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43rd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference 2025

Jan 15, 2025

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Good morning, everyone. This is Rachel Vatnsdal from the Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team here at J.P. Morgan. I'm joined on stage by the Dentsply Sirona team. So, as a reminder, these are 40-minute sessions. Roughly the first half will be a prepared presentation, followed by roughly 20 minutes of Q&A. With that, Simon, I will welcome you to the stage. Thank you.

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Rachel. We are now two years into our transformation journey at Dentsply Sirona, and we're happy to provide you with an update today once I get my slides up. Good.

Can I get that in the DSM too? Black turns up.

Speaker 3

Sorry about that, Simon.

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

It's good?

All right. Okay, so I think we're ready. So please take a moment to read our forward-looking statements in our presentation. Our most recent SEC filings list some of the most important risk factors that may cause actual results to differ from our predictions. And additionally, some of our remarks may be based on non-GAAP financial measures as detailed in the appendix. So let's start with an overview of our business. For those of you not familiar with Dentsply Sirona, this will provide a helpful introduction. For everyone else, it's a valuable opportunity to review some key metrics and to evaluate and track our performance moving forward. Our business is comprised of end-to-end dental portfolios representing over 90% of our revenue, with the remainder coming from the continence care space, Wellspect.

With approximately half of our sales coming from categories that are arguably underpenetrated, and with the potential for favorable long-term dynamics, we think we're well positioned to provide great solutions for our customers and their patients. From a geographic perspective, Europe represents our biggest geography, heavily influenced by our presence in Germany, which does disproportionately contribute to our revenue profile. We see the U.S. as a large source of continued opportunity in both dental and continence care, while disciplined and selective investments and execution in certain geographies can create the potential to accelerate our long-term growth. Data-driven decision-making remains a core tenet of this management team's philosophy, and as such, we regularly collect feedback from our customers, and here's what we've heard in the recent past from them in relation to our business strengths.

We have a comprehensive and broad and comparative portfolio that enables efficiencies and outcomes for customers and their patients. We deliver unparalleled access to clinical education, and our extensive scale and reach can help differentiate us from our peers. To take advantage of these strengths, we are laser-focused on delivering innovation that solves key customer needs, winning in high-growth categories like aligners and continence care, improving our execution in implants, and driving our aforementioned organizational transformation. The transformational work that we have and that we're doing here is comprehensive and well underway. We remain committed to unlocking and shaping the organization to unlock efficiencies across the business, to improve our organizational hygiene, to improve the experience for customers who work with us, and to allocate spend in areas with a customer and return focus that enables long-term performance of the business.

The dental market is a market of approximately $30 million globally and is fairly balanced across its core segments. Despite the sustained macroeconomic challenges that we all see, we believe the market is attractive in the medium and long term. For those of you who are unfamiliar with dental, the market shares similarities with other healthcare industries. An aging population will require more healthcare, including dental care, especially as more patients and clinicians recognize the link between oral health and psychological and physical health. GPs are adopting digital technologies, enabling them to perform more complex procedures like aligners and implants, meeting the demand for aesthetic dentistry and growing their practice. Importantly, the digitalization of dentistry improves workflows and creates opportunities to improve our customers' profitability.

Dental support organizations, or DSOs, in many markets, particularly the North American market, continue to play an increased role as they scale their network of practices. While there are also reimbursement challenges in certain markets, practices of all sizes, from the largest DSOs to single practice owners, are interested in marrying value with efficiency from product and technology offerings. We believe we are well positioned to meet these needs through our end-to-end portfolio, connected technologies, and with the increasing functionality of our DS Core platform. As an established leader in the consumables market with our essential dental solutions segment, we are taking initiative by investing in innovation, clinical education, and commercial excellence. In other segments, we expect to improve our market share and market penetration in areas like connected technology and aligners, while we simply must improve our performance in implants.

We have demonstrated our commitment to our Wellspect HealthCare or continence care business, where we continue to grow, where we continue to innovate, and we continue to drive profitability. We have made growth investments for product innovation and facility expansion, and we are excited to see what's ahead for this part of our business. As you have heard me say before, there are some areas of our business where we feel that growing with the market is okay. There are other areas where growing with the market is progress towards greater performance, and we have potential for above-market growth with the right delivery and strong execution. Since arriving at Dentsply Sirona, we have very intentionally focused our organization on meeting the needs of our customers from workflow efficiency and clinical outcomes perspectives.

