Straumann Holding AG (STMN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. A very warm welcome to the Straumann Group's press presentation. My name is Silvia Dobry. I'm the Head of Corporate Communications at Straumann Group. And I'm very pleased that we can present to you today the latest innovations Straumann Group has to present and launch at IDS. Today, we will start with Guillaume Daniellot, our CEO of the Straumann Group. He will give us an overview and welcome, followed by a couple of distinguished speakers, who will talk about the latest innovations we are launching here at the IDS, everything connected with digital innovation in dentistry. And with no further ado, I welcome Guillaume Daniellot, the CEO of Straumann Group here on stage.

Thank you, Silvia. Warm welcome also from my side to this Straumann Group Media Conference. And if there are just 2 words to remember from my 5-minute introduction, it would be -- the first one would be passion. Passion for innovation. As an organization, we have been pioneering, implant dentistry. And we have extended this, our passion for innovation in the orthodontic segment, but also into the digital dentistry, because this is part of our culture. And passion for innovation is obviously something that we are continuing to nurture over the months and over the years to come. Why is that? I think -- and that's leading to my second important word, it's our passion for innovation is helping us to deliver on our purpose. And this is what is important for us. We put always the patient first or the health consumer, as we can call it also now. And we are on our journey to try to impact 10 million smiles by 2030. We have achieved more than 4.1 million smiles in 2022 in, of course, a strong and close collaboration with all of the dental professionals all over the world. And this is obviously helping us also to grow our organization because we have a lot of then segments where we would like to continue to expand on the dental specialty side. The first one is obviously the implant side where you see that we are -- this is where we have our strongest penetration, especially on what we call the premium brands, but also on the challenger side with our strong presence, thanks the other brands we have like Neodent, of course, Anthogyr and Medentika. We have been developing a lot of our technology on the clear aligner and digital dentistry side to deliver also on customized prosthetic. And of course, the CADCAM equipment with IOS, as you know, we have Virtuo Vivo that is presenting here also, which is the intraoral scanner that we have significantly developed internally, but also with partners like 3Shape. And the goal of this presentation that are going to be done by many of my colleagues will be to try to present you how we are translating our passion for innovation in the digital world. We know that digitalization is really disrupting a lot of things in dentistry. This is supporting a lot of clinicians to be more efficient, more precise, having more reliable outcome. And this is really why we like technology. It's not technology for technology, but it's technology for the benefit of the clinician and more reliable treatment for patients. And for this, without any further ado, I'm pleased to introduce you to Florian Kirsch, who will then present you a little bit more of what we are doing on the digital side.

