Joe Hogan
Analyst · Glen Santangelo from Guggenheim Securities. Please proceed with your question
Hey, Glen, I start to say, our markets always been price sensitive. And when you look at our portfolio in the sense of how we put things together with our comprehensive product and then our Lite products, products like E5 and E7, the iGo that I talked about too, these have all been positioned to hit a certain price point, not just for doctors, but for doctors with their patients too. When you talk about competition increasing or whatever, again, it's out there, the traditional players that we know about. I'll talk about the DTC channel in a second. But in general what we find is there's no scale yet. There's no scale on the software side. There's no scale on the supply side. There's a ways to go. There's no challenge in the teen segment results, , it's primarily simple cases on the adult side. And so it's not that we don't take it seriously, it's just that we feel that we have really strong sales force. The iTero integration with our product line is so strong in that way. It makes it easier for doctors to work with us and to work with patients also. Our operations are unmatched in the sense of – now we produce half a million to 600,000 aligners a day. It's not easy to do those things. So overall as the landscape changing, sure it is. I mean, our key patents ran off at the end of 2017 as you know, we're in the 2019. And we're seeing competition slowly ramp up, but we're not saying that it's been material this quarter. We're just recognizing that it's been out there. On the DTC channel price again, I'll go back to our portfolio, the products like Lite, products like iGo, our simpler products like E7 specifically, those are designed for simple cases. Basically that's what DTC does. They do social six, lower crowding, things that are orthodontically simple. These products have been aligned for that too. Our job to get those products in our doctor's hands and to get in front of the patients and show them what an opportunity is to work with a doctor and its product line to getting the kind of outcomes that they expect. And also they give them a chance to be able to work with the doctor, hand-in-hand if they don't like the treatment at some point in time, they can continue to progress with that doctor to make it better too.