Australasian Dentist Issue 89

Category 116 AustrAlAsiAn Dentist Clear speak The Clear Aligner market W e have never experienced another subsector within dentistry that has had such incredible growth, development, and popularity amongst patients, clinicians and large institutional money. since align commercialised invisalign™ at the start of the century, aligners have enjoyed good popularity with the general public. From a clinician perspective, the last four to six years has seen us rapidly move from the early adaptor to the early majority to now being in the cusp of entering the late majority. Coinciding with this, the mindboggling amount of investor and institutional money in aligners and aligner related companies has absolutely skyrocketed – along with major acquisitions and restructuring. to put it lightly, the whole aligner industry is changing and restructuring rapidly. Will this continual change and restructuring continue? Absolutely. ACAs will use this column to continue to provide you with regular updates on what is happening in the aligner space! Afterall – Clear aligners market size was estimated to be us$ 2.35 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach us$ 39 billion by 2031! Stock market: We thought it would be interesting to look as some aligner based companies and how they have been doing over the last 6 months. Byte, a direct-to-consumer aligner company, has been acquired by Dentsply sirona on 31 December, 2020. the purchase price was $1.04us Billion. new listing on the HongKong stock exchange – AngelAlign on the 16th June! And didn’t it make a huge enterence! the Chinese clear aligner company surged 132% on debut! it’s offer price was HK$173 at the start of the day and ended their first day at $HK401 SDC ALIGN 6 months ago 6 months ago June 24, 2021 June 24, 2021 Patient based news: u All major aligner companies are running social media ads and patient focussing social media accounts. it is a good idea to be aware of these as it is likely some or most of your patients are seeing them before you are. u smile Direct Club is continuing to run a patient focussed tV/ Video campaign regarding daytime and night time aligners. u invisalign is running a patient focussed “invis is…” tV/Video campaign. u invisalign celebrated 10 million cases by donating $us 1 Million to Operation smile for children born with cleft lip and palate Clinical based news: u On 16th June, Ormco (spark) announced it has received FDA clearance to treat mixed dentition with spark u spark’s recent release also allows Orthodontists to download the stl files of the first 3 stages and last stage to minmise time between patient acceptance and being in their first aligners – no doubt a sign of things to come in the world of aligners! u On June 1st, ClearCorrect announced that it will standardise the time from case approval to shipping to 10 days! u A number of Australian invisalign users have started to notice that their aligners are now being made in China, not Mexico u Dental monitoring has released a major app upgrade for its users and doctors alike – and the feedback so far has been very good. u invisalign has released their new G8 protocol, optimised for lower anterior intrusion and deep bite cases u Henry schein has announced their new aligner system – reveal ® Clear Aligners u important update first reported Dec 2020 (now in effect!): invisalign has recently changed their cancellation policy in that if you don’t accept more than 50% of your clinchecks uploaded with a scanner per quarter – you will be charged a fee for every case not approved in the next quarter. this has the potential to have major implications on your clinic – particularly if you offer free aligner consults/workups. if you are not fully aware of this change, please spend time reading their updated official terms and conditions u