Annual Report 2024 - Chairman and CEO’s Letter
2025/04/22 22:49 (GMT+08:00)
Dear Customers, Colleagues, and Shareholders,
Thank you for supporting Angelalign Technology Inc. (“Angelalign” or the “Company”) over the past year. Your trust and support motivated us to make strong progress. As we traveled around the world to dental conferences and to see customers, it’s satisfying to see the accelerated pace of dental technology innovation. Whereas many dental technologies in the past rode on progress in other specialties, digital orthodontics is now leading the pace in the medical field.
Individual treatment planning, customized manufacturing, fast delivery anywhere in the world, cross-pollination of different clinical traditions, aligner orthodontics is at the forefront of where medicine is headed towards, improving clinical quality and expanding availability. More importantly, aligner orthodontics is at its early stages and rapidly improving every year.
We thank the clinicians who try new approaches. We thank the entrepreneurs who are pushing the limit of the industry. We thank the KOLs who illuminate with forward thinking. We thank orthodontic organizations for setting guardrails for clinical quality. We are excited to see the rich innovation of digital orthodontics in our field, including in brackets, materials, software, imaging, monitoring, and protocols. As a company built by orthodontists over 20 years ago, Angelalign is proud to be part of this worldwide community and doing what it can to advance the community mission.
LOCALIZING CLINICAL PREFERENCES
Sydney, Bangkok, Paris, Madrid, Cologne, Sao Paolo, Boston, Dubai, Shanghai… these are not just names of cities with customers. Each of our 50 country markets represents a drastically different ecosystem, patient base, clinician needs, and clinical traditions. We find it fascinating to adapt our products and services to each market and to create an organizational structure that can respond to their brilliance.
We remember meeting an experienced orthodontist from Cologne in an old brewery, next to its great cathedral. It was a chilly evening, but the centuries-old pub was warm and cozy. Together with our experienced German team leader, we were chatting about the challenges facing orthodontists in Germany and what they would like to see. The orthodontist shared us his family story of coming from many generations of dentists dating back to the late 1800s. Given his roots, he was not only interested in increasing case volume, but also in bringing orthodontic theories to aligner movementWe are continuously improving our localized services. Angelalign is expanding treatment planning capacity and aligner production in Brazil, which is fast becoming one of the most important centers of dentistry in the world, with strong clinical culture and strong academic research. Recently, we also decided to establish a new manufacturing facility in Wisconsin, a short drive to Milwaukee, thus bringing advanced custom manufacturing locally for our North American customers and being able to explore production process innovation with clinicians.
Our dedication to localization is often put to test, such as when an accomplished doctor in Madrid sent us a hundred-page presentation with her clinical preferences. After rolling eyes and pulling hair for a day, our clinical and treatment planning team dug in and distilled her requirements into structured preferences. This helped us to deeply understand the Spanish orthodontic approach. Out of that came product improvements targeted for the Spanish market. This clinician eventually became one of our best friends and mentors.
MAKING TECHNOLOGY ROBUST CLINICALLY
Both of us come from the software and hardware engineering area, so the latest technologies are straightforward tools for us to use. Maybe because of this, we are less enamored by marketing headlines that suggest digital technology is going to solve all problems in dentistry and orthodontics. We love all the new software and hardware and hope they keep coming. At the same time, we feel that as an industry, we need to make technology more robust and easier to use to allow doctors to truly increase productivity and quality.
We hope that Angelalign and other industry leaders come back to basic human intelligence and use clinical feedback to iterate products and improve over time. Moreover, we advocate our industry to incorporate technology unobtrusively into how doctors and patients live and work. Unlike other healthcare industries where professionals are well supported and have uniform needs, our clinicians operate in many different contexts and have less IT and administrative support. As a result, it takes much longer to make dental technologies robust and widely usable compared to other medical devices. Orthodontic technologies, in particular, have no short cuts to success.