Perfect. Thanks, Guillaume, and as well a very warm welcome from my side and a very warm welcome to maybe the most exciting time in dentistry where we see health and technology converging. And when we look out today to what is happening in all our dental practices, what is happening, how patients today interact with us, we can see that technology and digital transformation is basically hitting the whole clinical journey and patient journey. Digital transformation, we see already in the engagement, and we will show later on with my colleague, Florin, a little bit what we mean with engagement and how exciting this can be. We as well see already with our partners and as well with our own Virtuo Vivo intraoral scanner, how diagnostics is changing. I mean, we see today how we move from more our traditional impression taking to using this data in the future and the ease for the patients to basically create a lot more value for everyone along the chain. On the other hand, we see in the planning that a lot more is possible. The technology is coming from all sides to really help us increase the conversion and convince our patients and our clinicians of the best treatment possible. And we see during the treatment and particularly when we talk about implantology, that technology helps us bringing implant treatments to our patients in a much more concise and a much more efficient and reliable way. And technology helps us to monitor afterwards. We know from patients who have to come in and in again to our clinicians just to check up. Today, technology on all sides helps us to really make this easier for the patients and easier and from a productivity point of view as well for clinicians. I'm very happy to announce today for Straumann Group, they've been making tremendous progress on the diagnostics side. You can see here on the very right-hand side, a video, and this is a little snapshot of what we achieved with our Vivo, our own intraoral scanner in speed when it comes to treating, on helping to capture the images for our ortho clients on the ClearCorrect side, we are releasing today 3.8 and in the future, very soon 3.9, that brings a completely new UI/UX, that completely changes the way we can use the scanner in the future and how we can create value both for the patient and for the clinician. And it is a great honor and it has been a fantastic collaboration that we announced today our partnership with Smilecloud. And here, you can already see how Smilecloud will help and enable Straumann Group in the future to digitalize along the whole journey of the clinicians. On the one hand, you see it on the engage side, where we have smile design. We're adding smile design to the value offering of Straumann with very simple ways, like taking a photo, we can already engage patients, and we can convince them how they could look like in the future. And I already talked about the intraoral scanners, but then we as well moved to the planning side. And here, Smilecloud will as well help us to drive collaboration and to really digitalize treatment planning between dental labs, between dentists, between other specialists to really digitalize the whole interaction and find faster and more efficient ways of communicating. I'm as well super happy to announce already with the Smilecloud partnership, the integration with Co-Diagnostics that we are going to deliver from the very beginning where we then move the engagement, the planning part into implant planning and more reliable outcomes in the future. And we move to the end, the treatment. I'm very happy to announce as well that we have made tremendous effort in our Smile in a Box offering, where we have the planning all together. We can package everything in a box. We deliver surgical guides. We deliver stock products, and we make it a seamless experience for our customers. And at the end of the day, for our patients. And now as I don't want to speak too much about Smilecloud, I would like -- love to introduce my colleague, Florin, who will guide you through the future of dentistry. Thank you.

Thank you, Florian. So as stated, my role here today will be to explain what role Smilecloud plays in the bigger picture. And I think it's important before we talk about any technology to understand that it should aim to solve problems. So I will just focus on 3 problems, which I think we all have around the way. And I would say that the first one is fragmented data. There's chunks of data everywhere. There's different formats. It's all being scattered around, and it's quite difficult to collaborate around this. Then the other thing is the, let's say, predictability or unpredictability in design. And by this, what exactly do I mean? If we take a reference, any other field, think now about architecture or engineering. You have a very linear iterative process. You have design at the beginning and then you follow up on that and eventually end up with prototyping and the final thing. In dental, however, we have a different scenario. We have what we call patient engagement in the beginning, where the scope is to engage the patient, help him visualize a future treatment, which is done in a high level. And then obviously, you have the treatment in the middle and at the end, you have design as we know it. Now why is this a problem, because if you have designed at the very end, it usually will obviously encompass all of the limitations that are there because we didn't design in the beginning. Now also, if you just design in the beginning the high level way, the problem is that what is that, it's just a visual promise that many times it's hard to keep because it's too generic. So this is pretty much a fundamental issue, which we have because the nature of our professor -- of our profession, we basically deliver promises before we deliver services. And the last thing is, let's say, the disconnected workflows. If you look at all the specialties, you will notice that we still tend today to work very silos, to work very disconnected from each other. And this is also because of how technology makes it for us, but also because of many of, let's say, the lack of the infrastructure to collaborate in a true sense. So if I am to tackle these problems and talk about what Smilecloud has been delivering so far. In terms of patient engagement, we always know about Smile design, which is this pitch, this visual promise that you make to the patient in the beginning. And here, the differentiators on our side are the use of AI, which translates into a faster process. We just automate it, photorealism, which means you make it look life-like for patient. I think this is very important. And last but not least, probably one of the key pitches is the use of biometrics, which is in simple words, the use of natural tooth shapes, which does 2 things, not only it guarantees that you get good results as a default, because you are working with something which already looks nice as components. But also it has an output. Essentially, SmartCloud works as a search engine for anatomy, which means the output is no longer just an illustration to engage the patient, but is also morphology in its own, which then you can take further and translate into the CAD process, which I think was the missing link in this part. We need something to take from that generic first moment and be able to translate in the process in something predictable. And I believe this is probably one of the key aspects. Now in terms of collaboration, there are 2 factors here, which matter. Collaboration has to be -- not has to be, but I believe it's the better way, has to be centralized, which means you have -- and the data. and the people working together and the communication in the same place. It just makes things easier, especially when there are more specialists involved. And then the other thing is the fact that it's contextual. What does that mean? Obviously, if you have the resources and the communication in the same place, you can talk about things that you can see. You can handle these resources, you can virtually point fingers around. It just makes it much more relevant and without further effort. Also, the ability to be able to take all these files and put them together in what we call a virtual patient, allows us to bring team perspective, to view things in a more holistic way. And practically it means you can take the scans, the DICOM, everything and just stack them up and have this accessible anywhere, anytime. And this is another key factor. We need the data in certain critical moments, we cannot stop. We don't want hardware dependency. We want to be able to access things when we need them. And everything that I've been showing so far is available in a browser page, which means any device, anytime. Now to finish also with an announcement, since this is the norm today, what we are going further into is even more automation. So if the initial design, we got to a point where, let's say, we got the love for the community because it was fast. You virtually could go -- could get to with 4 clicks to a nice iteration of design. We added even more automation so now it's basically 1 click. You just select any resource, any picture and everything is instant to a point that you have a draft, and you get to, as a user, to the point where design is almost like you play because you start, everything is there and then you visually, intuitively and of course, scientifically are able to take decisions. [Presentation]