Importantly, we have very deliberately integrated quality into our new product development process to avoid some problems of the past. Our customers are not just healthcare providers. They are also business people. They consistently tell us about their need for efficiency when it comes to things like revenue per hour of chair time, time spent on clinical workflows, value for the products that they purchase, and how to get their patients to accept the treatment plans or proposals presented to them. Our product portfolio, which I will speak to in a few minutes, positions us well to support customers in meeting their needs, to drive dental practice efficiency, and enhance patient outcomes. Lastly, it's also worth highlighting that our global clinical education footprint provides unparalleled content and education opportunities for our customers.

These programs help accelerate their connectivity journey and in professional development, drive the integration of new technologies and procedures into their practices. We have a comprehensive end-to-end dental portfolio served across the markets and have leading market positions across several categories with the opportunity for long-term growth and share gain. We have improved our customer centricity as an organization, informed by robust and regularly solicited customer insights. Not only do we conduct our own quarterly survey that many of you are familiar with, but our R&D and marketing teams have improved connectivity and integrated this customer insight into our new product development process. A unique aspect of dentistry is that we can not only focus on product and outcome-centric NPD, but also on improving the efficiency of dental workflows.

The vehicle that enables this is digital and connected dentistry, and we have systematically driven innovation in this space and will continue to do so. Our DS Core platform and our expanding suite of connected products and technology, like Primescan 2, serve as great examples of this agenda. You are no doubt aware of the significant changes in the direct-to-consumer aligner space since our presentation here this time last year. On October 24, 2024, we announced the voluntary suspension of sales and marketing of our direct-to-consumer-only Byte aligners and impression kits, while we conducted a review of certain regulatory requirements related to these products. Since that time, we've conducted an intensive and thorough review to understand the regulatory requirements inclusive of the state legislative environment that would facilitate market re-entry under the direct-to-consumer teledentistry model.

We have also been assessing By te technologies and capabilities and analyzing the business and economic model. As a result of this review, we have concluded that the clinical and regulatory requirements for market re-entry through teledentistry alone are extensive, costly, and lengthy, and therefore, we are refocusing the Byte business model away from this direct-to-consumer teledentistry alone model. With this decision, it's important to reiterate that we are committed to continue serving bite aligner patients who are not contraindicated and are continuing treatment. What this means moving forward is that we plan to reposition Byte within our aligner portfolio to offer in-person dentist-planned and monitored treatment, and we will continue to work with the regulatory authorities and obtain any necessary clearances prior to market launch. It also enables us to continue to leverage direct-to-consumer marketing and demand generation capabilities that Byte developed over many years.

Furthermore, we plan to leverage these Byte technologies and capabilities in other parts of our business, and we have already reallocated certain members of the Byte team. Specifically, we are augmenting the SureSmile and e-commerce platforms with the goal of improving our marketing, our demand generation, same-store utilization, patient engagement and compliance, and customer service efforts. Our strategy remains crystal clear to us: digitalize dentistry, innovate in products and services for oral health and continence care, focused on customer and patient needs, be great partners, and do so through a committed and engaged team with quality and compliance at the core. We have been intently focused on all five of our stated priorities over the last two years to advance our agenda. We cascade these priorities through our organization, and we've aligned our goals from annual operating plans to bonus plans to individual work plans.

We have moved deliberately to execute on these through our operating model, our processes, and our investments to transform our company. We have made several intentional leadership changes over the past 24 months in order to shift this culture and to transform this organization into a stronger growth engine with the core tenets that we spoke about. We have a legacy of innovation, and this leadership team is proud to continue it, and we invested again about 4% of revenue in R&D in 2024. Some of our key launches included our next-generation intraoral scanner, Primescan 2, which was a significant milestone for the industry, and together with added DS Core capabilities, further advances our digital and connected technology and dentistry agenda.

We also continue to innovate in other areas, including endodontics with the U.S. launch of X-Smart Pro+, implants with our recent launch of Lynx, and Wellspect HealthCare with the launch of LoFric Origo with sleeve. We have advanced and enhanced our innovation-focused, improved the leverage of our core capabilities, and refined other aspects of our R&D processes to increase the return on investment through meaningful innovation. It's worth highlighting for you how we are continuously building out our DS Core ecosystem to create truly integrated and connected digital dentistry. We've introduced DS Core to 39 countries, and we've launched 85 new functions and capabilities to the platform since the initial launch just two years ago. We've seen adoption increase with each meaningful advancement to the platform. We ended 2024 with more than 37,000 unique user accounts, more than doubling our base year over year.

