All right, everyone. Well, thank you for, for joining us for our second panel of the day, Fireside Chat, with a company I cover. I'm new to, to InMode and have had a fun time getting to know them. We have CFO, Yair Malca, with us. Thank you so much, Yair, for making the very long 30-minute drive to see us here. Maybe let's start with a brief introduction into InMode, how the product is different, how your product offering is differentiated, and your approach to R&D, sales, and marketing, all of that. What's the TAM, the competitive landscape, and we'll go from there.
Sure, Danielle.
That's a lot. That'll take 45 minutes, so
Probably. Danielle, thanks for having me. InMode is the leading aesthetic medical device company. And we also start expanding to what we call wellness in the last couple of years. Our main focus is radiofrequency based technology, and more specifically, bipolar radiofrequency, and this is an important part. We can touch about it later. Also, we focus on minimally invasive.
Mm-hmm.
What we realize is there is a huge, what we call, treatment gap between what used to be popular before InMode, which was non-invasive procedure, mainly laser based procedures, which is optical energy, non-invasive. That was one side of the spectrum, and the other option was full surgery, full facelift, for example. There was not too much solution in between. People that wanted something more substantial than the non-invasive solution with mediocre results.
Yeah.
The other end of the- the other option would be full surgery with all the downtime, 2 weeks downtime, not to mention the very high cost. We realized there's a huge gap there, and we, we tapped the, the market, basically. What we offer is minimally invasive solutions based on radiofrequency.
Mm-hmm.
It's invasive enough to penetrate the skin, go directly to the fat layer, melt the fat, the fat from the inside, for lack of a better term, and also simultaneously tighten the skin. By doing that, you basically create this significant effect. Sometimes one with the RFA technology, you need only one treatment. With the fractional RF, you need several treatments, and then you can get a significant results. Not as significant as full surgery, but we are getting close to that. And with a minimum downtime, up to 48 hours, usually we call it a weekend procedure. You can do the procedure on Friday, go back to the office on Monday. So minimum downtime, significantly less expensive than a traditional plastic surgery, full plastic surgery.
For the physician, they can do it in their office under local anesthesia, unlike full surgery, that you have to do in the operating room, in the hospital, you know, pay for another physician to come and do the anesthesia. So in terms of ROI for them, it's actually a good, a good procedure for them.
Yeah. Yeah. Just to be clear, I think one of the unique benefits of your technology is the tightening component-
Yeah
of this as well, versus just the melting of the fat, because that's very important. Is that right?
Uh-
That's where you mimic more the full surgery type of outcome.
Exactly. Correct. I'm sure we'll talk about it also later, but tightening the skin is a big thing of what we do, and it's important. Killing fat is one thing, and there's several ways to do that, but once you get rid of fat, you end up with loose skin.
Yep.
This is where, tightening the skin and contracting soft tissues, is very important.
Yeah. Okay. Just curious how you see InMode evolving over the next few years. I mean, you are an aesthetics company, but you've talked a lot about wellness. I would just love to hear at a high level, we'll dig into this deeper in a little bit, but just at a high level, how you see the company evolving.
First of all, we are an aesthetic company. We don't forget for 1 second that we are an aesthetic company. As I mentioned, we are looking to expand our universe into more wellness. We think that wellness and aesthetic actually goes hand in hand.
Mm-hmm.
We believe, based on what we know from aesthetic, and we starting from wellness, is that there is a huge market out there, and patients are willing to pay cash, out-of-pocket, money for to look better and feel better. We start expanding to that. We started with the women's health-
Mm-hmm
We came up, and that's a good example. Again, we design a device based on radiofrequency, mainly radiofrequency. There are some other energies, but the main one is radiofrequency, because that's what we do best, to treat some traditional indication. On those devices, on those platforms, we also have several aesthetic handpieces.
Mm-hmm.