What we all lack today is time. We need technologies that make it fast for us and where the time spent inside them is rewarded. I want to be able to do something that I can have a follow-up. And I believe that the future is that at some point, these things need to connect. At the end of the day in an ideal world, patient engagement and design should be one and the same. But for pragmatic reasons, we cannot have this all in -- it would just make an interface too big. But what we can have is have this type of technology, which is simple, facing the patient and the dentist, and connecting with the specialty software in the background. Imagine being able also to take outputs in terms of planning from different software. You can take the surgical plan, the prosthetics plan, the ortho plan and stack them together in a browser, allowing everybody to connect to the same vision, to the same goal in a treatment because that's the purpose of working in a team. And I think this pretty much speaks a little bit about the future of collaboration. And at the end, all I want to say that, first of all, I'm also proud to be here and proud to present this new partnership, where the goal as were stated is, at the end of the day, together with Straumann is to make these ends meet for the dentist, for the technician, for the specialists and ultimately for the patients. Thank you very much.

Excellent, excellent. Thanks a lot, Florin. I hope you enjoyed his very strong presentation. I can introduce myself, Holger Haderer, I'm responsible for the business unit Implantology at Straumann Group. And I have the privilege to connect to this wonderful presentation of Florin Cofar. I think if you have listened carefully, you have heard a lot about predictability and predictable output. But let's talk as well about predictable outcome. Because at the end, this is what we are all about. We want to have a perfect result and planning means a lot. But to translate that also in the surgical area is obviously very essential. And this is why I have the privilege also to announce something new today, which is called the Straumann Falcon Dynamic Navigation system. So as you can nicely see this is a nice final step where we start with convincing the patients about a perfect smile. We have all technology at hand. You have seen the presentation of Florin Cofar, how we can orchestrate the different files, but also amongst the network of clinicians and obviously, technicians. And here, it's now the question how to translate that intraoperatively. And with this, we are very proud to talk about Straumann Falcon today, which is a dynamic navigation system, computer-assisted navigation system. And now you know at least the local people here, they know exactly there is also one way to get from Cologne to Dusseldorf. But maybe there is more than just one way. Imagine you are sticked to one way. And all of a sudden, there is a big construction and there is no second way. And this is exactly, if you translate all these digital files in one printed guide. And all of a sudden, there is something you cannot apply the guide. So you are stuck with the guide. This does not happen with dynamic navigation because you simply visualize everything. You have in real-time everything in front of you. However, you can always relate to the perfect 3D planning you have done before. So if it did not arrive on your side, a small video might support me here. [Presentation]

