Desktop Metal, Inc.’s (DM) CEO Ric Fulop on 24th Annual Needham Growth Conference (Transcript)

Desktop Metal, Inc. (NYSE:DM) 24th Annual Needham Growth Conference January 11, 2022 4:15 PM ET

Company Participants

Ric Fulop – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Conference Call Participants

Jim Ricchiuti – Needham & Company

Jim Ricchiuti

Good afternoon. Welcome to day two of the 24th Annual Needham Growth Conference. My name is Jim Ricchiuti, senior equity research analyst covering the industrial and technology space at Needham & Company.

Our next presentation is going to be from Desktop Metal, a leading supplier of 3D printing solutions, with a broad portfolio of metals, carbon fiber, 3D printers, as well as polymer printers. We’re pleased to have with us today, Ric Fulop, Founder and CEO. Ric is going to go through the presentation. We’ll have some time afterwards to go through Q&A.

Ric, I’ll turn it over to you. Thanks.

Ric Fulop

Excellent. Jim, it’s a real pleasure to be here with you second time here at your conference, and we look forward to updating everybody in our business. Can you see my screen, okay?

Jim Ricchiuti

Awesome.

Ric Fulop

All right. So let me walk you through a quick update on our business. I think our mission remains the same, which is to really enable mass production with additive and we’d like to reiterate our goal that would like to be double-digit share of this business by the end of this decade, which is something that we believe is achievable, and we’ll continue to make the right moves to get there.

As a business, this market is very exciting and growing 11x from about $12 billion in 2019 to about $146 billion by the end of this decade, projected to continue to compound north of 25% year-over-year, and it’s really propelled by a shift from prototyping, which was the original beachhead of added manufacturing into mass production, in our case, to be able to do that cost efficiently versus conventional manufacturing.

There’s very good tailwinds for this business with onshoring and supply chain flexibility. And the solutions that we’ve got today offer significant improvements versus what existed before upwards of 100x, the throughput that you could have achieved with our previous systems.

We are very proud of the effort that our team has put this year to increase our library of materials from 20 materials when we started the year to over 250 materials that cover everything from a variety of metals, composites, polymers, ceramics, biocompatible materials that are FDA-approved, sands, woods and elastomers as a 12x increase and significant moat that we’re building around the different products that we’ve got. It’s very defensible.

We’ve got the leading IP portfolio in both binder jetting and DLP for a polymer printing, which are the two methods of printing parts that benefit from continuous improvement, thanks to the fact that the core technologies that drive them benefit from Moore’s Law. So the break-even versus conventional manufacturing continues to get better on a yearly basis for our class of technologies versus our competitors who are sort of limited by the physics of those processes.

We’ve got significant moat on distribution and go-to-market that we’ve continued to build. Today, we’re in 65 countries with over 200 sales partners, up from 90 when we started the year. And we today have go-to-market team of over 70 professionals that are focused on enabling our customers to go into production.

We’ve got a combination of horizontal and vertical focus areas that ranges from automotive to healthcare, dental, consumer products, aerospace, military, and defense, heavy industry and machine design. And sometimes, you could look at us as doing too many things. But in reality, it’s because we’re marketing to the verticals. And there’s – that’s how people consume this class of technology.

But at the high level, we do two things. We make the best binder jet machines, where we’re the market share leader, and then we make the best and use photopolymer production platforms and parts, where we also have a leadership position.

We have a very compelling unit economics. We have had triple-digit year-over-year organic growth, much faster than any of our competitors that are publicly traded. So I’m very proud of that. In addition to that, we’ve moved very swiftly during the early part of last year to add some key components to our business inorganically that I think are going to be foundations for our future growth of this business.

We’ve got a high-margin recurring revenue stream business, where the consumables are going to play a big part of the long-term profitability of the business. And as a result, we have really focused on that material expansion capability and the ability to sometimes add key components to our business externally, so that they’d be part of our portfolio.

We’ve got great gross margin improvements and operating leverage that has continued on a quarter-by-quarter basis, I think, four quarters of executing that gross margin improvement. And you’ll continue to see that in the future as we reach our target operating model. And then from an inorganic growth point of view, we have demonstrated that we’re able to execute that strategy, I think, maybe too fast for some people, but we took advantage at when to do that, when the price was right, and valuations were to our advantage, in that we’re able to pick up some critical assets that have allowed us to enter that business – different segments of our – of the additive manufacturing business very efficiently.