They have a handpiece that can treat SUI and pelvic floor restoration. This is classic OBGYN offering. On top of that, we also have some aesthetic. What we've seen in the space is that it's very hard for those physicians that owns a practice to grow their practice just by depending on insurance-based procedure, procedures that are covered by insurance. It's very hard because the insurance reimbursement tends to go down, rarely go up. The cost of managing their practice keep going up every year. If they really want to grow, they need to introduce some sort of a cash-based procedure to the practice, and I would argue that there's no better a cash-based procedure for them to offer than aesthetic. That was the concept.
Mm-hmm.
What we've seen after 1 year in, in the field, we went to run some statistics and, and saw that EmpowerRF owner-- EmpowerRF is our women's health platform. EmpowerRF owners, on every vaginal tip that they order, consumable, they order 2 aesthetic tips, either for the face or for the body. We see that it's actually happening in, in, in real life. A patient would come to get a vaginal procedure done, and OBGYN, at least the, the ones that know what they are doing, and on average, we see that many of them do, are able to upsell an aesthetic procedure, so... or even 2, because, you know, there are a lot of body parts-
Mm-hmm.
-that can get treated, so they treat... They, they do the vaginal treatment and then start treating other areas, tummy, face, et cetera. We see that that happen in, in real life. Our next offering would be to ophthalmology. We started with a soft launch in Q2 in the US. Before that, we, we launched the product in, in Canada. We got really great feedback from both ophthalmologists and optometrists. Same concept. We are gonna have two handpieces to treat dry eye. One is based on IPL, and one is based on RF, bipolar radiofrequency. Again, just to mention, our founders came from the traditional laser optical industry. They... We, we have lasers, we have IPL, we have all of, all those.
It's not the focus of what we do, just because this market is saturated, and we believe radio frequency is a much more effective way to go. We also have those IPL and laser technologies whenever we need to use them. We have two handpieces, one with IPL, one with radio frequency, specifically for dry eye.
Mm-hmm.
On the same device, we also have a fractional RF handpiece to treat periorbital wrinkles. With the IPL handpiece that they treat the dry eye. They can actually treat the entire face, treat rosacea. Or, or, like, brown spots, take care of brown spots. We believe, and again, that's something that we are testing right now, same, same thing with the OBGYN. Patients that will come to the ophthalmologist to get treated with dry eye, the ophthalmologist would be able to upsell them. We tell them, "Okay, we got take care of the dry eye. Let's take care of the wrinkles here. Let's take care of maybe full fractional RF treatment from the face." We give them this option as well.
By doing that, we are attracting more players into, into the aesthetic plus wellness world.
Yes.
That's why we believe it goes hand in hand together. Next thing would be some solution for snoring, for ENT, probably in the end of, towards the end of next year. We will try to come up with a platform for ENT. Same concept, we'll have one or two handpieces specifically for ENT, traditional procedures, take care of snoring, turbinate reduction, et cetera. We also will have some aesthetic, couple of aesthetic handpieces on that device.
Mm-hmm.
By doing that, we will attract more to, to, to the aesthetic plus wellness. We believe, same as we saw with, we learned from aesthetic, people will be willing to pay cash to get to treat the snoring, to treat the dry eye, to improve the, the wellness.
Mm-hmm.
overall. I think that would be a win-win situation for, for us, for the physician and for the patient.
Okay. Still very much an aesthetics company, but very much also expanding the treating physician population through both the wellness and the aesthetics.
Yes. Definitely during this time, I just mentioned the product that, a wellness, focused on wellness, but we are going to launch also aesthetic, like pure aesthetic products.
Sure.
We don't forget that.
Yes
... about aesthetic. That's our bread and butter. That's where we came from. In the next probably 12 to 18 months, we are going to refresh our entire aesthetic product portfolio. Some of our legacy products are due for some refreshments and upgrades, and that would come probably in the next 12 to 18 months.