Platform adoption is growing across the board, including increases in connected equipment, increases in lab order placed, and paid accounts. By providing a range of tools that enhance efficiency, productivity, and growth, DS Core is simplifying dentistry to drive better outcomes for patients and clinicians. In December 2024, we introduced the new DS Core Enterprise solution. We aim to support DSOs in growing the usage of digital workflows by equipping their practices with the growing feature set of the DS Core platform while supporting central DSO functions to administer, to monitor, and to analyze their equipment and workflows with full transparency. DS Core Enterprise is the next step in expanding our unique capabilities to DSOs and becoming their preferred partner as they scale, digitalize, and connect their network of practices. In September, we launched Primescan 2, bringing the first-ever cloud-native scanner to the market.

Primescan 2 was powered by DS Core and takes digital connectivity to a new level, a new era for intraoral scanners. This new scanner provides workflow efficiency through its flexibility, through its portability and connectivity, and is another example of our commitment to solve the unmet needs of our customers. There is more to come in innovation in 2025 and 2026 as we design, create, and bring to market new products and technologies to drive workflow efficiencies, to improve patient outcomes, and to enhance customer profitability. We also continue to transform our business by focusing on efficiencies and identifying cost savings opportunities. This allows us to reinvest strategically into areas that drive demand and enhance commercial excellence, positioning us for sustainable growth. In Q2, we announced a second phase of our transformation to drive $80-$100 million of savings.

At that time, we also shared the areas that we identified for strategic reinvestment, including standing up a virtual sales organization, enhancing our SureSmile software and commercial presence, e-commerce, and customer service. As we shared earlier, we expect the redeployment of some Byte resources to help us in several areas to improve, but specifically to accelerate the SureSmile opportunity and improve the patient experience for us. We are ahead of schedule with our investment to our virtual sales team, and early performance indicators are positive. For example, the team has made over 16,000 phone calls and reached out to 6,000 unique accounts since November the 7th, and these accounts would likely not have had a Dentsply Sirona touchpoint during that time. We also have to acknowledge areas where we have not performed as expected, and one of those areas is the U.S. implants business.

We have stepped back to understand what missteps we have made with respect to, given our investments over the past two years. Importantly, in 2025, we do expect to more fully digitalize our implant portfolio through DS Core. We know that previously our SureSmile software had a well-respected backend, but the user interface was suboptimal and hindered adoption of our technology. We have commenced the necessary improvements and expect to release those later this year. We have also started the long-overdue improvements on our website and e-commerce portals and expect them to be released this year too. Both of these initiatives are being aided by some of the Byte redeployments that I mentioned earlier. We are focused on executing a wide range of initiatives to unlock the potential of our company, which we all deeply believe in.

By focusing our organization on our foundational initiatives, which we've previously spoken about, we have made meaningful progress across our organization from ERP deployments to increasing customer reach through our newly launched virtual sales team and an improved regulatory and launch process that has yielded eight FDA clearances out of eight submissions in 2024 and 21 new product launches globally in 2024 as well. As I just noted, we believe in the potential of our uniquely positioned company, and we plan to continue our efforts to improve and increase the hygiene of our organization to introduce new customer-focused innovation, particularly in our digital and connected technology platforms, to reduce our cost structure and to reignite and drive profitable revenue growth. So in closing, I would like to leave you with a few takeaways. First, Dentsply Sirona remains well-positioned with an end-to-end dental portfolio and a clear strategy to execute against.

Second, innovation is a cornerstone of our growth plans, and we have demonstrated our commitment to this important driver in the dental industry. Thirdly, we are investing for growth, and our investments are enabled by the continued work we're doing to shape our organization and progress all of our foundational initiatives. Fourth, we recognize that 2025 is an important year for us. Beginning to deliver on the promise of this company is essential. We believe we are on the right track with a strong team in place and an executable plan for 2025 and beyond. We look forward to providing you our Q4 and full year 2024 results in February, along with an outdated or with an updated outlook. Thank you.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. Thank you, Simon.

First up, I just want to kind of walk through some of the dynamics on aligners given the updates that you gave us this week. At your most recent analyst day, you noted that you expected over 20% growth in the aligner market just given SureSmile and Byte. Today, you noted that aligners are targeting kind of that double-digit growth range. Given some of the refocus on the Byte model here, are you still expecting double digits to be into that 20% range, or could double digits mean more something like 10, just given some of that reprioritization there?

