Annual Report 2025 - Chairman and CEO’s Letter

2026/04/23 20:07 (GMT+08:00)

 

 

Dai Feng
Chairman of the Board

 

Fourteen years ago, I walked into a small, stuffy office with old cubicles and stained carpets. Angel’s chief orthodontist cheerily showed me a book of cases that featured seriously gnarled teeth, excessively receding or protruding jaws. 

 

I wondered aloud: “Can’t you focus on easier cosmetic cases first – and have some sales?”

 

The orthodontist whispered in response: “Look, I also want easier work and quick sales. But our aligner system was created by a group of orthodontic professors to treat complex cases. They say anyone can do simple cases.

 

I learned that the lead inventor and co-founder, B.K. Wang, was a leading orthodontist, university ortho chair and mentor. Wang had invented not just the Angel system but also a bracket and wire system. He was also a humanitarian activist who organized fluoride treatment for many rural communities.  

 

Our chief ortho went on to explain. “Other aligners are tech-focused. It’s always exciting for them to talk about shiny new stuff,” he said. “But our founders demand clinically predictable outcomes and stability, while being easy to use. That makes life much harder for us and kind of boring for our investors.”

 

So, I asked: “How’s the company going to survive?”  

 

He looked at me with expectant eyes and said, “I don’t know. That’s why you’re here.”

 

Twenty-three years since its founding, Angel is still on this same path.  I’ve been in med-tech my whole career and I had never dealt with anything as complex as a high-end aligner supplier. It requires an Olympic-level dream team, with each operating module being best in class: treatment planning, custom manufacturing, bio-mechanics R&D, software algorithms, clinical support, specialist sales and order-to-delivery.

 

But it’s even harder than that. Recently I realized that aligner development is a slow iterative learning system. It can’t be built by a genius or just by throwing money at it. The product and service need to get a little bit better every day over a long period. Only by doing real cases and having demanding clinical feedback, does the system become industrial quality, with capabilities reflecting the type of cases and customers served.  Our system now reflects a capability of majority difficult tooth movements and very clinically demanding customers, as a result of doing over two million such cases.  

 

We are so fortunate to have been positioned just right from the beginning. Angel was built by orthodontists for orthodontists with a focus on clinical excellence. Our people, culture, products, and operating modules are finely tuned to achieve this goal together. Orthodontists rely on us for clinically meaningful treatments instead of just aesthetic fixes. Half of our cases are in the demanding category of younger patients.

 

Treating a lot of cases is still not enough to lead in innovation. The organization must be open and collaborative because most innovations in aligners don’t originate with the “smart people” at the top or from R&D investments. They come from customers, sales reps, engineers, clinical support teams, and treatment technicians. For Angel, it’s our thousands of motivated people in these roles, inspired by our management team, that have made us a leader in innovation, and successful in 60 countries.

 

After a long illness, Professor B.K. Wang passed away in 2022. We will always honor his role in building doctor community, innovating orthodontic technologies and spreading humanitarianism. These embody Angel’s values.  

 

Even when he was bedridden, B.K. thought a lot about Angel. He scrawled huge words for me that filled an entire page as if yelling: “You CareCapital guys make Angel amazing! Enduring!” That sheet sits on my desk to remind me every day. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.

 

 

Dai Feng

Chairman of the Board

Angelalign Technology Inc.

 

 

Fox Hu
Executive Director, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Technology Officer

 

Dear customers, shareholders, and colleagues,

 

I would like to thank you for your continued trust and support over the past year and for being part of Angel’s journey as we reach new milestones together. In 2025, we continued to strengthen our position as a clinically driven clear aligner company, expanding globally while deepening our capabilities in serving our doctor customers.

 

In 2025, we continued to receive strong positive feedback from our customers around the world. Angel recently surpassed two million total cases. This important achievement is a testament to our long-term capabilities and the respect orthodontists have for our products and services. We feel confident about our strategic direction and prospects.

 

The clear aligner industry has grown steadily. An experienced orthodontist in the United States told me that he expects aligners will account for 60%-to-70% of cases in his practice. A French orthodontist with two decades of experience described aligner treatment as “the direction of the orthodontic industry.” These perspectives reinforce our view that clear aligners are still in the early stages of long-term structural adoption globally. Yet orthodontists are cautious about selecting the brands they use. As a result, orthodontists tend to rely on a small number of providers with established clinical track records. 

 

This reflects a fundamental characteristic of the aligner industry — it is a compounding system.

