All right, thanks everyone for joining us. My name is Troy Jensen, Managing Director at Cantor. With me today is the CEO of 3D Systems, Jeff Graves. Jeff, thanks for making it. Maybe give us a quick background of yourself and then 3D Systems, for those that don't know you already.
Sure, thanks, Troy, and thanks for the invitation. I always appreciate being here. My name is Jeff Graves. I've been the CEO of 3D Systems since 2020. I spent most of my career prior to that at General Electric and then leading other technology companies. 3D Systems, marvelous company, we're one of the leaders in 3D printing technology. We develop our own printers, materials, software, bring them together for advanced applications. Our founder actually invented 3D printing back in the early 1980s, Chuck Hull, and is still going strong at this point in his career. His next endeavor is the printing of human organs. As he's leading that activity, amazing guy who's been recognized internationally for all of his contributions to mankind and obviously to the economy of the United States. Pleasure to be here and very happy to talk about the business.
Yeah, thanks. For those that don't know, I've actually been following 3D Systems for 20 years, so I know it pretty well. It's been quite a turnaround of your leadership after the prior CEOs. Quickly, a fun topic here to start with. Any quick thoughts on the Vikings quarterback situation?
I was proud last year to say I thought they'd have a good season last year.
You did right away, and I challenged you.
Sam Darnold led the charge there. I guess he's gone on to greener pastures now. We'll see a new, hopefully a new quarterback that's healthy this year coming up through the ranks. Hopefully they'll have a good season, Troy.
A quick question for you. Jets, Giants, Chick-fil-A employees, what do they have in common?
No idea.
None of them work on Sunday.
I like that one. That's a good one.
I really hope they had a bigger crowd of New York fans here.
I particularly appreciate that because my second favorite team's the Eagles. That's good. That's a good one. That's a good one.
All right, so let's dive in. I know you guys just got back from the LAB DAY conference in Chicago. It is a big, big dental conference. I have unfortunately never been there, and I could not last week when it was recently. Just give us an update on what happened there. I mean, Align is a big customer. I know they slowed down in 2023, 2024, right? They are back now. You guys had a nice big contract. Let's just start with dental.
Dental's an amazing field. I would tell you just broadly, dentistry is all turning to 3D printing. In the past, most of dental products have been handmade and machined. 3D printing technology between the printing technology and the materials and the software controls has gotten to the point of being able to make products very quickly, very cost-effectively for use in your mouth. You saw the trend of that start with the Invisalign product with Align, very successful for straightening of teeth. We participated with them in the inventing of that process. I've been a long-term supplier to them, marvelous company, really helped change the dental industry. It's tip of the iceberg. The reason I was at LAB DAY is a kind of a funny name. It's a conference, the biggest conference in the United States for dental technology.
You see everybody there, all small companies, large companies like Align, everyone's there. We break dentistry into four categories, and we've got active programs in all of them now given the state of the technology. One is for straightening of teeth. Straightening, protection, meaning night guards to protect what teeth you have in your mouth. Folks are living longer, so the protection aspect's more and more important. Repairing teeth as you have cavities. Not many people in the U.S. have cavities anymore, but crowns and other implants. Complete replacement, dentures. That last market is actually, given the aging population, one of the most exciting growth markets that we face. If you think of Aligners as a 3D printing company, the available market in Aligners for products that are supplied today is about $125 million by our estimates.
We have a meaningful percentage of that business, and it's growing. If you look at protection and repair, they're equivalent size markets. If you look at dentures, actually, complete replacement of teeth, it's about 4x that size. That's why we're excited about this. We can make monolithic dentures, one-piece dentures, teeth and gums together, and virtually make them overnight now. That technology's just hitting the market in the next year or so. We're excited about the product offerings. We've gone through the FDA approvals. LAB DAY was a chance to show all of that. There's another big conference in Europe coming up at the end of March called IDS, biggest international show for dentistry. Never thought as a kid you'd be excited about talking about dentures, but there it is. Maybe I'm just aging.
No, it's exciting to see a whole industry start converting toward 3D printing. I think it'll be a model for many industries to follow.
Can you just remind us about the Align partnership and the new contract that you guys signed not too long ago?