We are looking to capture a larger share of the final part value and critical killer applications. And one of them is in the medical device and dental segment. I’ll go to that in more detail as we go through the presentation. And yep, so we’re very excited about the customer base that we’re building. It grew from 400 customers to 6,000 throughout the past year, some of that as we added some of our new portfolio companies like ExOne or EnvisionTEC, but we – so as I mentioned, still triple-digit organic growth on our existing business.

So we’ve now got a world-class list of customers that we’re very proud of across many verticals from automotive to healthcare, to consumer electronics, to aerospace, military, R&D, heavy industry have parts in, flying aircraft have parts in, rocket engines, some of the more important ones from leading companies have lots of activity in the vehicle OEM space and defense and other segments.

And again, with a focus on indious part mass production cost effectively with 3D printing, which is different from what people used to do with printing, which was primarily tools and fixtures and jigs and things like that. Our focus is 100% on the end use parts market, so which is a much bigger market.

We have a growth strategy that’s got three pillars. The first one is to really be a leader in processes to produce parts that get better with time. That’s what we call AM2.0, that give you parts that are competitive with conventional manufacturing. We’re the market share leader, about 90% in metal binder jetting, but also dominant share in the casting space with binder jetting. And we are a leading player in the photopolymer space.

We want to be vertically integrated. The second part of our strategy, we want to be vertically integrated into the materials that our machines consume. So we have a high-margin recurring revenue stream. And we’ve added some companies like adaptive 3D that have enabling technology to make that happen with better material properties than our competitors.

And then like I mentioned earlier, we want to be in a few markets where the margin accrual or in the profit pool goes to particular applications, we want to be a heavy player in those and we’re executing that strategy. And we’re much developing killer apps for the use of this technology. So this is a flywheel that we’re very excited about.

The additive space is one that’s been growing for a significant period of time. There was a hype cycle that occurred from ‘08 through 2014, when the market was very, very small, and only a billion or two in total market size. But it’s continuing to compound and the fastest-growing segment of the market right now is indious parts, which is production.

So we’ve built a portfolio of businesses around it in the – to complement our organic metal business and to add applications to the binder jet side of the business, like we’ve done, for example, in wood, with Forust and – or with adaptive 3D on the case of EnvisionTEC, and we’re very excited about that platform and the future growth that’s going to come from it.

To be successful in indious part production, you need to have four things as part of your portfolio. You need to have the ability to do very high accurate parts, very, very good surface finish parts with great material properties, then you need to do it at a throughput that makes the process cost effective versus conventional manufacturing. And we have the technologies in house for additive, they’re able to do that at scale.

On the metal side, we make parts that are 100x, the throughput versus legacy systems like powder bed fusion and do that with better surface finish and embedded properties and with materials that actually are not even compatible with like a lot of the aluminums or with materials can’t be processed with part of a fusion, they can be processed with our technology.

The photopolymer side, that’s a technology that for the longest time had the speed, had the accuracy and the finish, but it didn’t have the properties. And what we brought to the table is the ability to make those parts with properties that are in use that you can put in the market for a decade plus and have then implementation of those technologies in things like automotive or other markets. So we’re very excited about that segment.

For the folks that don’t know our industry well, the reasons that 3D printing is very disruptive and innovative, is because you can reengineer your supply chain instead of making a part in one part of the world and shipping it to another location. And then now you’re able – you’re freed up from your tooling, which means that you can make the parts in wherever you need them, you have the ability to consolidate assemblies and print many parts as a single component and have significant weight reduction benefits. You can mass customize, you can do new classes of design, like gender design, and completely have inventory of one.

So your spare parts can be available when you need them instead of having to be inventory for a decade, like some industries have to do. The technologies that we’ve got allow us to do very high throughput printing in their area, why? That is they do the full exposure at once versus having to trace an outline like lasers do or slower systems do.

We are the only binder jet company that is a turnkey solution, where we provide not just the printing technology, but also all the other elements like the centering systems and we make systems that fit through a door, are super easy to use, get over the air updates. And these may seem if you’re not – if you don’t use printers all the time and this may seem to you like table stakes, but it’s something that we’re bringing to the industry for the first time to have like a very easy to use technology that’s easy to adopt broadly. And then we provide all the software that enables you to have success out of the box, which is something that competitive solutions don’t have.

So we do that in the metal side with photopolymer space. We make the world’s largest high-speed DLP printers. They have a significant price performance benefit versus previous generation systems. The technology is being widely adopted. As you saw before, we’ve got engagements and customer relationships with most of the major vehicle OEMs, that continues to be a key segment.