 

Aligners’ value is not determined by short-term customer satisfaction or pricing strategies but by the stability and predictability of long-term treatment outcomes. Differences in product and service capabilities accumulate over the course of a treatment, which often lasts one-to-two years. Orthodontists rely on past-case experiences and peer recommendations when selecting new brands.

 

As a result, Angel has chosen a demanding path to establish its reputation in the marketplace. Over two decades, we have built and maintained foundational capabilities that include localized service as part of its delivery systems around the world. We also offer comprehensive clinical support and a clinically driven innovation process for new products and services. We believe this clinically driven and localized approach is fundamentally different from a standardized, technology-led model.

When we started to expand beyond mainland China three years ago, Angel launched in several markets simultaneously. We set up local teams and support systems in four major regions: EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa), North America, APAC (Asia Pacific) and South America. We also established treatment planning centers in Brazil and Southeast Asia. In addition, we expanded our Brazil manufacturing facility to include Angel branded products and are building our U.S. manufacturing facility.

 

These sites allow us to stay close to the needs of our customers and patients. We are constantly getting feedback that allows us to validate and improve our products and services and build an ever-stronger reputation among orthodontists. This strategy requires big, long-term investment and disciplined execution. But we believe that only the well-validated products and services can succeed in global competition. 

 

We do not apply a standardized service model everywhere. We tailor our approach to local clinical cultures, treatment philosophies, and decision-making processes. For example, some European experts expect treatment plans to follow their protocols. So, we offer to train our treatment planning teams. Many U.S. orthodontists prefer in-depth discussions about complex cases so they can refine treatment strategies through multiple iterations. So, we do that, too. This kind of localized understanding has helped make us a trusted clinical partner in the diverse markets we serve around the world. 

 

We also have developed a differentiated support system in China. In Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, we continue to deepen our professional services and systematic capabilities by helping doctors improve efficiency and clinical performance. In broader Tier 3 and Tier 4 markets, we are committed to making service more available, expanding clinical support and improving commercial teams. This means that we maintain a consistent focus on case evaluation, treatment planning, patient communication, and careful treatment management. Our goal is to help clinicians finish each case well. 

 

Through long-term collaboration with doctors, we have continuously applied real clinical needs to build sustainable competitive advantages. “Clinical-first” is our DNA. Clinical outcomes improve when doctors have more support. That’s what we provide. We have found that innovation finds its true value when technological capabilities are combined with localized clinical support.

 

Take the angelButton™ as an example. The product was devised to address a demonstrated clinical need. Today, after six years of refinement, the angelButton™ has significantly improved orthodontic stability and usability. More than 100 million buttons have been shipped globally. They have become a widely adopted tool in daily clinical practice. 

 

We also are combining cutting-edge technologies with traditional orthodontic methods. Our technology is embedded into our clinical support and manufacturing ecosystem. For example, the iOrtho platform is updated frequently to continuously integrate computational capabilities with clinical expertise. This improves diagnosis, treatment planning efficiency and quality control.

 

Underlying all of this is our long-standing core value: putting the customer first. This is the principle that guides our product development, operational decisions, and long-term strategy. It also drives us to take responsible actions when the industry changes. 

 

Currently, some aligner brands have scaled back or exited markets. Doctors have increasingly turned to leading suppliers with proven long-term reliability. For Angel, this presents both an opportunity and a responsibility for us. We are committed to delivering reliable products and services to earn the trust of doctors and patients. At the same time, we are constantly looking for ways to support doctors when treatments are disrupted by supplier issues.

 

Our open and inclusive culture and our collaborative organizational model have opened the way for Angel to serve customers in more than 60 countries. Cross-regional and cross-functional collaboration continues to improve, integrating R&D, clinical support, and commercial, and operational resources. This organizational strength is an important competitive advantage.

 

We are firmly committed to delivering customer value. We will continue to strengthen our clinical support services and R&D capabilities, expand treatment indications, and improve the overall experience for doctors and patients. We will further enhance production capacity and treatment design infrastructure to improve the resilience of our supply chain. We will continue to invest in IT, compliance systems and global data security, while strengthening our intellectual property protections to support long-term growth.

 

We believe that long-term success in this industry is built through consistent execution, discipline, and trust from doctors. Small continuous improvements, compounded, go a long way. Angel will continue to innovate, invest with discipline, and work alongside doctors and partners to create sustainable development of the global orthodontic industry by helping clinicians achieve better outcomes.

Fox Hu
Executive Director, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Technology Officer
Angelalign Technology Inc.