We have been a key supplier to Align for many, many years as they have grown globally now. Many people's lives have been touched by that product, either yourself, your kids, maybe you are young enough, maybe your parents, but a lot of folks, especially coming out of COVID. We have been a long-term supplier of printing technology and materials, consumables for that for them. Last year, we signed a five-year contract with them for the supply of materials for their printers worldwide. We just finished the first year of that contract. It has four to go. There are more and more participants coming in that market every day. They have a great business. They have a super business model. Undoubtedly, they will face competition. They have a strong focus on cost with us to continue to bring the cost of Aligners down.
The evolution there will be today, it's called an indirect method. You print a mold and you form plastic over it. That mold is basically customized to match your mouth and where your teeth are going. In the future, the trend will be to direct print those Aligners. You avoid the mold altogether and you direct print them to match your mouth. You can do it faster. You can move teeth. In principle, you can move them further because you can customize the thickness of the Aligner. Today, there's a limit on how far you can move teeth with each one of the Aligners. With direct printing, it offers the capability to move teeth further and further encroach on the old-fashioned wire system that people still wear.
Right, okay. I think the Align contract, was it $250 million?
Yeah, largest contract in the company's history, a quarter billion dollars over five years.
Yeah, five years. To me, I think that was just material sales.
Material sales.
That has nothing to do with hardware sales, so.
Correct, right.
With respect to that direct printing of aligners, I've been told that the material pricing could be the biggest gating factor.
Yeah, it's likely to be a more exotic material because it has more performance characteristics. It still is clear. It's got to be strong and tough to last in your mouth. The idea there is to customize the thickness and the material properties to move teeth further. It addresses a different and maybe larger segment of the market that's still dominated by wire braces. The debate will be how much does it encroach on the indirect method, the current method versus opening up a new piece of the market. My guess, Troy, is it'll do both. It'll consume some of the current market, but it'll also open up new markets for that application.
All the materials are ready, FDA approved.
We're working our way through that right now. Yeah, the material, the challenge there, quite frankly, has been the materials development. We're working our way through that and going through, as you might guess, there's a lot of testing that's required in order to pass FDA approval for something you have to wear in your mouth. We're working our way through that process. It's always a tedious process, but one that's good for consumers to make sure everything's safe in your mouth. Especially dentistry, there's low barriers to enter from a printer standpoint, but you don't want to put unknown materials in your mouth for a long period of time. The FDA approval part of it is very important.
Yep, okay, perfect. How about just the straighten, protect, repair, replace? When do you think those are going to start hitting the income statement?
Yeah, so they should enter. We'll just go step by step. Protection, meaning night guards, they'll still be clear in large part, although where cosmetic taste will go, I mean, maybe people will want fluorescent night guards in the future. I have no idea. Wherever it goes, we'll be ready to do that. That's probably the easiest technologically to get through. We're working our way through FDA right now. We have a partner in Glidewell that we're launching that product with, major dental lab, national and even international for Aligners. Those are for night guards. Those will enter the market over the next 12 months. Dentures are already FDA approved. We have a brand new printer coming out this summer, which will largely cater to local dental labs and even chairside for more adventuresome dentists that want to print these in the back room.
That will hit the market and hit the P&L, I would guess, by year end. The repair aspect is just incrementally growing over time. They're already in the market, so it'll incrementally grow. I would expect, looking at our company, the fastest growing segment over the next 24 months will be dentistry.
Okay, awesome. It's going to be easy to outgrow industrial here since I've been struggling so much, but anyway.
There is that. The bar is pretty low .
All right, let's talk production.
By the way, great teeth, Troy. That's good. You may need to protect them. Make sure. Get those night guards.
All right, production versus prototyping. Can you talk about the significance for additive in production?
Yeah. Yeah, so it's a very interesting transition in our industry. You've been following this industry for a long time, Troy, the transition from focusing on prototypes. Prototyping has become very easy, but prototype labs in any business are usually run by engineers, degreed engineers, often with advanced degrees. They'll print prototypes for showing off designs and even functional fitting. That's still a market. It's still growing and everything. The real volume applications and the future of this industry, I believe, is in production applications. In that, it's a completely different sale, a completely different customer base, even within the same customer. If you take a large industrial company and make up your own name, a large industrial company, they've been buying printers for the lab for a long time for prototyping. Now in a factory, different customer.
