I know that they just picked up their old analysts back, and so we look forward to building another relationship with Goldman as we go forward. I'll do a couple of slides to basically talk about the company for those that may not know what we do exactly. Then I'll dive deeper into some of it, and then, of course, as Q said, we'll get up and go through it. Forward-looking statements, some of our non-GAAP financial reconciliation. This is posted on our website, and we just filed this presentation this morning. So we essentially think of it as an implantable contact lens. It's all cash pay, and think of it as a better procedure than LASIK. I can speak to that because I was actually a LASIK candidate about 17 years ago and got LASIK done.
The company is a very unique company, and I'll dive into what it is we're trying to do. How is this product different than LASIK? We've got a really good product, and what's really interesting is the company has been around for almost over 40 years listed on NASDAQ, but our meaningful revenue has really just come in the last, call it, 5 years. In fact, we have now sold over 3 million of these lenses worldwide, with about 1.5 million happening in the last 3 years. Why is it that our product is different, and how does it differentiate from LASIK? We've got a long history, as I said, 200 papers reviewed. The first implant was implanted over 30 years ago, but there are some clear benefits of us versus LASIK. LASIK is an acronym.
It's now a branded name, but basically what it does is it removes your cornea tissue in order to create a refractive correction. The higher diopter, the worse your eyesight is for distance vision, the more tissue that has to be removed. I can tell you from experience, I was about a -5, -5.5. Immediately after getting my surgery, I had great 20/20 vision. I didn't need my glasses or contacts anymore. But my night vision was pretty poor. I got what you call halos or starburst, et cetera. And so because we are tissue sparing, we actually place this Collamer contact lens behind the iris or the color of your eye in the posterior chamber, and it sits very quietly there. And so because of that, we don't have any of the issues that you get with cutting the cornea.
Dry eye is another issue. The more severe your vision is, distance vision is, you've got to cut more of the cornea in order to get that correction. The other thing that's really unique about our product is that it's reversible. So at any point, if for some reason you don't like the product, the doctor doesn't like how it's sitting in your eye, they can remove it and put it back in. This does not happen, really, and it's not meant to happen, but it does give peace of mind to the consumer out there as well as the doctor. And of course, you can see that 99.4% satisfaction level. We're a new team. I've been with the company for about four years. Tom Frinzi is our CEO, a longtime industry veteran in the ophthalmology space. You can read his credentials there.
He actually came onto the board the same time I came on. In the last year and a half since he took over in an operational role, starting in 2023, we really changed a lot of the management team, and so you can read through that. We've also added some new board members with some pretty strong pedigrees in terms of their experience in the public markets as well as the Asian markets. We've got a huge TAM. Myopia, which is distance vision issues, is not going away. Our lives are in front of us with phones, laptops, et cetera, and so because of that, we continue to see myopia increase and increase. And so we've got a TAM that just will not go away, especially in some of the South Asia and Asia markets where there seems to be a higher prevalence of higher myopia.
In September of 2023, we gave out what we called our Vision 2026 plan, where we said we would grow 15%-20% CAGR over the next three years. We broke that out by the various regions of APAC, EMEA, and Americas, and then we talked about what that meant for fiscal 2024. Pretty simple. 2023 was a bit of a challenging year for us where we got approval for our US EVO product, which we got in 2022. We had high expectations that the product and the launch in the US would be much more rapid than it was. It was not, and so we had to really take a hard look inside and figure out what we needed to do to move the company forward.
And so 2024 is a year where we've rebaselined and reset the numbers, and we feel we've got the right strategy in place now to not only pursue and grow within the U.S. market, but also move forward and expand that in other parts of the world. The biggest thing we talk about, on the right-hand side here, is what we call the diopter curve. What's very unique about our product, unlike LASIK, is that the higher the diopter you are, the worse your vision is, the less probability you have to use LASIK because there's not enough tissue or cornea to cut in order to create the refractive correction you need. Let me say that again. You are actually not a LASIK candidate if you have really bad eyesight, okay?
We can come in, though, and we can put our product in there, and we can basically make the minus 9s, the minus 10s, the minus 11s, and higher live a life without glasses and contacts. Well, there's a good and bad to that. Part of that is we get niched into this little corner where the doctors really look at us as a gateway of doing their high myopes or their non-LASIK candidates. And so the company for several years has really made its living off of this high myope area, which might be about 10%-15%, maybe upwards of 20% in certain geographies like Asia, as I mentioned. And so really what it's incumbent on us in order to hit our numbers and continue to take market share is to start driving down the diopter curve, and that's what we're focused on now.
