that Joe described and how easy it is for doctors to be able to use our system that we have with that scanner. And if they add another scanner. So now just 1 to 2, we see incremental volume, and that really shows up in our case fine. So we're very focused in on digitizing those practices to be able to help those doctors digitize. And if they digitize more, they scan more, they end up doing more Invisalign. And so it's a good combination that we see. So we're really trying to get to, as Joe described, well over 90% of the cases that come to us are through a scanner. And that's a real big advantage versus the [ group ] that you have to put in your mouth in the past and some sadly still use, but for the most part, a lot of them are using it via scanner. This looks like it kind of the trailing 12 in terms of where we're at, just under $4 billion. You can see all the patients that we've helped doctors treat and how we want to continue this to scale up and gives us a lot of information as to what we know works and doesn't work in terms of treatment. And so we have a lot of experience that way. A lot of employees to make sure this works the right way, a lot of them in -- from the fabrication standpoint or treatment planning standpoint where we have people working on a lot of these. And we've trained a lot of doctors. We don't always sell to the same amount of doctors every quarter, but we've trained a lot of doctors, working to make sure that we can give them the clinical confidence to do more cases. And ultimately, we want to try to increase that utilization. So a lot of the new products that we have really help with that. But that's how we look back over the last 12 months. So as a takeaway to this, we are continuing to drive innovation. We invest a lot into this business with the sole purpose of moving teeth in a predictable and reliable way for orthodontists as well as general dentists, and we want to continue that model. A lot of investments, as Joe described, with the 3D printing, the direct fab, the flexibility that it gives doctors the cost benefit that it gives us when 90% of the material comes out. And as we scale this up, we've really gone from investing in the R part of R&D to really now into the development. So it's really exciting to see that as we could start to scale this, there's a lot of benefits that will bring to the marketplace that we know no one else can do. And it's also going to give us benefits from a cost standpoint that will really change the market and give us a lot of flexibility as we move forward. So we're still very excited about what that means. And in the end, we think that this is obviously a benefit for our customers and how they want to treat their patients, but it's obviously a benefit for us as we want to move the industry forward through digital orthodontics. So that I'm kind of at time, but if there's anything, Brandon, you wanted to have...

Brandon Vazquez

analyst
#6

We're heading out to breakout now. We are going through the mayor room to the breakout, and we'll do some [ bread and butter ] with it. So thanks a lot.

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