You've got a factory manager whose job depends on keeping production flowing every day of the week. What he cares about is not only precision, the ability to make a part, make it reliably, reproducibly, make sure it's serviced, make sure it can be run by technicians without engineering degrees. Simplistically, a big red button and a green button. Hit the green button, make parts, make sure every machine runs the same. For our industry, reproducibility, as simple as that sounds, has been a challenge. Making sure every machine runs the same way. Make sure the interface with the human is simple. Those are all design challenges initially and then sales challenges. Basically, we spend most of our design money now. Now that machines are precise, we spend more and more money on reproducibility, repeatability in the machines, making sure they're all the same.
We insourced production over the last two years completely to take control of the quality of the machines because they're going in factories around the world. From a sales standpoint, our sales engineers teaching companies about the application of 3D printing, not how the process works. Customers don't care anymore about how the process works. It's a machine. They want to treat it as a black box by and large. They just want to know it can make parts reproducibly and well. Our sales folks are telling them how that's done, how it affects their business rather than how it's done behind the scenes. It's changing the nature of the business. The payoff will be not only machine sales, but large volumes of consumables and large service revenue.
To compete in that market, you've got to be good in materials development or partnerships to do materials development. You've got to have a really good service organization, either directly or through your channel partners, to make sure those machines run every single day. Our technology produces over 1 million parts a day that are 3D printed, more than this entire industry combined. We can support that because of our service team, fundamentally.
Yep, yep. I always say, if you think about Align, they're a 25% customer for you guys, right? They disrupted the Aligner business. I mean, we should have dozens of 10% customers across the industry, and we just don't yet. This consistency, repeatability, never really heard the service side, but you're absolutely right. If you're doing production, if something breaks down, they need to know that you're there the next day, the next hour fixing.
Exactly. You even think about dentistry, like a dentist's office. If a dentist is going to print parts, he doesn't care how the machine works, but it's got to be available because he wants the patient to walk out the door and have a new denture, having a liner in their hand when they walk out the door. It's a big sales tool for them.
Yep. Do you have any estimates on what percentage of your sales are production versus prototyping?
Oh, it's shifting quickly, Troy. I would tell you at least three quarters of our sales now, probably more, are production related.
Oh, really? Wow.
Yeah, it's shifting fast. Frankly, we're only focusing now on applications that, when they take off, could be 10% type customers for us. So $100 million kind of customers. Those are the ones that we want. We want to pick the application in the market so that if it takes off, if we're successful, it has that potential. Now, all of them won't work, but we want to pick them that way.
Right, that makes sense. It's interesting, I suppose, if you put dental and all that customized healthcare, right, that's 40%+ of your business, of Leigh, and then whatever industrial is production, so.
Right.
All right, so speaking of customized healthcare, it's been extremely strong for you guys and actually most of the industry. Is it sustainable? Can you talk about the bigger applications for you guys?
Yeah, we have been, so by healthcare, for us, it's orthopedics. And that's literally printing personalized bone replacements, if you will. So helping surgeons perform the surgery faster and better for the patient and then providing replacement parts, if you will, for the skeleton. It's been a great business for us. We've been focused really above the neck, so cranial, facial, maxilla, it's called, so all the bones above your neck. We've been very good in planned surgeries. We work with surgeons directly to plan the surgery so that when the patient's on the table, they can get them in and out fast. Now more and more the replacement parts for the bone structure. We've got the cycle time down now where we've moved into trauma.
If a patient's in a car accident, one growth vector for us has been moving from planned surgeries to emergency surgeries to trauma, again, focusing above the neck. The big growth area for us, because we're so dominant above the neck and in the spine, the big growth areas are for the other joints of the body, fundamentally. We just moved into ankles, ankle surgery, ankle replacement. In the past, that's largely been done with slow operations, and the parts come from cadavers, largely from cadavers. Now you can 3D print the elements. You can 3D print the elements to make the surgery go fast for productivity. Now we're moving through the other joints of the body: knees, hips, shoulders, elbows. Those kind of replacements, great growth trajectory and a really specialized business and a large market. It's terrific. We're big in the U.S.
We're growing in Europe. We'll continue to grow in those markets.