Consumer electronics is also a key segment with a lot of the hyperscalers’ work that we’re engaged with. And then healthcare is also a key segment, where we’re really excited about our progress, very proud of this team’s execution in the dental and healthcare side, where today, we have over 70 materials, including our Flexera material, which is best selling over 1,000 printers installed globally at labs, doing dental parts.

And with this new class of denture materials that were just introduced in the second half of the year, we’ve printed already over 100,000 dentures or our customers have printed over 100,000 denture. So it’s working. The properties of those materials are much, much better from what you can get out in the open market from either analog-made product or older generation systems. And that’s translated in a very short period of time to over 12,000 dental practices that are their customers in the business.

I like this area, because it’s got a very large TAM, that’s going to turn relatively quickly this decade. There’s about $30 billion in spend for dental parts that are in the removable category, they’re made by labs and go to the dentist. And those parts are almost 100% of them, whether it’s the ceramics, the acrylics, the photopolymer products for the metal components. All of that is printable in dental context, that’s all patient specific. So you really have much better economics with the printing than you do with all the processes. So we’re a leader in this space, and very excited about how that is coming along. We’ve got some other activities that I’ll skip talking about in this area, but expect to see lots of also expansion in that business throughout the year.

We have a very exciting distribution platform building up right now. If we started the year with 90 partners, we have over 200. We’ve built an internal go-to-market team for production of over 70 people and a support team of over 100 people. And we’re in 65 countries. This is a unique differentiated part of our platform and adds to our moat and we’re excited about that.

The products that we sell are all high-margin product platforms with recurring revenue streams. And as you can see the unit economics here, whether it’s in our production polymer or metal products. And I’ll skip that slide. It’s more of a valuations. But we’re growing much faster than any of our publicly traded competitors grew being. So anyway, that’s a summary of our business, Jim. And we’ve got a highly differentiated technology, with great market share growing faster than the industry and well-positioned for this decade as we go and turn this into a mass market industry.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q – Jim Ricchiuti

Thanks, Ric. That’s a good overview of the business. I appreciate it. You’ve done a series of acquisitions over the past year. And I wonder if you could talk to how the integration of these acquisitions has progressed. Maybe you can highlight a few just give us a sense as to where you are obviously, some of them are a little bit more recent, like certainly like ExOne.

Ric Fulop

Yes, I mean, I think that we focus in two areas. The first thing we integrate is really a go-to-market side because that’s where you have the fastest impact to the business. It’s easier to integrate the – I mean, none of this is, I don’t want to trivialize it, but it’s easier to integrate the systems or the components of business today that everyone is using cloud tools and there’s integration capabilities for software to automate processes.

So that part is not as challenging, but we have focused on making this a core competency of a business, some people do it well, some people don’t do it well. And I worked in the investment community before on a private side and that’s what you do. You roll up your sleeves and you execute – help companies execute and focus in the areas that to make sure this stuff happens.

And so we, I think, have been relatively proficient at that – at what you would call integration for us, as you know, the go-to-market part is the most important part. I think we – I think we’ve proven that we can do, we’re good at it. I think, the – at least we’ve proven that we can do it, that we can execute it and close transactions. We will probably in a year. You can – if you invite me next year’s conference, you can tell me whether we did a good job or not. But I think we are going to get lots of fruit for the – for putting this different elements together.

Jim Ricchiuti

Now, you made an interesting comment, you said you made a series of acquisitions, some maybe faster than investors, some investors might have been expecting. But on the other hand, you guys have been fairly transparent from the get-go of doing M&A. So I’m kind of curious what your take is on that?

Ric Fulop

I’ll tell you is you demonstrated [ph] it, your demonstrated or not. We did put it out there that we have a real good understanding, have we been an investor in the space in the private side for five years before I did this and deploying capital at scale. And we knew where the assets were, what’s interesting, what’s not interesting, and what would be very accretive is to that $12 billion, sort of pie with a bottoms-up view of the $2 billion that you want to be part of and the $10 billion that you don’t want to touch with a 10-foot fall.

And we’ve been – when we had an outsize currency by the get-go, we move very quickly to execute on that plan. And once a key asset is gone, it’s gone for your competitors and other folks. And so we’re not tooling our thumbs. I mean, I think we’ve been shooting the way we structured things with some of these different transactions. And I think time will tell, but we’re very happy with the platform that we’re building focused on indious part mass production.