Here's the market share taking that I talked about. It goes all the way back to 2018. You can see our numbers are in the blue, and then the refractive market is in the gray, and then the difference is in the orange. So we do continue to take market share. In fact, we are probably growing the market as well. Because high myope does not have an ability to do LASIK, they're starting to find out about our product. They're walking in the door, and they find out they do have an ability to get a refractive correction using the EVO ICL lens in order to get it done. And this is another slide that shows where we're at with market share. In terms of some of the key areas, we started in China really getting approval and moving forward back in 2016, so about eight years ago.
Fast forward to today, one out of every five people that chooses to get a refractive correction in China is getting an EVO ICL lens. And so we have about 20% market share now in China, which is the largest market in the world, followed by the U.S., which is about the second largest market in the world. We do expect that we'll continue to take market share and continue to grow the market. So in terms of what we wanted to do for 2024, as I said, 2023 was a bit of a learning experience for us. We're now back on track, and as we like to say, back into a positive new cycle. We're trying to deliver and hopefully at least meet or beat expectations as we move forward. We delivered strong growth globally in the first quarter. You can see all the notes here that we have.
We also were able to pull in sales in the US probably about 2 quarters sooner than what the rest of Wall Street had and the expectations were. To put into perspective, the US is still 5%-ish of our overall revenue base, but it clearly gets a lot of attention, especially from US-based investors that are able to more easily do channel checks on it. And so we had said that we would do $4 million a quarter, at least for the first half of 2024. We actually said we would do about $5 million in Q3. We did $5 million in Q1. So what we said during our Q1 call is that we've created a new baseline, and we expect that the numbers past Q1 will go higher than the $5 million that we did. And as I said, here's kind of the wrap-up of Q1.
We did $77.4 million, 9% growth year-over-year. Really, 2023 was a tale of two halves, and I'm sure Q will ask me about this as well. The first half of 2023 was a very, very strong refractive market in terms of growth overall. The second half of 2023 became much more challenging. And so because of that, we're seeing very tough comps in the first half of 2024, which will ease up as we move into the second half of this year. You can see the rest of the metrics. We actually did not raise our overall guidance of $335-$340 million on revenue, but what we did say is we expect that we'll be on the higher end of that guidance. We did raise our profitability metric. We're a very unique company.
I think if you were to put us up against other med tech peers in our space that are growing at our size, et cetera, we generate quite a bit of cash. Since I've been on board, we've now generated in four years about $150 million of organic cash, free cash flow. We're now sitting on over $250 million of cash, and so that's something that we're very proud of. We have a pristine balance sheet, no debt, et cetera. We also did provide during our Q1 call that we expected Q2 to be approximately $95 million in revenue to give a little bit of color for street modeling. The reason why Q2 is our biggest season is we sell into the major channels as they prepare for the implant procedures that happen during the high season.
What we describe is China specifically, a lot of our demographic is a younger demographic, kids that are graduating from high school or young adults that are graduating from university. That starts happening as we exit June this month, and then it goes strong into July and August. We have to get our product into the country to get it through the network, clear customs, et cetera. So we do recognize revenue upon the shipment into China. We can talk a little bit more about that structure if QCs fit. So with that, I wanted to add one more slide, which is kind of incremental information. I was just in China for about two weeks, visiting our operations, visiting with customers, et cetera. It was a great two weeks. I see a huge opportunity there for us in China.
There certainly are some macro conditions, but those go through cycles and those ebb and flow. But we've got the right team in place. I actually met with our two new, what we call distributors. We actually added a second distributor in February of this year in order to further diversify our ability to move into the country. The name of that distributor is HTDK. They are a Warburg Pincus-owned distribution logistics company. Very, very well-capitalized, very, very strong company with a large network to get into what we call tier three and tier four cities. As I said, the macro headwinds are there, consistent with what you're probably hearing about from other med tech, especially in China. We expect those headwinds to continue as we move through the first half. As I said, the comps get much easier in the second half of the year.
All of this has been factored into the guidance that we gave for the full year, not only for the company, but also in the specific regions like China. But I think there's a lot of upside that we haven't built into the model. We know the Chinese government is starting to do some stimulus programs in order to try to reinvigorate consumer spending, et cetera. So with that, I will stop and have Q come up and ask some questions.
Thank you, Patrick, for walking us through that. I'll kick it off, and then we can go to the audience and have a handful of questions to wrap up for the next 23 minutes or so. But why don't we start on Q1? So you reported Q1, May 7th, so it's been just over a month, and there may have been some confusion around units and sales growth.