Yep, so I'm surprised knees weren't bigger than above the neck.
Yeah, it's interesting, Troy. It is the bigger opportunity, but the cost competition for those joints has been high because what they've done is they make a library of parts, and it's an off-the-shelf product. As you think about it, everyone in this room's knee is different. Everyone has different needs for their knee, right? A surgeon is forced to take part A, B, or C off the shelf, the closest one that fits you, and use it. Now, with 3D printing becoming faster and less expensive, you can customize a knee joint or an elbow joint. The market's bigger. It was a tougher price point to get to, but now we're able to do it, and we've got the materials. There's special wear materials.
Right, I was going to say that.
It has to work. We can print those materials now, and the cost has come down where more and more of your bones and your body will be customized replacements rather than generic replacements.
Yep, yep, interesting. All right, you kind of touched on this a little bit, but when you go from planned surgeries to emergency surgeries, point of care is where these products need to be. Can you talk about just the point of care market for additive?
Yeah, it's interesting. The first pressure wave as a supplier to that market is do it fast, but still do it from a distance because it's hard to do. Do it from a distance. As you mentioned, Troy, the ideal situation is where the hospital could print it, where somebody could print it in the emergency room. We've got for cranial replacements, we've got a printer now that can go in the surgery. It's a sterile environment for printing. You can print this special polymer, medical polymer called PEEK, PEEK medical grade PEEK, for somebody's head that's been in a car accident, for example. We've moved polymer printing largely into the hospital capability-wise. The interesting thing is the FDA hasn't approved hospitals as a production site. We have an approved production site in our case in Denver, but the hospital isn't approved for production.
Oh, interesting.
They don't know how to get approved for production. There aren't many rules around that. It's kind of a work in progress. Ideally, you move your source of supply closer to the surgeon. It's on-demand printing in that case. We'll support that transition however we need to.
Yep. How about talk about insurance reimbursement for additive?
Yeah, it's absolutely critical. We started life, and this was an acquisition years ago, in medical modeling. You make a model for a surgeon to use to, number one, show the patient, for example, if you have a heart defect, you can take a little model apart. You can print it, the exact defect that you have in your heart. I'm sorry to be pointing at you. You look healthy. You have a model of a defective heart. You can take it apart, show a patient the problem, and the surgeon can plan the surgery. That's medical modeling. Generally, that's not reimbursable. As you might imagine, hospitals work on razor-thin margins. It's not really very positive to go in and do things that aren't reimbursed by insurance companies.
What we've been able to do is now do much more of the modeling on a computer, which is fast and easy. You take a CT scan, and you can manipulate it, take it apart, put it together, all that. Then we just print the replacement. We just print the surgical aid and the replacement. Modeling, because it's non-reimbursable, is kind of phasing out as a tool versus computer-generated animation and then the actual printing. When you choose to go into a market, you must choose it in order to be reimbursed. You have to understand a regulatory environment and the insurance environment, which most companies in our space haven't really thought about until they get into it. You can spend a lot of money going down a trail that's not reimbursable. Technically, it works, and you're never reimbursed for it.
We try to be smart about picking applications and methods of supply that are reimbursable for an insurance company.
Which ones are today? Are there?
Well.
You're not working on all of them.
None of the major ones that we work on, yeah. That's why we've kind of phased out our modeling work to a large extent because it was becoming onerous for people to pay for it and moved into the actual work on the body. That required the technology to get to that level where you could actually do body replacement parts. Of course, the exciting extension of that is actually printing, moving from bones, which are simple by comparison to human tissue, up to and including organ replacement. If you look out on the horizon, that's what's coming is we're working on bones now. We've got a lot of nice organic growth, organic growth through FDA approvals to get through the joints of the body.
The next phase of our evolution will be working then on human organs, human tissue to replace the rest of your body. That is where we are headed. Sounds kind of Star Trek, all I'm doing is, but so much so that when I first got to 3D, I did not pay any attention to it for about six months. I thought, "This is crazy stuff. We are never going to be able to print." It actually works. It actually is true. It is actually on the roadmap, and it will come someday.