And all, I can talk in detail because we’ve got a plan and a way of how this whole thing comes together. Some of them are technology pieces that we think are critical, like Aerosint, got key IP and technology to do multi material powder re-coating that nobody else has. Adaptive has a new class of chemistry, that allows you to essentially get a two-part chemical reaction like a two-part epoxy out of a one-part part turns out that when you think of photopolymer printing, you have usually one part vat, or an accolade. And you will polymerize it with UV light, and that gives you properties that aren’t very good.

The parts are beautiful, but the properties degrade over time. Whereas the technology that we have, when you shine UV light on it, it’ll phase separate into two phases. And then they chemically react to form that voxel. So it is basically a two-part system that comes out of a single part vat that has long shelf life. And that is something that nobody else has. And it’s a very much an enabling technology in the polymer space.

And so we’re really excited about this portfolio. We’re building best-in-class printing platforms, vertical integration into all your consumables, and then a real focus on killer apps.

Jim Ricchiuti

And you also not only expanded the customer base significantly, but I wanted to talk a little bit about the channel as well, because that also has grown. I want to get a sense as to, where you are in terms of having the channel sell the full suite of the products, or maybe that’s not necessarily the strategy. What are your plans for…?

Ric Fulop

We’re a channel-centric company. A channel is a key enabler for growth and it allows you to uncover get reach and scale faster than other approaches of selling. However, channels not use not known for selling 2 million pieces of equipment, right? They – there – they play between 100,000 and 0.5 million, it’s where they really can have velocity. But they have scale.

So we now have a global channel in 65 countries, that gives you installation and service capability that augments the one that you have internally. We have 100 people in our service team, and that augments it with our channel. So that the exciting part there is, our channel can actually sell a production level system that’s a greater a large number. But then we have a production sales team that complements that for things that are over 0.5 million and we’ll get those deals closed.

So it acts more on a – the meat and potatoes may be products like shop system, which are in that bracket of price range where they operate at high velocity. But many times when people want to get something larger and they’re in that account, they have a way to make money with our larger systems. And then we bring in the horsepower to really do all the cost estimation and all the engineering that would be required for to support a customer in adopting this technology for high-volume mass production. But there’s a place for the channel in that conversation. And in reality, it’s a more efficient way to uncover stones and find customers and build the business at a faster scale. So we have products that that live on both sides.

Jim Ricchiuti

Maybe talk to something we’ve been hearing from virtually every company at this conference and that’s just the supply chain, the logistics issues, some of the cost pressures, obviously, you guys are not immune to it as well. How are you guys dealing with it?

Ric Fulop

Well, really, it’s a huge wind behind our sales. I can’t tell you how many just in this building alone to the outside. I have 400 to 500 customers that have a – people are all today discussing projects on large reshoring or supply chain optimization benefits that you can achieve with our machines. At the same time, we have to make our own machines. So we go through our own supply chain stuff.

So it’s a double-edged sword. But I would say that it has helped our business more than it has hurt it. And we have built a great portfolio of applications that are all about helping customers solve supply chain constraints. And I think, when you move the needle in this area, it’s something that takes a long – these activities, they get started, and then they – it’s not like they go away. You learn all the benefits of using a new class of technology that makes you a lot more flexible than it continues to be adopted over the years.

So I think, we come from a world where you had specialization in factories and started with a steam engine in the first Industrial Revolution. And that made products more cost effective in one region led to tariffs, and then we’ll be – we’ll go to a world in the future where you can make anything in any of your plants. And I think cooling is going to not be required over time. There’ll be less and less tooling required, even for very large rocks. So that’s a long arc of progress. But we’re a key enabler for those type of innovations.

Jim Ricchiuti

On the – Ric, on the new product front, where does the company stand on the expected scale-up with the P-50?

Ric Fulop

Yes, P-50 is a fantastic product. It’s imminent and we are, to some extent, before the pandemic started. We had teams working on P-50, over $150 million. We’ve invested in developing that product. So it’s an incredible system that does things at a cost structure that no other product can do that. When the pandemic hit, we shifted resources to the smaller products like shop system and P-1 wood that we can get out and install really easily and they were kind of high velocity products in a world where borders were closing and we had to figure out how to get a service person to another location and travel was more difficult.

But then at the beginning of this year, we sort of reroute it as we finished those products and those are in the market. We reroute all our engineers to finish P-50 and that is no longer a technology risk or engineering risk. The designs are done. It’s just more of scaling-up the production line and we’re hoping to do that by the end of the year. But we’re going to be a few weeks late.