Can you help clear that up for us?
Yeah, absolutely. So we actually did a pre-announcement, which is not something we would normally do, but we had a major conference trade show in North America in Boston, and it was before we were going to do our Q1 call. So we did a pre-announcement. You can go back and look at what the stock did. I think people were very excited about the 9% growth, certainly very excited about the $5 million in the US that we did. When we did our Q1 call earlier in May, we gave more details, and of course, our 10-Q came out. And so what you saw in there was a little bit of an anomaly of unit growth wasn't as high as the revenue growth. And so we had about a 2% unit growth globally and a 9% revenue growth.
Some of that was a byproduct of really customer mix as well as product mix. We sell two versions of our product. One is called a Spheric, which is a standard version. One is called a Toric. The Toric has about a 20%-25% higher ASP than the Spheric. So that led to it because we saw a higher mix of Toric in the quarter. The other thing that we saw was customer mix. China is by far our largest customer. We probably have 60-ish% of our revenue that comes from China. We have multiple accounts in China that we sell to, but during the quarter, as I mentioned, we effectively brought on a second distributor and we split the country in half.
And so I think it's a little bit of a transition where the original distributor, Lanshang, was actually supporting our prior largest customer, which has the best pricing in the world. There weren't a lot of orders in Q1 from them as they were sort of rebalancing inventory a little bit, and so we saw many more orders from non-Aeir customers, which have a much higher ASP. I would expect we're going to see a little bit more of that in Q2, but that gap of, let's call it, 700 basis points between revenue growth and unit growth will shorten. And by the time we finish out the year, we're probably going to see maybe 300 basis point differential, which is what we expected. We just didn't do as good of a job as articulating it, and so we've been articulating it, as I just did more recently.
Got it. Okay. Super helpful. Thank you. I'll pause here and see if there's any questions from the audience. Why don't we start here? I believe the microphone is coming for the purposes of the road.
Thank you. So I wanted to ask on China. I mean, you referenced that the market's been a little bit weaker and some macro headwinds. Are you able to sort of maybe quantify that weakness? And then as you look into the high season and you said you're sort of doing shipments in Q2 to make sure you have supply, are there any early indications of things starting to get better for high season or still muted? Thank you.
Yeah, great question. So as I said, I was just in China. I visited probably 4 or 5 customers, including our largest customers with the Aeir Group, which is a private hospital. We're about 75% of our business is in private hospitals. I also visited ENT, which is a teaching university, a public hospital. Both very busy. With that said, look, every doctor I spoke to, even talking to distributors, the market is still probably down. Refractive market is still probably down about 10% year-over-year in Q2. First quarter, we heard different numbers from 10, even as high as 20. Maybe it was closer to 15%. What everyone does say, though, is that they expect that as we move into Q3 and Q4, we know the comps get easier, as I said, but it really is dependent on this high season right now.
And so part of this is going to play itself out over the next 6-8 weeks. We will do our Q2 call in early August, and certainly that question that you just asked will get asked again, and that'll be the time that people will truly understand what will the impact be for the balance of the year. With all that said, I would say that there was much more enthusiasm with the teams that I was meeting with, but again, the high season is just kind of beginning right now for us, so we got to kind of see what's in the cards for us. In terms of our revenue, what I would say is, again, we are setting ourselves up for success. So we're going to ship product to stage for a successful high season.
If for some reason the implants aren't there, then the next order that would come in Q3 and beyond just won't be as large. We do ship to China on a routine basis, probably every one or two weeks, so it's not like there's these big lumpy orders. It's just the size of the order will get adjusted based on the actual demand in country of the implants.
I believe the next question's here.
Yeah, I guess just quickly expanding on China. One thing we heard from med tech peers is delayed purchasing decisions as a result of the pending stimulus package. Just, it's kind of a yes or no question. Is that included in the macro headwinds? And on the stimulus package more broadly, have you quantified what you think the odds of that passing are?
Yeah, so we have not included any sort of stimulus from the Chinese government in it. Some of the hospital stuff they're doing doesn't affect us because we're a cash-pay product, so it's not sort of a reimbursed non-elective procedure. What we're focused on is some of the more consumer stimulus things that the Chinese government is starting to begin to do. And as I said, and I think I still have it in the slide there, it's not included in our guidance, so that would be upside to the current numbers that we have.
Got it. Thank you.
Any other questions?
I'm sure you have a lot.