Actually, I wanna While we're on that topic, since we already went there, let's maybe talk about the pipeline and where the focus is. When you say, you know, refreshing the existing products, what is the focus? Is it, is it on improving outcome? Like, you know, maybe talk about what the focus is when upgrading the product portfolio.
So each product has its own upgrades that we are looking for. Definitely, we are going to stay both minimally invasive, but come up with some non-invasive procedure as well. Improve efficacy, improve safety, improve the outcome overall. Coming up with some a new way to basically melt the fat and tighten the skin simultaneously.
Mm-hmm.
That's important. That's basically the holy grail of aesthetic procedures. I don't want to get into details-
Okay.
It's still in the R&D. We are going to have something very unique, replacing or upgrading the RFAL technology, which has been our legacy technology for almost 7 years. Definitely due for a refreshment. Optimas, one of our best-selling products. We, we will update that as well. Morpheus, very popular procedure, very strong brand name. We're gonna improve the Morpheus as well. We, we keep finding ways to do it even better, even though right now it's probably the best fractional RF procedure in the market. We have some. We, we, we keep receiving feedback from the field, from the physicians we work with, and that's what's unique about our R&D team. You know, even our CTO lives here in North America, very close to the physicians community.
He keeps getting feedbacks, then go back to the back room, to the lab, and try.
Innovate.
To... Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
That makes sense. Thinking about the product portfolio, what is the right way to think about InMode's strategy for new product launches? Is it, like, once every two years? Is it once-
No, we, historically, we, we brought to the market 2 to 3 new platforms every year.
Every year?
Yes. And two, two platforms is probably will be the sweet spot for us.
Mm-hmm.
Especially if it's, brand-new technologies. So I think because more than that might be too much for our sales team as well as the, the market to, to absorb.
Yeah.
I think bringing two is, is a sweet spot. Looking at all the other players out there, they don't do anything close. They bring to the market maybe one product every three, four, five, 10 years.
Yeah. Yeah.
Then if it's a good one, they try to run with it until, until, until they hit some kind of a wall. That's exactly what we don't want.
Right
... to happen to us. That's why we understand that in order to continue to grow in aesthetic, you need to keep innovate. Even though we have a very strong product, the Morpheus8.
Mm-hmm.
We could, you know, run with this product forever, but no, we keep innovate.
Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about recent performance and how you think about top-line growth from a, you know, go-forward perspective. You know, in Q2, another 20%+ sales growth quarter. It is true, though, the last two, three years with COVID, with staffing constraints, we're not really at normalized procedure levels, just broadly speaking, in med tech overall. How would you characterize the sustainable top-line growth profile for InMode in a normalized environment, taking into account the product refreshes that you've talked about, too, every year?
Overall, the way I like to look at it is in dollars rather than percentage. We believe that going forward, we can deliver additional 70, up to 90. This year, it probably will be 90, but just to be conservative, I will go with $70 million to the top line every, every year. We would love to grow 20%, but the more we grow, this is capital equipment, and, you know, most of our revenue, 85% of our revenue is based on capital equipment. It's not easy to convince a physician to buy a $120,000 device.
Mm.
This is not a product that can go viral. This is a hard work every time. Every sale takes its own time, there's no easy sale.
Yeah.
That's why innovating is important. As long as we continue to innovate, bringing those two new products to the market and continue to grow our sales team and go direct in some countries, we definitely can achieve that.
Okay. Then, as far as the capital versus consumables mix, I definitely want to touch on that because I think you are unique in the aesthetics world...
Yeah
- given that dynamic. maybe talk about where you expect consumables as a % of revenue to go over time. you know, I think your installed base is expected to exceed 20,000 in Q3. how to think about the mix going forward of capital versus consumable?
If you look at the last couple of years, let's say 3 years ago, our consumable was only 9% of total revenue. 2 years ago, it was 11%. Last year, it was 13%. So this, this, there seems to be this pattern that we add 2 more %. This year probably will be fifteen-
15, yeah.
