Stratasys has made a very unusual and strategic move into a new application area.
This week the company announced “TrueDent”, which is a new technology to 3D print full color dentures. The technology allows for the production of dentures that not only appear extremely realistic, but are also have a durability that they describe as “permanent”. Stratasys said the dentures have “accurate tooth structure, shade and translucency”.
TrueDent provides an FDA Class II cleared solution for dental 3D printing.
The workflow for using TrueDent would involve a dentist taking a 3D scan of the patient, running that through some software to generate a unique 3D model of the dentures for the patient, and finally printing the dentures themselves.
This is no doubt a new variation on their powerful full color PolyJet technology that they’ve used in the past to produce multiple types of full color objects. I’ve seen many samples from this technology, and believe me, they are incredibly realistic. You cannot tell they are not real until you pick up the object and realize that it is too heavy for what it appears to be.
While there are plenty of dental 3D printing solutions on the market today, there are relatively few if any that provide an ability to 3D print dentures directly.
According to Stratasys, the U.S. produced 4.2M dentures in 2021, but only five percent were produced using 3D print technology. This presents a rather large market opportunity for Stratasys, as they could theoretically capture 4M denture prints annually going forward.
It’s hard to estimate what this market is worth, as the cost of dentures varies considerably. According to the Aesthetic Dental Center:
“A basic set of full dentures might cost anywhere from $600 – $1,500, midrange quality dentures might cost between $1,500 – $3,000, and a premium set could be $3500 – $15,000.”
Given that the Stratasys dentures would be precisely personalized, they would not fall in the lower range of these prices. Perhaps they could be in the US$2-5,000 range? If so, then Stratasys just found a market worth US$32-80B. Revenues at that level are dozens of times larger than Stratasys today.
But that’s only with our assumption of the denture cost. It could be larger, although the higher the price, the fewer will be sold. Nevertheless, this is a truly gigantic market that Stratasys just stepped into. On the other hand, these statistics are only for the US, and there is the rest of the world to consider as well.
When I first saw this announcement I was a bit confused. Stratasys’ long term revenue play was thought to be in manufacturing. They’ve been long experimenting in that area, hoping to cash in on the long-term adoption of additive manufacturing in a US$12T market. So why dental?
The answer is above in the numbers. Stratasys’ full color technology is perfectly suited to this application, which can be ramped up far easier than any of their manufacturing strategies.
I suspect there could be a bump in Stratasys’ valuation coming up because of this move.
Via Stratasys