I'm seeing none. I'll shift back to some of mine. Let's drill down a little bit on the U.S. You mentioned Q1 at $5 million ahead of expectations. Where do you go from here, and should we expect to see a $6 million+ quarter? And related to that, if you could talk about your commercial organization here in the U.S., your current go-to-market strategy, including marketing, where I believe you have invested heavily here in the U.S.
Yeah. I was just thinking about your question on China. Let me just wrap a bow on it maybe. I want to stress the importance of us bringing on this second distributor and also describe. You hear the word distributor, and I know that sometimes causes people angst when they hear that. This is not a classic distributor model where we sell product to the distributor and then it's out of sight, out of mind. This is a truly hybrid relationship that we have. So let me explain that. We have approximately 100 STAAR employees on the ground in China, and their job is to generate demand alongside now really our new distributor, HTDK. The reason why we picked HTDK is they have relationships and they have a network into what we call tier three and tier four cities. Most of our business comes from the major cities in China.
Part of the problem that we have is that when we were going head-to-head against LASIK, it might take three or four days for our lens to get through the country of China to get into the hands of the doctor. This is a product that you can't have that happen because LASIK can happen anytime at any given moment because there's no lens, right? It's a piece of capital machinery. And so when we brought on the second distributor, one of the things that we had to ensure was that we can deliver product same day or next day. So that effectively is one of the things and why we picked HTDK to do this. I've been very impressed with the organization, and this is where we feel we've got really big opportunity.
When we brought on the second distributor, we didn't think that 1 + 1 would equal 2. We believe it's going to equal more than 2 as we move forward. So just wanted to make sure I said that.
No, that's helpful context.
Yeah. In terms of the U.S., look, we were very happy with the first quarter results. We put a lot of time and effort into better understanding what is limiting adoption, not just in the U.S., but other parts of the world. We've talked about increasing confidence in surgeon size selection, measurement of the lens, training, et cetera. We've talked about that now since the beginning of this year. We believe that's going to help us move down the diopter curve. What we saw in Q1, I think, was just a byproduct of really more focus by the commercial team on what we call our Highway 93, which is essentially taking about the 400 or so accounts that we have in the United States and parsing those out and just focusing on, let's say, 20%-25% of them, right?
We then came out with some more clinical papers around April that we believe will help further drive surgeon confidence in size selection and sort of the pre-op to intra-op to post-op procedure. That is starting to take place in Q2, and you'll hear us talk a lot more about that as we move into Q3 and Q4. So the answer or the question is people are expecting, well, when is 6 and 7 and so on is going to happen from a revenue standpoint. Look, we're hyper-focused on growing the US. We certainly don't want to take a step backwards. We have set a new baseline of $5 million. We said that out loud, and so people should expect us to deliver north of $5 million. And now I think the big question which you asked is when is the 6 going to come?
I'm sure there's some people wondering when the seven's going to come. So for us, as long as we continue to see steady progress and we're making those strong gains in onboarding physicians in a much more seamless manner, I think what you can have the ability here is for a true hockey stick. I've been in cash-pay med device for quite some time. I've also been on the reimbursed side. What I know as a fact is this: the reimbursed side, you can go after it, but that hockey stick takes time to happen, whether it's getting codes, getting insurance companies on board, getting tenders with the GPOs. That takes time. With the cash-pay product, where you're just dealing with an individual physician in many cases, right? As long as they're on board, remember, we don't have to create this market.
Every single day, people are walking into that doctor's office to get a refractive procedure, and more often than not, they're getting LASIK versus us. Our job is to convert more of those into EVO ICLs, and part of that will be moving down the diopter curve. And that's one of our big things this year is to sort of drop from that -9 average diopter to really focus on -6 and above as a clinical advantage to LASIK, as well as a practice economic advantage for the doctor.
Makes sense. Let's shift for a moment to the income. Oh, excuse me. Please go ahead. And I'll repeat it.
Microfilm, please.
Go ahead.
Yeah, so the question was kind of how do we go against LASIK and sort of the differences between it and bringing SMILE in there? Is that?
Yeah, yeah. Basically.
Yeah. Yeah, so the question was, can we make the same arguments of our benefits of our procedure over LASIK as we can over SMILE? And the answer is yes. They both are non-tissue-sparing procedures, so they're cutting the cornea in some way, shape, or form. In fact, SMILE really hasn't taken off anywhere except for really in Asia, and the rest of the world has been fairly subdued, I guess I would say. We definitely have clear benefits, which I covered earlier. You know, I think right now it's kind of interesting. You could say in the short term that our direct competitor is LASIK and SMILE or cornea-based procedures, but I really think our competitor in the longer term and maybe mid to long term is glasses and contacts.
