Forums › Other Topics › Financial › Penetration of Waterlase in 2004, 2005, 2006
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ebrodskiSpectatorDear members,
I’m the one who sent Dr. Schalter and Dr. van As the long emails inquiring about dental lasers.
I am trying to quantify the current and incremental of dental lasers (as a % of dentists in US and Europe) over the next few years.
The best data point I’ve found is a March 2002 survey by Dental Products Report that asked dentists whether they were planning on buying a dental laser in the next twelve months. There were 203 respondents.
For soft tissue lasers, 1.1% of dentists plan to buy in the next 12 months and 10.3% are interested in buying one and plan to buy one some point beyond 12 months. 88.6% do not plan to buy one ever.
For hard tissue lasers, .5% will buy in next 12 months and 13.7% plan to buy after 12 months. 85.7% plan to not purchase one.
Would you trust these data points? Do you recommend any other ways of quantifying the incremental penetration over the next 3 years?
Thanks.
Eldar Brodski
Research Analyst
Abacus Capital
AnonymousGuestEldar,
You might consider going to a World Clinical Laser Institute (Biolase) meeting or the Hoya meeting (think its in Las Vegas if it hasn’t already happened) or an Academy of Laser Dentistry meeting. This would give you a chance to actually talk to purchasers and potential purcahsers who actually are serious enough to spend some money on investigation of lasers.
I think you might find that its one thing to say, in a DPR survey that you’re considering purchase, but when it comes to actually making a 20-50K investment the results may be different.
AlbodmdSpectatorInteresting question, for personal sake, I hope laser’s are not accepted to quickly so I can maintain my niche. 😉 Dentists as a whole seem to be slow accepters of new technolgy. I would look at how quickly past technologies like intraoral cameras, air abrasion, and digital x-rays were accepted. I bought my Delight laser not only because I wanted to be able to provide “no shot” dentistry but also because I was the first in my city to have it. Having had my laser for only a short time I can see the tremendous potential in it. I doubt the hard tissue will be accepted quickly because of it’s high cost. If prices drop a lot, then that can change. I thought the intraoral camera was a no brainer to have and I don’t think it’s in a majority of practices yet. The camera is a lot cheaper than the laser. Will be interesting to see what happens.
Regards,
Albert Boholst DMD
lagunabbSpectatorThe surveys offer interesting snapshots of fluid market conditions so I think they are useful for monitoring the state of the market. However, I think a thought experiment on the positive utilities (fun, standard of care and economics) and the negative utilities (I am doing fine as is, too expensive, too close to retirement etc…) would be more useful at this stage of penetration. There are many factors to consider and many of them are variables that will change with increasing market penetration. I tend to think in simplistic terms and look only at the X-factor. X-factor being the ROI on the lasers. For example, if the gross revenue for an average successful user increases by 15%, what does his/her pre-laser revenue have to be in order for a laser purchase to have positive return? If the TOTAL cost of the laser is 񘒀/month, then 12 * 񘒀/0.15 = 贠,000/year. You can add more complexity and real life distributions but the basic idea remains the same.
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