And I think I messaged to the world to our investors a week ago that we would be single digits – single-digit weeks away from getting the first systems out. And we’ve had to expand capacity for production of those systems because we have pent-up demand from customers that I’ve been waiting for those systems and for important programs. So we have all hands on deck to get it out and it’s imminent.

Jim Ricchiuti

Let’s talk a little bit about the ExOne acquisition company that you’re – you were competing with. And what does the excellent business bring to the broader, the solution set that you’re bringing to market? I think I have some of the answers, but I’d love to hear what your take is on it.

Ric Fulop

Sure. So ExOne had been in the just for legacy point of view that binder jet technology was invented by Ely Sachs, who is one of our Co-Founders, any license of technology for ExOne, when they got started in the early days that was initially used for casting, where they are the market share leader in systems for the casting industry very much in the high end, like, these are multimillion dollar systems.

And then around the same time, we started our company. They started to migrate their businesses in developmental binder jet solutions that were direct metal printing, and the platforms that they had from what’s good and bad. The good news is they had many different platforms. So they had a small system, a 25 liter, 160 liter, they had like a portfolio, the systems were much slower than our flagship systems.

So they were a fraction of the throughput. So the cost per part was higher. But they were interesting good portfolio products. They also had a lot more materials qualified for those machines. And we had a big investment in catching up on materials, which we did. And then in making very, very high throughput systems, but we only had – we had a smaller number of frames. So not combined, not only are we market share leader like 90% market share. So we’re the dominant leader in metal binder jetting.

But we have the broadest portfolio of frames for customers to make them successful. And we’ve really amplified the number of materials dramatically for customers. And because we’ve qualified products, in parallel, for particular high volume alloys, like 41, [four year through 16] [ph], or it feels like that. Now our customers have choice. They have multi sourcing. They can have very cost competitive solutions.

So nomination is very powerful for the customers, because they have a very high throughput capability, and they have a broader portfolio of products and they’ve got – I would say, it’s a win-win on both sides. And then we were also – we had been developing a product for on the casting side, that was a robotic arm system, that’s very low cost. But it was more for the mass market, in that it’s something that ExOne is going to be able to leverage through their go-to-market effort in know-how and in that space.

So I think overall, we’ve got a lot of capabilities for significant growth of those businesses. One thing that hampered ExOne’s growth was the fact that when you bought one of their systems is like a six-month lead time to get the installation bring up, and it was very slow. Whereas we had architected VM to be a much faster velocity, we made systems that fit through a door, use regular power, were easy to install, and you ordered one and you had it in two weeks, and you were up and running.

And so we’re going to migrate the ExOne business into something closer to what we’ve got, where it’s easier to use technology. And it goes from a build to order to a built to forecast business. And that’s going to really accelerate the pace of what we’re doing.

Jim Ricchiuti

That makes sense. And how is the a – culturally, putting the two companies together, how is that working out? And so it’s always a little tricky, especially when you’re competing in something…

Ric Fulop

I mean, it’s really interesting. I had a sales guy this morning from ExOne that was visiting, is a really wonderful guy. And then he used to tell people that our stuff was all hype, and that – and then I brought it. We were in a room with a machine actually doing printing in three seconds per layer. And it’s like, I can’t believe this stuff was really real. We all believe, you don’t see it on the other side. But the – you do actually throw mud at each other when you’re competitors. But now that we’re under the same house. It’s actually quite nice to have so much expertise around this technology.

I think we’re by far the leading company in the world in terms of production and printing capability across the polymers or metals or casting or the different applications. And when you look at our competitors, they’re still focused on tooling or jigs and fixtures or much not really high volume production.

So I think that’s what we’re a pure play and have the best position. And I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve built a fantastic real customer portfolio and helping. We’ve got parts in leading rocket engines. We got parts in flying in helicopters. We’ve got lots of engagement in automotive. If you buy a luxury watch from many of the major brands, it’s probably been printed with our technology.

So we’re seeing broad adoption across the board. And printing is just one way to make parts, but it has many benefits. And I think, today is 0.1% of all parts made. If we get to $150 billion, it’ll be 1% of the way people make parts. So I think we’ve got like a 20, 30-year, there’s no reason it can’t be 5% or 6%, or 10%. And so we’ve got a long arc of growth ahead of us. And things happen slow, slow, and then all of a sudden.

So I think we do – I think 25% compounding is very doable, and we look forward to continue to grow. We’ve grown triple-digit in the last year, and we expect to continue that this year to have significant growth. And so I think we – we’re excited about our – I mean, I couldn’t be more excited about our future. I see all our indicators are for all our KPIs are green.