There are so many people that drop out of contact wearing every single year and go back to their glasses for a number of reasons: dry eye issues, et cetera, that that's really the bigger opportunity. When I showed that slide of 4 billion people that suffer from myopia, obviously we're not going to satisfy and not everyone's going to get a refractive procedure. But if you go back 20, 25 years, the LASIK-SMILE market was 2x the size that it is today. And you got to think about why that is. I'm actually kind of in that sweet spot. I was a person that got it almost 20 years ago. I don't talk bad about LASIK. I actually talk sort of so-so about it. What I mean by that is I have my daughter is about a -2, right?
So she wears glasses in order to see the board at school and everything else. What I talk about is, yeah, I got rid of my glasses and contacts. I'm 20/20, but I have night vision issues. And I don't like driving at night now as I get older, right? Because it's harder for me to see. I've actually regressed to about a -1, -1.5 in my eye. So if you think about people talking like that and talking about some of the adverse events or the longer-term adverse events that weren't really known 20 years ago, it's caused a decline in the overall refractive market. That's where we think our biggest opportunity is to bring that TAM back up. So then not only are we converting LASIK and SMILE patients, but we're bringing in new patients into the doctor's office.
As we know, that's the most powerful thing you can do in a cash-pay medical device situation is to bring new patients in that they would never have seen before.
Other questions from the audience? Okay, seeing none, I'll shift back to some of mine, Patrick. You referenced this during your presentation, but as you and I both know, high-growth medical device companies are often valued based on sales growth, but STAAR is one of those rare high-growth companies that has been profitable since 2018 when it was still in its relatively early commercial stages. How do you think about, as you think about the income statement, balancing growth, top-line growth, and profitability? For those investors who are looking more for profitability earlier, when might you see the operating margin improvements that you had highlighted earlier?
Yeah, so as I said, you know, 2023 was a bit of a challenging year, and I always say it's never a good thing for a growth company if you gave the same guidance two years in a row, right? That means something happened. And so let me go back and sort of revisit what happened in 2023. Our miss in 2023 was primarily related to the US launch. We had said we would do about $340 million in revenue in 2023. We came in at $322 million. The street had expectations of $35 million for the US. We did $17 million. That's the $18 million miss, which is what our original guidance was.
Now, there were some other areas where we obviously thought we would overperform in other geographies, and that was some of the economic stuff that we saw in the second half of 2023 that we're still living through today. So when we came into guidance for this year, we gave the same number, $335-$340. That's why our valuation has taken a big hit. I think the other part of it is the lack of being able to see the U.S. number grow more quickly created a lot of pause, I think, for the investor community. Not only did they want to see diversification away from China, which is 60% of our revenue, but they wanted to be able to channel check and be able to do their own diligence, which is a lot easier for them to do on U.S. folks.
In terms of the balance, look, we built the company with OpEx and infrastructure and investments in various things to support a much higher revenue than what we expected was going to happen this year in 2024. We have taken steps to pull that back a little bit. We have reduced some of our brand awareness spend. We are doing much more downstream stuff. We brought on a new Chief Marketing Officer who's got a ton of experience in direct-to-consumer, and some of us also have that in other parts of the management team. So you can expect us to still take that incremental dollar and invest it into growth because we believe we're still in the very early innings, and we believe that we're in a market, especially in the U.S., where we can really grab a lot of market share quickly. There's been a lot of momentum.
If you go to trade shows, if you go to conferences, Evo is becoming much more of a talking point, and you're going to hear that more and more. At the last ASCRS we were at, we doubled the number of subspecialty breakouts we had. There's another sort of very specific ophthalmology conference called ACOS. We're starting to see us get talked a lot more about than we did even two or three years ago when I attended it. So that's the classic med device 101, KOLs, podium, everything else. I just think we've got a really cool opportunity here to move forward, but we will invest that dollar in the top line. The beautiful thing is we sit around 80% gross margins. We throw off cash.
This will probably be our last year of sort of heavier OpEx of around $30 million to build more manufacturing and some back-office infrastructure stuff we're doing. But after that, I would expect this to be fairly leverageable from a profitability. The last thing I would add is most of our markets, we're direct in the US, which is about 5% of our revenue, Japan, which is 15%-ish, and then Spain and Germany, which maybe make a 10%-15% depending on the quarter. So about half-ish, a little less than half of our revenue has a much higher ASP. And as we are able to grow in those markets, it's going to continue to just push our gross margin up and obviously throw more dollars to the bottom line. So that's not an area that keeps us up at night.