... 16%. I think at least 2%-3%, we should add every, every year. We are not a razor and razor blade company. We sell the devices for full price, and then sell the disposable for a very reasonable price.
Mm-hmm.
Our People would even say fairly low price. The reason for that is that we want to incentivize our physicians to offer our procedures to their patients as, as many times as possible. If the physician see a patient, and let's say the patient can pay $2,000 for a procedure, and the physician has a bag of procedures that he can offer to the patient to start with, right? If he, if on one procedure, he will need to pay to the manufacturer $700.
Yep.
like, a third of what he charges, and on our procedures, he needs to charge only or, or pay us only $100 or $200, let's say $200 on average, what would he feel more comfortable to recommend? They tend to forget that for our product, platforms, they paid full price, and the competitor, maybe they got a discount because they have, they have a, a razor blade model. They, they, they tend to forget what was the initial cost for them.
Initial, yeah.
They just look at this procedure and then don't, don't like the, the fact. They see it like the, the greedy manufacturer. He's. This is his patient, this is his, he's doing the work, and then the greedy manufacturer is coming, putting his hand into his pocket and take, take 1/3 or sometimes even 1/2.
Mm-hmm
... of, of what they are able to charge, and physicians don't like it. That's why we, we try to keep it low. But again, this is another level that we can pull if we see that, you know, we need to or there is a reason for us to start increasing that. At the beginning, as a young company, we, we wanted to take this, this cost out of consideration completely, so they just offer our procedures as much as possible. At some point, when, when we have such a strong brand name and we feel comfortable that, we've put our name out there, we can definitely start pulling some levers that we, we never pulled before.
Yeah. I mean, it makes sense if the physician's investing in the capital equipment-
Yeah
... upfront, too. It's kind of like a, a chicken-egg situation. Like, they're already invested-
Yeah
it makes sense for them to want to use-
That's also correct.
that system as much as possible, so they already have that incentive, and you're offering at a lower cost-
Yeah
... for the disposable. I actually wanted to touch on, because of the you know, you're not a razor-razor blade model.
Right.
Often it's the capital equipment that's lower growth margin, and the disposable, higher growth margin. You have one of the best financial profiles of any company in our coverage universe as it relates to operating margins. Maybe talk a little bit about how you're able to achieve that. I have my own thoughts about where the market sort of misunderstands this, but I'd love to hear your.
Sure.
Thoughts.
Our, our gross margin actually on the capital equipment, as you mentioned, is higher than our gross margin on, on consumable.
Yeah.
Our gross margin on capital equipment is over 85%. In some countries, over 90%, 90. On the disposable, it's around 70%, 70. We, as I mentioned, we purposely keep it lower. We want the physician to make a lot of money on our procedures.
Mm-hmm.
We want them to keep most of the money because then when we come back to them with the new technology or a new product or new offering, it makes it easier for us to sell them the next product. That's kind of the concept. So far, it seems to be working. I think there's this misconception, and I think in the next recession, we find it out, that a company that has the razor and razor blade model would fare better during recessions.
Mm, mm-hmm.
In COVID, that was not the case. During COVID, that was not the case. We did better than any other company that deployed the razor and the razor blade model. Again, COVID was a unique situation. We'll see in the next recession how things would look like, but we are very agile. If we need to make some changes or tweak our models, we can definitely do that. For now, I think, we are completely fine with having only 70% gross margin on consumable. I think this is a respectable gross margin. Keep in mind, we barely have any additional expenses related to consumable sales.
Right.
This 70%, almost 90%, 80% of it trickle down to the EBITDA margin.
Mm-hmm.
That's also something to keep in mind.