So we have expanded – expanding margins on a quarter-by-quarter basis. Growing customer base, we have a, let’s say, a handful five or six applications with hyperscalers that just one of them hits. It’s like blows the barn doors out of our plans. So I’m really excited about the position that our business is in at the moment.

Jim Ricchiuti

This is a slide that you have right showing right now. I mean, if we think about the market verticals, your positioning in these markets, particularly with respect to some of the acquisitions you’ve done, where do you see the biggest growth opportunities over the next year, you seem pretty excited by not only next year, but beyond in dental? What – if you were to rank order some of these market verticals, what are you most excited by in the next one, two years?

Ric Fulop

Healthcare is super exciting. The healthcare is supporting our customers there. Consumer electronics, we’ve got some really exciting things happening there. And they are fast cycles. So – and then we see broad adoption in oil and gas and heavy industry surprised when you see the parts that people are making for this technology. And then in order, we have a lot of stuff that’s in the pipeline, that’s shaping up nicely.

So I’m – those are the major segments that we see. Then, obviously, aerospace, we have stuff happening, but it’s just not – aerospace is not as big of a market as consumer electronics are as what we can. So even though we have great stuff happening there, that used to be where people used to say, “Oh, I mean, 3D printing, and despite us to be honest, because that’s the only people who could afford this type of stuff like that.

So – but it’s not a big market, when you compare it to, let’s say, consumer electronics. So, the market – we have great adoption there, but one account, one hyperscale and consumer electronics dwarfs, what you could do in our stuff.

Jim Ricchiuti

And the company has still has a fairly strong cash position, I think, it was over $400 million at the end of September. How do we – how should investors be thinking about M&A going forward? Is it still an area that very much of focus? What…

Ric Fulop

We modulate it. I don’t like where our share price is. So we don’t – we modulate things depending on where we are and depending on what we’re doing, right? So I think we moved aggressively when our price share price was up much higher, so to get some particular deals done. But I would say, we usually don’t talk about M&A before we do something. We want to do it afterwards. But what we demonstrate is one of the things that we do, we are financially driven and strategically driven. And I can say that with the exception of the things that are like buying a technical competence, like what we’ve done, for example, in the case of Aerosint, which is a small acquisition or things like that. We have tried to do things that that are accretive or that we believe are accretive. And I think it’s going to pay out that way, when you look in the rearview mirror in a couple of years.

Jim Ricchiuti

And maybe finally, we can wind this down. But I’m curious as you’ve been on this journey, as a public company, you clearly have a long-term growth strategy. At the same time, you just alluded to. I mean, what do you think investors I think may not be as well understood by investors in terms of what you’re trying to do with the company?

Ric Fulop

I think that many investors don’t understand what’s the difference between the products that we’ve got, or the products that our competitors have. And what is it that they don’t – there’s seven different types of printing platforms, whether it’s extrusion-based printers, or binder jetting, or other approaches like that. And even in the resin in the photopolymer space, there’s like stereolithography and the LP.

And I think that what’s unique about our company is, we’re 100% around mass production at high volume, whereas these other companies that are publicly traded are focused on technologies that are not area wide, high throughput printing. And so they have to be searching for applications that are effective in a particular niche, whereas we’ve got a very broad base.

We’re competitive versus conventional manufacturing in a broad base of applications. And so our growth is faster for that reason. And we expect it to be more organic for that reason. And then we’ve got up – if people don’t understand what we’re doing in the dental space with the enabling chairside, which is a key growth driver of the business. And $30 billion worth of parts that are made today by labs that go to dentist, they’re going to be printable, and we are putting the pieces together on the dental side to be able to support the design requirements that a dentist has, when they operate at a chairside printer. You need to have somebody to execute that. And you need to have somebody that is able to essentially provide a finished solution. It is – you take a lab that is fully on printing, it’s twice as profitable as one that is analog, which is an amazing stat. And you can provide much faster turnaround then a – if you were outsourcing your parts to China or Vietnam, or making them by hand, you can have a much faster turnaround with printing with better material properties. So it’s unstoppable, in my opinion, what’s going to happen there and there’ll be consolidation in that segment in the, I think, adoption of the technology as a result, so.

Jim Ricchiuti

Great. I think we’re going to have to end it there, Ric. Thanks very much for spending some time this afternoon with us.

Ric Fulop

Awesome, Jim. It’s always a pleasure and come and visit. Visit you soon.

Jim Ricchiuti

I will. Thank you.

Ric Fulop

Okay.

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