So the video illustrated, it's definitively a very powerful tool for visualization. First of all, you see what you do in all dimensions. And whereas the guide usually is also standing in front of, let's say, the surgical area and yourself as a surgeon. This is obviously helping you to see exactly what you do related to all the images you have done before. There's also clinical and business insights because usually, you never know what your people have done during the surgery. And this is documenting everything. So you know exactly what you and your people in the OR have performed. It gives you flexibility during the surgery, especially versus, let's say, nondynamic solution as guides. And we are convinced with all this information, we can expect significant improved treatment outcomes for patients. So this is the system at hand. I think you have seen with all the presentation, it's a very consistent path we want to follow here within the digital transformation. And obviously, this fits perfectly to immediacy. So you can expect from Straumann always very strong drive in innovation, but especially in immediacy, which means nothing else but time to teeth because patients want to have teeth. If you have to print in between the guides, you're going to lose some time. But with this solution, you have everything at hand as long as you have all data available, you have performed the preop planning and you just go for it. You can count on multiple innovation in immediacy. And with this, I have the privilege to hand over to my colleague, Camila Finzi, who will report about the best innovations in orthodontics. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Good luck. Okay. Thank you. So I think as you can see with ClearCorrect, we have a completely new branding. We did that for this occasion is also a launch that we are doing now. And we think it's a good testament of how much our value proposition has improved in the last few years, but also show our partnership with our doctors on how much we want to keep improving for the years to come. We believe that everything we do we have our customer in the focus. And we do that by hearing them and creating a solution that is done by clinicians for clinicians. And in the end of the day, we want to be partners in excellence and United by Smiles. So always starts with a good intraoral scanner. And then we have the privilege also to announce in this event, Virtuo Vivo is launching a very good integration with ClearCorrect as well as 3Shape with the new retainer workflow and also the revision workflow all embedded in the United platform. And after that, also a pleasure to say that for the first time ever, we're going to have our ClearCorrect sync app. It's our first app available in Apple Store and Android as well. And what it's going to do, it's going to help our doctors to take all the pictures they need directly from their cellphone and this is going directly to the doctor portal. So it's also going to guide them what type of pictures you need to take from all the angles to restart your aligner journey and make it much easier than having to go to bulky cameras and then have to upload to your computer. So we're very proud of that. This is only the first version of our tiers correct sync, but we do believe in the months to come and the years to come, we're going to be adding new functionability, so you should expect more versions from this app. So going back and then you did add our -- the intraoral scanner, you have the pictures, then you are finalizing your diagnostic phase, and then we go now for all the innovation that is coming on doctor portal. So yes, all this that you are seeing today is being launched at these events. So we have 6 launches that it's all being released today. So when you go to the dynamic prescription form, it's exactly what name says. It's a decision tree on your treatment that it's going to be as easy as I said a case needs to be and as complete as a very comprehensive or full arch treatment needs to be. And depending on the decisions that the doctor is taking when he's filling out of the platform, the system is going to guide him what he needs to upload, what are the type of treatments he should expect and also guide him how is going to be the treatment outcome. And also, we are launching here our first-ever collaboration with external treatment planning optimization service. This is going to make easier for our doctors because now they will not need to bounce between different platforms to talk to a treatment planning service. So for doctors who want a second pair of hands and want to talk to a treatment planning service, it's going to be all embedded in doctor portal and the treatment planning service is going to finalize the case for them and if they are going to receive an alert when they are ready to approve the case. Okay. Now we're getting close to the end of the treatment. So after the end of the submission at doctor portal, the doctor is going to submit the case to one of our planning centers that is going to finalize the treatment setup. And as soon as it's done, he can move to our ClearPilot that now I have the pleasure to announce that we are launching also today ClearPilot 6.0. The main thing about ClearPilot 6.0 is that we have completely redesigned user interface. We made it very clean, very simple, so it can be as simple as you need for a simple case as complete as it should be for the complex type of cases with all 3D controls that a doctor would need to design that type of cases. As you can see, we improved all the interface for the doctor view, it's going to show the picture of the patient, it's going to say the name of the patient so he can remember which patient he's treating. And now we are including also the point-to-point measurement that is going to help them to see the discrepancies with the bolt-on analysis and also make it a more predictable treatment plan. The gingiva morphing was improved as well as now they have at their fingertips with the 3D controls for lesion and space management also to help them to better see the outcomes of the treatment planning. So after you did all that, finally, you're going to approve your case and then some days after that, you're going to receive your premier aligners from one of our manufacturing sites. So we have the pleasure to be manufacturing ClearCorrect in 4 different continents. So we pretty much do very fast across the globe. And with that, we can serve all the 50 markets that we operate. And last year, we did a lot to improve our aligners. So as we know, we are very proud to have a premier aligner that offers esthetic comfort and precision due to our proprietary ClearQuartz material that it's a 3-layer material that is stain resistant and very comfortable, but also the high-end flat trimline who creates better torque control. And last year, we included all the clinical features you would need with the cutouts, the bite ramps and the different engager sites. And to complete the journey, it's my pleasure to announce that we completed all clinical features having now Pontics, bars and eruption guides. So this is going to come in your aligners and then you can better treat different types of patients of different age groups and also different orthodontic conditions. And with all that, it's my pleasure to be here with you and to say that with our patients and our doctors, we are very proud to be creating more healthier and confident smiles. Thank you.