I think that's one of the misconceptions that I see when talking to investors, is people really wanna put InMode in the box of medical device company, which you are, but you're also very much a consumer company, in that you're selling, you know, the cash pay to the patient. I think what people miss is the physicians that buy your systems, they're the ones marketing this-
Right
T o the patient, right? Once they are invested in buying an InMode Morpheus, whatever, face type, body type, they're gonna put the money behind. Mark, I was at my dermatologist's office, and I was captive in the, you know, examination room and all these InMode procedures scrolling across the screen, you know?
Yeah.
I think that's something that people miss. Is that one of the drivers of keeping your sales and marketing so lo- and high operating margins?
Yes, absolutely. We do a lot of what we call co-op, co-op marketing, because as you mentioned, these physicians, not only that they can advertising to the captive, captive audience in, in their practice, many of them become like a social media, celebrities, and they have a lot of followers. There are a lot of patients following them. They like the work. They want to see what's new and coming, like to see their before and after pictures. Us, partnering with them for fairly inexpensive cost, we can have them put together a post, and we provide them some of the material, and then, you know, all the followers can see that. That works very well, and some of them are tweeting, some very famous, celebrities.
Some of the celebrities post.
Yep.
S omething on social media about, "Hey, I did this procedure," mentioning us, calling out us, calling the doctor out, and that's always helping.
Yeah.
A lot with, again, minimal spending.
Yeah. Right. Where is the pushback from a physician purchasing a system perspective? Is it usually the cost of the capital equipment? Maybe walk us through the process of selling one of these systems to a new practice. I, I feel like the practices you're already in, they're using it.
Yeah.
Maybe a new practice.
One thing to complete the, the marketing, we also spend on direct-to-consumer marketing.
Mm.
We have brand ambassadors.
Yeah.
We, we started doing billboards all across the US. We are focusing on that as well. That's also something that help us selling to the physician. When, when we come to a new physician, 70% of our revenue from capital equipment in the last couple of quarters came from new customers.
Yeah.
We are still in the process of adding new customers to the InMode family. Basically, is some kind of a discovery meeting that we, with the physicians, try to explain to them what they are missing out on, try to identify what are their needs, what kind of demographic they have, what procedure they already have, what's not. The fact that we have such a robust product portfolio, almost nine products in our portfolio, that's also something that is very unique. We can offer them, other than tattoo removal that we don't have currently, we have all the aesthetic procedures that they might need.
Mm-hmm.
We try to identify what would be best for them to start with, and then they can add more products later on.
Mm-hmm.
That's, again, one of our main competitive advantage, because many of the other competitors, we, we don't really see any other competitors that compete with us head-to-head on the entire product portfolio. There are some companies with a single product, which is extremely hard to.
Yeah
A single product company in, in our market.
Yeah.
Right? The fact that we have this robust product portfolio is a huge competitive advantage for us. We come, we try to understand what are the needs. We have those very successful workshop events. The workshop events looks something like that. We take a very luxury hotel, just like as this, and we bring a very celebrity physician, a very successful doctor, and they talked about how they became successful with the practice, of course, mentioning the InMode products, but not only the InMode product. They're also talking about injectables and what treatment they combine with the InMode procedures. We sponsor the event, obviously, but it's a very educational event for those customers.
Even customers that were not sure before what, whether they need or not, an InMode procedure, once they hear the physician, the doctor speaks about his success, he's doing many times a live demo on the stage. They can ask him questions. That helps us kind of address all their concerns and make it basically easier for us to sell them after such an event. In addition, we show them all the huge investment that we do on direct-to-consumer, so they understand that we are actually trying to attract patients to his practice.
Yep. Yep, that makes sense. Okay, maybe let's talk about site of care. I mentioned, you know, I saw the InMode products in my, in my dermatologist's office. Your primary call point, I think, is plastic surgeons.
Correct
still. maybe talk about the opportunity expanding beyond just there's still plenty of plastic surgeons-
Yeah
T o adopt, to still, to adopt the technology, but, expanding even beyond that and how you think about the TAM in that regard.