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

Yeah, thanks, Rachel. So if I look globally at our SureSmile business, for example, we have grown in excess of 20% in Europe fairly systematically over the past several quarters. And the European growth is now becoming very meaningful, or the European number is becoming very meaningful for us. If we take out some of the one-timers from 2024, we're actually growing on the aligner piece. We're actually growing in the mid to high single digits in that space. We believe we have a differentiated platform with SureSmile. We believe that there is an opportunity to create further demand with some of the resources that we are reallocating. And so I would say that our double-digit growth is still very achievable for our SureSmile platform, and it is one of the highest growth categories in dental. We have an opportunity to, we feel, to take share and to drive penetration.

That's what we're heavily focused on.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. Then just kind of sticking on that same topic of aligners. So in the press release, you noted that you're planning on repositioning Byte within that aligner portfolio to include more in-person dentist oversight. So can you provide more details on what the future operations of how that repositioning will work out? And then specifically, will that DTC model still play a role at all in the positioning, or will you entirely shift that focus into the in-person dentist visits?

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

So if I start at the back end of your question, I think there's an opportunity in the aligner space and arguably in some aspects of dentistry in general for a direct consumer model focused on educating consumers about the choices they have with respect to their dental care. And by Byte over their time, I really generated some robust systems and practices to create awareness and to drive demand and also to develop tools and capabilities that enhance the experience for patients who were dealing with the Byte model. So we plan on deploying them across our portfolios where we think it's applicable. Everything will be dentist-centric. The regulatory requirements are there, and so all patients will be assessed by a dentist at the start and will continue to have ongoing monitoring by the dentist during their treatment plan.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. And then you also mentioned in that press release leveraging some of Byte's core competencies and expanding that digital customer journey for patients. So can you talk about how you plan on integrating some of those core competencies in the digital customer journey into the broader aligner portfolio?

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

Yeah, so we had a pretty powerful app on the Byte side to ensure their continued connectivity with that team. And so we're going to recast that into other parts of our business. So the patients and the aligner patients in particular are continuously connected back to our company and back to their treating dentist.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

That's helpful. Maybe shifting over more to just your view on the market expectations across dental. Obviously, 2024 was a challenging year for the dental end market. So can you walk us through how that environment has really progressed throughout 4Q and if customer demand is trending better entering 2025? And overall, do you expect that end market to materially improve in 2025?

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

As you know, Rachel, we do a quarterly customer survey where we get 1,500-2,000 respondents. We've just done a small one here in the U.S. with 85 respondents, and we'll share when we get it complete, the more globalized version of that on our Q4 call. I would say footfall or patient traffic in the U.S. has not changed significantly in the past quarter. It's plus or minus 1% as it has been throughout 2024. I think there's some elements of positivity around capital equipment purchases. And if you take a close look at the ADA survey, I think their data suggests that there's, I would say, a markedly improved sentiment with respect to intent to purchase capital equipment in 2025.

So the environment is not getting any worse from what we see, and there may be some signs of some light at the end of the tunnel with respect to capital purchases. And then, as I noted, we'll provide some insight into Germany in particular, which, as you all know, is critically important for us, particularly around the capital piece and Japan and Australia on our Q4 call.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. Maybe just digging into that equipment versus consumable trends a little bit more. Can you walk us through your customer conversations toward the end of the year across equipment versus the consumables part of the portfolio? You've mentioned that consumables have remained more stable. So how should we expect that to trend into 2025? Are you seeing heightened pressures anywhere just given macro challenges, some of the elective procedures and things like that?

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

On the consumables, as you know, that's driven by patient footfall into a clinic. But we have launched some new products in that space that have performed pretty well for us. The X-Smart Pro+, a new endodontic motor, and the Reciproc Blue files have done very well for us. We're seeing good adoption. We're seeing competitive account wins, and we're seeing stickiness with respect to the files themselves. We're pretty comfortable with our endodontic business, and the footfall for the consumables business in general is not suggesting any deterioration. On the capital side, I think it continues to be a wait and see, notwithstanding some of the positivity that one could argue the ADA survey put out there.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. That's helpful. Then just sticking on this idea of end market backdrop and market growth, are there anywhere where you believe that Dentsply Sirona can outgrow the market in 2025? Which products do you view as taking a little bit longer to recover on the flip side as well?