Okay. All right, so if you go back kind of post-COVID, reshoring, nearshoring was a really hot theme. I know talking to just the channel, the resellers, that these guys were telling me that they're having higher-level conversations with C-level executives, really starting to think about reshoring and nearshoring production into the U.S. Then it was rates went up and inflation, and we had the war and whatnot, recession. Now we've got tariffs, right, to deal with. Just your thoughts on just tariffs and is this whole reshoring, nearshoring theme going to pick up again?
I didn't check the news this morning. I'm not sure who we're tariffing today. Clearly, moving production closer to the use, we talk about hospitals, moving production closer to the use source is always a good thing. You reduce logistics costs, you reduce complexity, you have more control. It also addresses tariffs and things when you move closer to home. From a use standpoint, an import of the actual things from a printer, for example, making it close to the source gets around that. Now, where you make the actual device is an issue. Sometimes you get some, I won't even say if we got lucky or smart, but we insourced production into the U.S. over the last two years. Virtually all of our polymer printers are made in the United States today, down in South Carolina, great place to assemble products.
Some of the supply still comes from overseas and different places of parts. But the assembly operations and many of the parts are US-based now. So we're insulated from tariffs. Tariffs can help from a sales standpoint because there's a lot of Chinese exports that's trying to work its way into the States, quite frankly. So tariffs could help the sales situation. From a supply chain situation, it's going to drive up cost, undoubtedly, no matter where the parts come from. So the more you can source locally in the States, the better for us. So we have a factory in Europe. We have a larger factory here in the States. So for us, tariffs are less of a concern and potentially a benefit for the industry. It's very company-specific. A lot of folks still outsource manufacturing. It can be outsourced in Asia and elsewhere.
Frank, I'd be concerned about that. We've gotten around it now because we've insourced things. I would tell you, we did it for quality reasons, not for tariff reasons. As it worked out, it was fortuitous.
Right. As far as your customers then, I mean, have you heard anything yet? Is it too early for a tariffs conversation?
No, it's very interesting. I think conceptually, everybody thinks, "Okay, moving stuff closer to the use." Most of our revenue comes out of the U.S. and Europe now. Making things closer to those or in those countries or areas is a really good thing. For customers, though, they often have plants around the world. They're very concerned about where they spend capital now. It's basically just as the election was behind us, all this stuff, and we had hopes that everything would settle down and everybody would spend money that they hadn't spent in a couple of years on production capacity. I think now there's a bit of a headwind of people saying, "I don't know where to spend it." If they have factories in multiple sites around the world, where do they actually spend the capital for capacity because of the tariff risk?
Hopefully, a transient concern because I do think they're going to need the capacity. It's now a question of timing.
Right. Your comment too, if they establish production capabilities geographically, typically they get depreciation cycles, right? They need to depreciate those assets over the life of the asset. It is hard for them to just stop and move to new technology until.
Yeah, it's hard. It takes time. It really does take time. 3D printing is going to get there. It's going to have its place in the world. In factories, it just takes time to get there.
Yep. Okay. Let's talk industry consolidation. Been a hot topic for a long time. I mean, your product portfolio is fairly expansive. Is there anything that you're missing technology-wise or anything on your radar?
Just bits- and- bobs, Troy. For us personally, it's a blessing and a curse. We have the broadest technology portfolio in the industry: hardware, software, materials. Even just looking at hardware, printers alone, we have five different polymer printing platforms, and we have the leading metal printing technology inherently as well. Most of our growth capability can be through organic growth, through organic R&D investment. We don't need the seeds of technology very much. Opportunistically, there may be bits and pieces that make sense for us to bring on either because of the technology or because of the customer base. We don't need any acquisitions in order to fuel our technological expansion. From a scale standpoint, we've got the scale we need. It's a matter of focus. It's a matter of picking our spots, making sure we can service those customers and growing.
Broadly on consolidation, for us and for at least one or maybe more of our competitors, they've probably got the scale they need from an overall mass standpoint, like a service team, all of that. Some of them need more technology infusion than we do. I feel good about our position there. Some are owned by large parent companies. If they choose to invest, they can. If not, they won't. Does the industry need consolidation? I think the smaller players do. I don't think it's sustainable with current sales levels. For the larger players like ourselves, I think it's a matter of focus more than consolidation, quite frankly.