Yeah, that's absolutely correct. This company started with a $3.5 million initial investment. The next round was the IPO. We needed to be very focused, almost laser focused, although we focus on RF in what country and what specialty we go after, and we decided to start with the plastic surgeon community in the US. Why is that? Why the US? Because the US actually set the aesthetic trends for the rest of the world to follow.
Yeah.
Why plastic surgeons? They are, they are the top of the pyramid that all other aesthetic providers looking up to, to see what they are using, and then they tend to follow. This is also the hardest community to penetrate. However, because of the minimally invasive nature of our products, that was the perfect community for us to go after. It did take us many years to penetrate them. All of our KOLs at the beginning were geared toward plastic surgeons. We basically able to do something that no one in the past thought it's even possible, to create a very successful aesthetic company without the derms, just around plastic surgeons.
But now, after we establish ourself and the brand name with the plastic surgeon, we start expanding to other communities, more traditional one, and especially since in the last several years, we also launched the hands-free devices and devices that are less invasive in nature, so they can actually cater for those communities much more. Only in the last couple of years, we start building relationship with the dermatologists. If you think about it, dermatologists is a larger group than plastic surgeons.
Mm-hmm.
We're maybe 5% penetrated there, 6%. With the plastic surgeon, we are a little bit more penetrated, probably 20%-25%. With the rest of the groups, this is definitely an opportunity for us and to build relationship with them and start expanding to them as well.
Can you do that without adding to the sales force as it is today, or do you have to continue adding maybe more derm-focused reps?
Aesthetic companies, any aesthetic company, if they want to grow, they need to do two things: one, keep adding more sales reps or more people, and keep bringing innovation and bringing new products to the market.
Yeah.
You cannot do only one of them.
Yeah.
Yes, we will need to bring... On average, a sales rep in the industry is doing between $1.2 million to $1.5 million a year per rep. That's the productivity, the average productivity. We used to be higher in the last couple of years, basically, if we want to add another $70 million to the top line, yes, we will need to add another 30-40 reps at least-
Okay.
Every year.
From a geographic perspective, in the first half of the year, US grew, you know, high teens, OUS grew high twenties.
Yeah.
There are some, I think, comp dynamics there with China, but maybe talk about international versus US, what's happening there, how the markets are, are different fundamentally, and how the long-term growth profiles between the two geographies are different?
Yeah, that's a good question. Again, back to what we mentioned in the previous question, we started from the US, so that was our focus. Only the last few years, we start investing seriously in the international expansion, and to remind you, that was COVID years. We opened some direct subsidiaries in some countries during COVID. The contribution was minimal. Only now we start seeing the fruits of the investment that.
Right.
T hat we did during COVID. That's the plan. We, we continue to expand also internationally, go direct, versus, distributors in, in, in some countries, at least 1 to 2 subsidiaries every year. That's, what we would like to, to, to see. It takes time from the moment you open a subsidiary, a direct operation, until you start seeing some contribution. You know, Italy, we opened a subsidiary there, 1 year, 1 and a half years ago. Only now we start seeing the, the contribution, so it takes time. Overall, comparing US to OUS, because of the fact that we started in the US, obviously the growth rate in the OUS would be higher.
Mm-hmm.
It will come from all regions. We see very strong demand in Europe, Asia, including China and Latin America.
Okay. Okay, it sounds pretty broad-based.
Yeah.
I was gonna ask if there are any countries that are better primed for aesthetics than others?
Yeah, there are. There are, but overall, they're spread across several regions.
Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's talk about your second-half guidance, because I know you love to be conservative, like that $70 million per year, which we can discuss offline. Your second-half revenue guidance implies 15% growth at the midpoint, 17% at the high end. That is a slight deceleration versus over 20% in the first half of the year. You know, maybe talk about the dynamics that are driving this conservatism, and how we should be thinking about the puts and takes to the back half of the year.
