Robert Frist
Analyst · Scott Berg of Needham. Your line is open
That’s a big thing we’re trying figure out. We’ve looked at -- remember I mentioned the change over from one clinical partner to two others, and we have actually flip flop from one to two others. And observation when we did that flip flop was that as we ended our ability to sale those products, the sale of product was essentially the same as the prior year, which is really growing. So, it flattened out a bit but it stayed strong. In other words, we didn’t experience a drop off. In fact, we did see some customers trying to secure the rights to that product beyond end of our relationship. And so at the very end there’s little surgeon buying or an increase in buying, I should say. So, we’re trying to figure that out. I think customers it’s a really good product, as I mentioned. I think our customers really value integration. And I think they will probably likely want to secure the product for as long as they can to be fully integrated. And so my thinking is now as we enter this next 14 months is that hospitals will contract for a little longer than average period, like their average period is about 18 months, maybe a little longer than that. And what we’re thinking is they’ll probably some clients will want to secure essentially what is now through a partnership, we want to secure working version of that out to 2020. But it is going to be hard to predict. And so right now, the way we’re modeling is essentially we’ll probably sale about the same amount in this coming year, in the next 12 months beginning in January, as we’re going to sale in this year, maybe it’s a little uptick at the last to deliver modeling. And so, not a decline mostly flat but flat on a really good year here in ’17, so we expect to repeat that in ‘18. And then it’s going to be difficult in ‘19, because we cannot sale, mark or distribute a competing product until January 1, 2019. So we can’t even begin selling replacement products until January 1, 2019. And so, it’s going to be a hard backfill for us. But to answer your specific question, I do think that customers want to secure it, because they do value the integrated products. We’ve seen that over and over again when products come out of network that our customers are willing to shift as we mentioned in clinical scale, a really good shift going on right now to integrate partners from the prior partner. And so again, we're modeling it relatively flat, but it’s a strong year in '17, so I expect strong year in ‘18.