We can turn this stuff off and on fairly easily, and I think we've demonstrated the ability to leverage cash and generate it.
Speaking of cash, as you mentioned in your prepared remarks, very, very strong balance sheet, which again, I would say is unusual for high-growth med tech. $250 million of cash, no debt. What do you plan to do with the cash?
Yeah, we're getting that question more and more. Look, I think we probably hit a little bit of a, for this year, we've got some CapEx that's going to come through. We'll continue to generate cash, but maybe not at the rate that we did over the last year. I can get some of the details, but we basically were able to collect a big chunk of our accounts receivable from last year, which augmented some of our cash. You know, for us right now, it's not to be acquisitive, I would say. It's to be opportunistic. Potentially, we might place some bets here and there in terms of R&D pipeline type things. We keep our eyes and ears open. I don't think we're really that focused on trying to expand our portfolio for many reasons, the defocusing that can happen with it.
We actually just exited our cataract portfolio, intraocular lenses. We exited that sort of in the last year or two. And so I think really for us, the opportunity of that cash is going to be, once we get to that hockey stick, we'll call it, where we feel the surgeons are in a good place, we start training more physicians worldwide, you'll see us start making more of an investment on the brand awareness side. My guess is if I ask people to raise their hand, how many people here know what LASIK is and have heard of it? Please raise your hand. Look, everyone raise their hands. Keep your hands up. Drop your hands if you know what EVO is, or keep your hands up if you know what EVO is. Yeah, I see a lot of hands went down. So that's the opportunity, right?
So there's so many times where I talk to someone socially or whatever, and you tell them, well, we're an alternative to LASIK. The reality is, I always give this time machine, and it's probably a good one to end with. This to me is the opportunity that we have. Let's go back 30, 40 years ago, and there was a company that came out, and it was called STAAR, and we wanted to get people to get rid of their glasses and contacts, and we came up with EVO ICL. Okay? Now let's fast forward to today, and I'm a Shark Tank. I'm pitching you guys a new business model, right? What I'm going to do is I'm going to cut the cornea with the laser. That's probably going to create some dry eye, some night vision issues, especially as you move up the diopter curve.
In fact, that'll increase the frequency and severity of those adverse events. And if I get to a certain diopter curve, I won't even be able to monetize that patient, which means you're going to lose out on money. But it's probably with my product, you're going to need a touch-up, especially if you're a high diopter, maybe after 10-15 years. And here's the really good news. I'm going to charge you $500,000 for a piece of capital equipment. I think that any of you would invest in that knowing what the predicate or the opportunity we have. And that's not a reality. We have a very good product in LASIK that's out there. It delivers what you want, which is 20/20 vision, get rid of your contacts and glasses. But I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that if you can avoid destroying healthy tissue, you should.
That's exactly what EVO ICL does.
Yeah. Anything in the pipeline that you'd like to highlight?
It is an area of. We have four areas of focus right now, and I think this is an area that I've been really happy with what Tom brought in terms of structure and focus for the company. One was this concept of a high-performance management system. We call it HPMS. The goal there is to do voice of customer, both internal and external, and to listen to what the customer says. You'll hear Tom talk about getting into the arena. I just spent two weeks in China talking to customers, talking to our distributors. We learn a little bit more every time we talk to our customers. So from that, we've created really four major vital few, we call it. Number one, as I said, is to increase confidence in training, size selection, positioning of the lens.
Number 2 is to move down and dominate, own, be the optimal choice or the first choice for -6 and above on the diopter level. Number 3 is some of the infrastructure stuff I talked about, probably not as meaningful for you all. But number 4 is product innovation. I think that's an area where the company has not had a new product in quite some time. We did talk about a presbyopic product called Viva. To be fair, that's had a bit of a reset. Fixing Viva with a multifocal and EDOF lens is very challenging. We're seeing that. There's a reason why no one else has done it. But it's very interesting that we are, as I said, we're starting to look at the product pipeline, perhaps partnering with our physician customers a little bit more, being much more open and listening.
With $250 million on the balance sheet, there's an opportunity for us to place many multiple potentially small bets in areas to see what could come to fruition down the road.
Very helpful. I think we're coming up on time.
Perfect.
Patrick, I want to thank you for your time today, for coming to our conference and presenting, and best of luck for the rest of the year for STAAR Surgical. Thank you.
Thanks, Q. Appreciate it.