Fair. Yeah, I do say, and we talked about this at the MS conference a month or so back, but hardware acquisitions are tough. For the most part, it's really hard to pinpoint someone who's done a hardware acquisition that it worked and it was accretive and it hit their expectations. My question for you is, do we really need to merge and acquire all these companies, or should we just let them fall by the wayside? If you remember at that conference on that panel, Max made that conversation that if you just let 20% of the smaller guys kind of go away, that revenue gets kind of redistributed amongst the rest of the players. Do we need more mergers and acquisitions?
He was brutally frank on that comment. Yeah. No, no, that's right. I think either that technology needs to, it can benefit from finding a home somewhere. Does that happen by them just going out of business and the technology getting picked up somewhere or not? That's fine. I mean, they can. The way it's headed, it seems that way. Like a lot of the smaller players are just going to go under and go away, and then that business will be redistributed. Technically, they all started for a reason. So they all have a little technology kernel or more that has some value. I'm guessing that technology finds its way somewhere, but maybe not being purchased as a whole company.
Yeah, so that it would be helpful if that revenue, because the overall revenues aren't growing a lot right now, it would be helpful if that was redistributed. It sounds kind of brutal, but yeah, that's the way capitalism works. That's fine. For us, it's a matter of focus. We've spent a lot on R&D in the last few years. When I arrived in 2020, we needed a refresh on the portfolio, and I think we've largely gotten there with what we spend and what we're spending. We need a hard focus on cost, make sure we get our footprint down, make sure we can afford the sustaining R&D, and then the sales and service cost. That's it. We've got the mass we need. It's more getting the footprint down and getting some cost out of the business.
Yep. Okay. Can you talk about the Hexagon acquisition? I know you guys just, when is it closed? Just remind us of the details.
When I arrived in 2020, in 2021, we sold a lot of non-3D printing assets, and we put that cash on the balance sheet. I held on to this Geomagic software, which is a reverse engineering software. It was a great asset, and arguably it related to 3D printing. It was a reverse engineering software, and it was not painful to own. Were we the rightful owner of it? Hexagon came along and approached us to buy that software. That software is often packaged with laser scanners for reverse engineering. They are a great owner of the technology. We had a long conversation, and it was a great outcome for our employees to sell the business to them, a great outcome for their business. It needed to be approved in three countries. We got it through two of them now. It is working its way through the States.
I expect no impediments to getting that deal closed. It's timed at the end of Q1, roughly. If the administration changed, I'd guess end of Q1 up through May, we'll close that deal. $123 million of cash coming in for us before taxes. It'll be taxed down a bit, but then we'll put that cash on the balance sheet, take care of some debt, and make sure we've got cash in the bank to sustain any investments we need to do.
Yep. Yep. What timing of closing? When did you say?
End of Q1 up through, I'd say, the latest kind of May-ish timeframe, end of March to May-ish.
Okay. Perfect. How about just lastly, just the industrial business for you guys has been the big challenge, right? I mean, I get it, CapEx dollars, it's all been deferred, but when do you think it turns? What's going to turn it? Just kind of an update on industrial stuff.
How are the Vikings going to do in 2025?
Let's go back to an easy question.
That's it. When do people start spending money again? On capital equipment, it's such a mixed bag. You all see this in the newspaper. You read it, and the economy feels okay. As a consumer, it feels okay. Planes are still pretty full and everything else, but there's so much change in the world. Companies, like people, need to plan their investments for a significant period of time and then make them. In companies, it's even probably harder than your personal situation. They have to be very thoughtful about all these geopolitical considerations and things when they invest capital. It takes a long time. When the environment's changing this fast, it's hard to predict. I think things just need to settle down a little bit. The demand is there, and they have the cash.
If there's no more wars, even if they settle this one or at least it calms down, these calm down. If the discussion just cools off on the changing tariff dynamic and stuff, I think then you'll see an inflow. Nowhere in there did I give you a date. I'm hoping 2025, I'm hoping 2025. Again, we haven't released earnings. We usually give an outlook for the year when we release earnings. I think if you just look at the tea leaves, you'd say 2025 should be a good stable year. It could be an up year. I'd be foolhardy to say it's going to be a tremendous year. I also think there's good outlook for stability and hopefully a little bit of growth over time. Then 2026 and beyond, like everything over the horizon, you think it's going to be great.