Thank you, Camila. Then we're arriving at the end of that presentation. And I think that was important for us to be true to the key words that I started with about the passion for innovation. You have seen that we are really going to provide some additional solutions and additional capabilities to clinicians for delivering better treatments. And what is important for us is that we realize now that, obviously, innovation on the key pillars of organization, the implant on one side, the clear aligner on the other side, it's still at the core of the strategy. But investing significantly as well on the digital workflow and the digital solutions are critical to generate that customer experience, which is now going to be one of the major ways of differentiating our solutions versus what is existing on the other side. Then the digital solutions are going be a very significant way for us to deliver additional value to clinicians and you are going to be able to experience this in the different booths here around then -- this presentation area. And I just hope to engage you to be able to get some of those demonstrations to really see what it means in reality. With this, then, I would like to thank you for being present with us today. To thank all the passionate leaders that have shared with you the innovation that we are bringing to the market, and who are available also obviously, to answer any questions you may have about what has been presented. Any questions, Silvia could come and hand the microphone, if you have any. Mario as well if you prefer.

[ Naria Nasha ] from Quintessence Publishing. So Falcon, how much will it cost?

Well, that's a good question. And as you have seen, I think there are so many different solutions that I cannot give you a price for each of them. But I think something which is very important in the past, technology has been too expensive and has been -- has slowed down the penetration and the acceptance on digital solution in dentistry. However, what we see now is that a lot of those digital solutions are included within the price of the overall consumables. And what is price is not so much the technology, but it's a lot of the service going with it. And as you can save time, then this is a way where, it's an investment for a clinician to go on the digital solution. But at the end, it represents a profitability gain if you are using it wisely. And I would say the cost of digital technology has significantly decreased. To give you just an example intraoral scanner still 3 years ago was costing between EUR 25,000 to EUR 35,000. And I think nowadays, if you look around, it's going to be between EUR 15,000 to EUR 25,000. Then you see we have seen a kind of a 1/3, 30% decline in those costs. And one very important point also to cost, before from a software perspective, you were obliged to pay the entire license for perpetual use meaning that the entry cost was very high. With cloud technology, you are paying for what you use, then you can get a pay-per-use approach, you can get a subscription fee that you can stop when you are not using the system anymore, then the flexibility in pricing increased very significantly, which is giving much more affordability and ability for clinicians to really use those new technologies. Any other questions? Not anymore. Okay. Thank you for bringing these very good points. Wish you a very good congress, very good end of the day, and thanks again for being here with us. Thank you.