As you mentioned, we, we, we do tend to be conservative, and I think 17% growth is still a very good and healthy growth for a company in our size. Keep in mind, we are the biggest aesthetic company. No, no other company achieved those level ever in the history of the space.
Yeah.
Yes, we want to be conservative because, as I mentioned, no other aesthetic company has done this before. This is new, new field for everyone. The second, there are so many question marks about the economy, where things are going, you know, interest rates keep going up, financing processes start taking longer. There are so many question marks, so we prefer to be conservative. Overall, even 17%, I think it's a nice number. It's a nice target to have.
Sure. I'm very greedy, but yes. What level of visibility do you have when you give guidance? Sort of how long is the lead time for making a sale?
That's one other thing: It's not, not long.
Not long.
Not long.
Yeah.
We don't really have visibility. We, we, we can measure that, as I mentioned, by the number of sales rep we have, and we know what's the average productivity per rep.
Yeah.
We look at the demand for our consumables, working with our distributors, try to gauge their intention to place orders towards the rest of the year, but there's no real visibility.
Yeah.
This is something that, you know, we use our past experience. This is more, more art than science, unfortunately.
Yeah.
That's why we want to be conservative.
And we talked about recessionary risks, so I'm not gonna really go there. I'd rather actually talk about, something else that's very dynamic in healthcare right now, and that's the GLP-1.
Mm-hmm.
We've seen meaningful stock moves, and, you know, we'd love to get your thoughts on how broader GLP-1 adoption could impact the aesthetics market as a whole, but obviously, we care most about InMode, specifically. Have you started to see anything yet?
Let me start by saying that I do not want to tie InMode to a specific fat loss trend.
Sure.
Overall, as with every fat loss trend, that actually helps the aesthetic care space. Because once you get rid of fat, you end up with loose skin, as we mentioned before, and it doesn't matter how you get rid of fat. That trend might be stickier than others, and that may be the Holy Grail, and they solve all the obesity problems and overweight problems. All those patients that would lose weight or lose fat would end up with loose, saggy skin. You know, some call it Ozempic face, when you have your, your face becoming a little bit droopy. This is exactly where our fractional RF, Morpheus device, can help them.
Mm-hmm.
Our RFAL device can help them. We start seeing that, but it's too early to quantify. Overall, from our past experience, this is something that will do great for aesthetic. Keep in mind, our products right now are not recommended for obese people. Obese people have been put on those drugs, lose a lot of weight, now we can start working with them.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Which before we couldn't.
Mm-hmm.
No matter at what brought you to use these drugs, we might end up, helping you out, with looking even better.
Yeah. Okay, that's a, that's a very fair point. I want to talk a little bit about the expansion into wellness. You know, you, you mentioned this already, but about, you know, OBGYN practices not only adopting EmpowerRF for vaginal rejuvenation, but also adopting some of your other products to do the aesthetic procedure. You know, this is already happening with OBGYNs. You know, you're- you will be launching a product to ophthalmologists, I'm just curious to, to get your view on how- what the friction points are to these physicians getting comfortable with doing a more pure aesthetics procedure. Is that something you guys have had to take on?
Yeah. With every, each of those groups, even before we, introduced a solution for them, we had OBGYN using aesthetic, ENTs, ophthalmologists, even before we had a solution for them, because as I mentioned, many of them realized that there is a lot of money in aesthetic. They will start... Sometimes we saw, they call it aesthetic day. One day they do only aesthetic treatment.
Oh, interesting.
or they have an aesthetic room in the treatment room in the practice, or they have the ophthalmology practice or, or ENT practice, OBGYN practice with a, a, a, room specifically for, for aesthetic. This, this was done only by the savvy physician, the savvy, like, business-
Business, yeah.
business-savvy physicians.
Yep.
