Came across a great research report published by Baird and Dental Economics
A brief excerpt:
In late September, we surveyed 161 dental practitioners to assess a variety of recent dental market trends.
Key takeaways include:
- Seasonally adjusted patient volumes stable to slightly improved. While patient volumes –2.5% over past six months vs. –1.5% in our spring 2011 survey, a seasonally adjusted improving trend line continued in this survey when plotting results from our past six surveys spanning the last three years. In our opinion, this indicates a slow, steady recovery in domestic patient volumes is continuing.
- Healthy backlog of planned dental equipment spending remains in place, most of which looks targeted for high tech equipment. If dentist confidence improves near term, we believe domestic dental equipment demand could improve late 2011/2012.
- Offsetting these positives is evidence that recent spending on dental equipment has been soft and that dentists might be turning increasingly price sensitive, especially when it comes to high tech dental equipment. In our view, this latter point creates risk to manufacturers such as SIRO and distributors PDCO/HSIC if dentists continue to search out lower-priced equipment options sold direct by some manufacturers.
- Lastly, on a product-specific note, our survey highlights the increasingly competitive nature of the CAD/CAM and digital impression scanner market, with CEREC purchase intent falling to a multi-year low and interest in competitive systems growing to a
three-survey high.
Read the full report here