One day at a Brazil conference we met with an accomplished business executive who led various dental and orthodontic products businesses for decades. In recent years, he has transitioned to leading an aligner business. He was a brilliant guy and much more accomplished than we. He scratched his beard over coffee and mumbled that “All dental products are linear products, just like any other medical device. What you see is what you get. I can look at the design, the material, the manufacturing, the software, the protocol, use it briefly and pretty much know how well it works. Having been in aligners for a few years, I found it a different animal. Aligners all look the same; all have beautiful marketing; all make same claims and seem to have similar manufacturing processes and design software. But they give completely different results. Differences are in details of interface, design, manufacturing, quality control, and medical protocols. Differences are unobservable at first but over 20 to 50 steps of treatment they accumulate tenfold. The accumulated irregularities get magnified by biomechanical forces, and finally expresses non-linearly like the butterfly effect.” What an insightful perspective from a lifelong dental industry leader. He reinforced our view that for aligners, the ultimate value proposition for our customers is to make technology robust and effective, achieved through a large amount of iteration and feedback.
As a result of this approach, customers will see continued innovation in our doctor-facing software and hardware offerings. This including tools to handle complex cases quickly, to present treatment plans to patients more professionally, to control mid-treatment check-ups in finer details, and to ensure every treatment phase is smoothly monitored.
Even more of our investment in technology will be in the invisible areas such as better medical protocols, higher treatment planning quality, reducing refinements, improving manufacturing and operational quality, strengthening data security and adjusting for different clinical traditions.
PROGRESS IN PEDIATRIC AREA
Pediatrics is a good example of how we incorporate technology robustly into a wholistic treatment paradigm for clinicians and patients. In some well-developed countries, it is common for parents to take their children to see orthodontists at an early age. While in other regions, awareness of early orthodontic intervention is still low. Parents often delay seeking treatment until problems become severe. By then, treatment becomes more complicated, longer, and costlier.
Regardless of the region, doctors face similar challenges in pediatric dentistry due to the long treatment and monitoring cycle. Most pediatric orthodontic products are limited to specific stages and tackle only a part of the process. Whereas what doctors really need is support through a very long treatment cycle and by a clinical ecosystem.
Guided by the principles of prevention, timely intervention, and personalized treatment, we launched our new KiD Max full-cycle orthodontic product in selected regions last year. This product allows doctors to utilize Angelalign’s professional orthodontic tools and clinical support for up to six years. Doctors can use our K1 product to achieve proper molar occlusion and incisor alignment for children. Doctors can seamlessly upgrade to the full-cycle KiD Max treatment plan if further intervention is necessary. Many doctors say they can now recommend the most suitable treatment plans based on each family's needs and budget without worrying about product terms limitations in later stages.
Pediatric oral health is not just orthodontics, but lifelong oral health. Therefore, we need to introduce more innovative products and services into the treatment paradigm, such as the KiD Care clinical service, which covers every step from early diagnosis to mid-treatment monitoring, and caries-prevention aligner technology because caries is a big concern for many parents. Pediatric oral health is one of many examples of where technology needs to be unobtrusively integrated into the complete treatment cycle.
DECENTRALIZE, EMPOWER AND STABILIZE
Doctor needs vary tremendously depending on their region, culture, or patient demographics. To address different needs with tailored products and services, we created a decentralized organization that empower country teams and operating teams to be an integral part of product and service design. To make the decentralized structure work, we continue to make our team culture about transparency, responsibility and most importantly, stability.
In contrast, highly centralized corporate structure serving fiercely independent doctors in different cultures is a real challenge, especially when people are constantly changing. Large corporate mergers in the past decade in dentistry have faced this challenge and investors have begun to understand that stability is itself value-creating in dentistry. Our customers and employees have welcomed the advantages of stability in our ownership, strategy and management, which ultimately engenders trust inside and outside. Trust is at the heart of dentistry, more so than even technology or marketing.
By the end of 2024, our business and clinical team are operating in over 50 countries, with a diverse multinational and multicultural team. We continue to build a culture that flips the corporate monolith on its head so that headquarters are service providers and risk managers. The real bosses are our regional market executives and our operational leaders, those who are closest to our customers. This has driven our strong customer satisfaction and solid business progress. Moreover, this culture has attracted many talented people to join our effort. People enjoy making customers happier and enjoy in turn making the orthodontic industry better.
Chairman, Dai Feng
CEO and CTO, Fox Hu