Unfortunately, there are not too many of those. Most physicians are very good doctors, not very good businessmen. The ones that, that are business savvy already adopted aesthetic and already had our products. That's how we came to know these, communities, and start thinking of: Okay, how, how can we expand? Because if you want to go to the mass population of a community, you need to offer them some sort of a, a procedure on your platform that's customized specifically for them, and that's what we are doing.
Mm-hmm.
With that, they will then they will feel more comfortable adopting our technology, and we need to work with them hand in hand, at the beginning at least, and prove to them that you can make money out of cash-based procedure. You just need to know how to position it right and how to sell it to the patient. We can help with that.
Yeah. Just, following up on that, we have been very focused on the opportunity with EmpowerRF and women's wellness. You guys significantly outperformed expectations last year-
Mm-hmm
in the first year of launch, I think $45 million, the initial guidance was for $20 million in the U.S. You've stopped highlighting it as much, or you're not giving the, the numbers. Is, is that because maybe we were looking at it incorrectly, and it's more about getting into the OBGYN-
Yeah.
-practice with EmpowerRF? It's less about who, who cares almost how many EmpowerRF procedures they do, it's them adopting the entire portfolio.
Yes.
Okay.
Exactly. You know, we always knew that the EmpowerRF can be a $45 million-$50 million a year kind of product. When we gave the original guidance, we usually don't do that, but when we were asked about it, we said $20 million would be a good number to achieve in the first year of a soft launch of the EmpowerRF. You know, we ended up doing $45 million. What we thought would take us about two to three years to get to, we got to in 1 year, in year 1. Once we are there, I think it's gonna grow like similar to the rest of the portfolio, 15%-20%, that probably will be on the higher end, but like 20%, because it's still a very new product.
Yeah.
it's gonna behave in a similar fashion to-
Yeah.
to the rest of the portfolio.
Is there still opportunity to add more OBGYN? It's not like-
Yeah.
You're done penetrating the market?
No, no, the OBGYN is a-
Yeah.
Huge market, and we are continue to innovate also with EmpowerRF. I didn't mention that. We plan to bring to the market on the EmpowerRF, new handpieces and new indication. Right now we have only SUI, but we are looking at OAB, overactive bladder, which can be huge. We know it helps. We don't know why yet.
Yeah.
Right, where- the feedback that we, we get, from the field, it helps with the urgency. Like, instead of getting up 7 times a night, they get up only 2.
Yeah.
Which is a huge improvement. We don't know how yet, so we are still studying that. HPV, we believe that we can provide some solution for HPV using microneedling RF solutions. Yes, once we add more indication, I think this will help us with expanding more to the OBGYN. Think about it, OBGYN community is bigger than the aesthetic community.
Yeah.
T his can, this thing can be big.
Yeah. Well, in the last 30 seconds that we have, capital allocation, so you guys have a ton of cash. Just curious about, you know, you've been pretty transparent about, you know, where you could potentially go with that. Has anything changed there? Maybe remind us sort of how you're thinking about deployment of capital.
Our main priority is, right now, is to do M&A. We really believe that if we can find an M&A target that would help us, create a one-stop shop in aesthetic, or M&A target in one of the you know, new communities that we are after, OBGYN.
Yeah.
O phthalmologists, ENTs, that can actually, help us a lot in, establish ourself in these communities or, establish ourself completely as a one-stop shop in the aesthetic space. That's the first priority. However, we are generating a lot of cash, which is the problem, big problem. We are not gonna sit on this cash forever. If we see that we cannot find a, a suitable, M&A, target, we will, start giving this cash in some form, or at least some of this cash back to the shareholders.
Uh-huh.
The first priority is M&A. Luckily, we have such a strong R&D pipeline. Unlike many other companies, we will not do M&A just for sake of doing M&A.
Yeah.
because we need new products to fund our growth.
Yeah.
We don't. We will do M&A just because we believe strategically that's the best thing for us and for our shareholders.
Okay. With that, I think we'll wrap up. Thank you, Yair.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, everyone.