I do think the long-term prospects for growth in our industry are tremendous. I'd still peg it, if you pick your markets, high single digit, low double digit in an environment that maybe macro is growing faster than that, but you can make money and target high-value markets and grow organically at high single, low double digits. It'll return to that. I don't think 2025 is going to be that kind of a growth year, but I do think, and it could be, it really could be, but I do think 2026, 2027, 2028, you're going to see more and more of these aligned kind of customers coming up for our industry. Hopefully we'll capture a reasonable percentage of that.
Yeah, I agree. It's like this whole production applications, I mean, there's just so much we could do to date that we haven't yet. It seems like there's a lot of pent-up demand for this stuff.
Reliability's up, costs are coming down. It's a very attractive, flexible technique. It's going to be used. It's a matter of timing.
Yep. You guys got like a minute left. Any questions in the audience?
Was that a question?
Yeah, she was, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Just in the dental space, why is it just Align? I mean, there's other Aligner companies.
Yes.
Why have you not been able to, you know, is there exclusivity that you've given to Align, or what's the reason why others?
We worked with them to develop a process years ago. They've been the dominant player in the industry. Like every industry, when it starts maturing, you get other competitors coming in, you get other players coming in. Even from a supply chain standpoint, as they get bigger, they're going to want other suppliers for their technology products. I think it's a natural evolution. When they were kind of the sole player in all of that, they were the dominant guy. When you've got them as a customer, that's your focus. As they mature now and others come into the market, I think our scope certainly broadens, and I'm sure their supply scope over time broadens too. It's just the way things work. Yes, will we be cultivating other customers in the Aligner business? Absolutely, 100%.
How fast that'll occur and things just depend on the evolution of the market. This changing technology to direct printing, I think, again, that's going to change the playing field a little bit. You may see some new players coming in, things like that. There's new opportunities for growth there as well.
Maybe one just on financials. What level of revenue do you need to consistently break even or to still cost down for your company?
Yeah. Great question. No, great question. I would tell you, even at this revenue level, we can make money. We have to get cost out of our business. I'll give you an example. We were a company built up by acquisitions largely. We had a good core, but a lot of acquisitions. We're consolidating those now, and you'll see a pretty aggressive program in 2025 and 2026 for us to get our cost down, our footprint simplified, all of that work done. We insourced manufacturing, so now we can streamline supply chain activity. That's our big focus right now. We've had a big R&D focus for the last couple of years. You'll see a shifting to cost. My goal is at this sales level to be able to be profitable and have positive free cash flow within the next couple of years. Okay?
You'll hear more about that as we talk going forward. There's some investment required to get there, but that's the focus for us is at this scale making money.
When you give the outlook, you'll basically give these cost sort of outlooks.
Yeah. So we'll.
What sort of sustainable, if revenue was flat, because your stock basically discounts no growth at the moment, stock price, so at this level of sales, what sort of EBIT margin do you think once you basically get all the costs you want to get out?
Gross, I'll start with gross margin. Gross margins today are 40-ish %. I think those can trend upward to 50%, especially as these production volumes come on. You get a richer consumable revenue stream. Gross margins can trend up to 50%, and some are doing 50% already today in isolated pockets. That is very attainable. If we get just a nice normal incremental lift in gross margins over the next decade from an OpEx standpoint, OpEx we can bring down. SG&A, absolutely, certainly G&A as we integrate acquisitions, things like this. We get our G&A structure down. R&D has certainly stabilized. We can probably streamline even that a little bit more. You'll see gross margins just gradually trending up. You'll see EBITDA margins swing pretty quickly as some of the footprint consolidation, the operating costs come down, reflected both in COGS and in OpEx. Okay?
That combination, and I'm not going to give our formal outlook right now, but you'll see some big swings in EBITDA coming over time. Again, my goal is to get our company to positive free cash flow over the next couple of years. Okay? I think very attainable.
Is that three years?
Over a couple, I grew up in Indiana. A couple usually means two, but it could mean three in the new definition. Maybe it does. I don't know.
We got to cut it off, guys, just to be respectful of the next one. Thank you, Jeff.
Appreciate it. Thank you.