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

We've commented on aligners already. I think it's fair to say we've been taking some share in aligners on a global basis with SureSmile. Of course, we're not a large player in that market compared to the competition, but we do expect our double-digit growth profile to continue in that space and so exceed the market expectations. In our connected technologies business, we were under pressure. The market was under pressure in 2024, particularly in Germany, and imaging was a large source of that pressure for us, the high-end imaging. So we reintroduced Orthophos SL back in the April or May timeframe, and that really helped stem the bleeding for us on our imaging platform with our scanners being connected to DS Core. And I mentioned in the prepared remarks, 85 incremental additions to DS Core capability in the past two years.

We feel we can outgrow the market in the scanner space and create a digital ecosystem for our customers that's going to improve workflow efficiency, reduce chair time, reduce customers coming back, and increase the profitability of our customers. And then finally, the high growth category that we have not, to acknowledge it, where we have not performed nearly as well as we and many of you expected is implants. So we are taking a long, hard look at what missteps we made there. As you know, we invested in the U.S. sales team. We doubled down on clinical education in that space, and we have yet to see traction, and it continues to be a source of disappointment for us.

When I look at our scorecard about what we've done in the past two years, that is a glaring red dot on our scorecard, and we need to address that because it's an integral part of our plans moving forward.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. Maybe a more general market question as well is just one of the updates that we've gotten in recent months is the election and the new Trump administration. There's been a lot of noise for, I think, all the healthcare investors in the room, and I would say that maybe dental is one of the areas that's been a little bit more insulated from that noise. So can you walk us through, do you see any impact in light of the new administration to Dentsply Sirona's business, and has it impacted any of your customer conversations as well?

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

We don't see that much of an impact for us. If you're talking about tariffs specifically, we have a very small footprint in China. Less than 5% of our materials come from the Chinese market, so we don't see any impact there. And then our site in Mexicali is covered on the Maquiladora structure. So we don't see the administration having a negative effect or that much of a negative effect on us. Of course, the macro conditions with respect to reimbursement has an effect on the dental industry in general, and I think that is absolutely not a tailwind for ourselves nor other parts of the industry either.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. And then maybe shifting to some of your targets. You previously had this $3.26 EPS target. You've talked about how you're withholding comments on that, just given some of the dynamics of the Byte situation, which is understandable. But can you give us an update on some of the other moving parts in terms of how you were planning on getting there? Things like the restructuring, SG&A savings initiatives, the SKU optimization efforts as well.

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

Yeah, yeah. So when we put that target out there, it's been a North Star for our organization with respect to our internal programs and obviously trying to drive revenue growth there. We had said that our growth targets were there in the context of a more normalized macro environment, and clearly we haven't been there. However, when I think about all of the internal work that we have done and the scorecard that we keep track of, we feel that our SKU rationalization is on track. We have eliminated more than 92% of our non-revenue generating SKUs. We are beginning the process of migrating the revenue generating SKUs this year in 2025. We've done three or four pilots around the world to make sure that we're not going to be too disruptive to either ourselves or our customers. We have closed manufacturing sites and closed distribution sites.

We committed to a 10%-15% reduction in our manufacturing network by the end of 2026, and we feel that that is on track. As many of you know the history of our company, Dentsply came up through acquisitions. Sirona came up through acquisitions, and when they merged, it was just a bunch of acquisitions that had never been integrated with systems or processes. And one of those systems is ERP. So today we have 14 ERP systems. We immediately started the process of migrating to a singular one. We went live with SAP in the U.K. in August with only a few minor headaches. We went live with the first phase of our U.S. introduction of SAP in November with a few more minor headaches, but minor headaches nonetheless, and we will continue that throughout this year. We feel we're completely on track with respect to ERP.

As we noted when we announced it, we adopted a very standardized life sciences SAP S/4HANA model, and we think that this standardization and the lack of customization has helped us avoid some of the major pitfalls. So if I look at our scorecard on the internal things from ERP to SKU to network to quality to compliance, I feel that we are well on track on all of those aspects.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. That's helpful. Maybe shifting over to implants then. So on implants, can you just walk us through where are we in terms of the revamped go-to-market strategy here? Can you elaborate on what changes you've made on the commercial side and what you have left in order to revamp growth in this segment? And then also, how should we specifically think about value implants as we head into 2025?

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

Yeah. So we had a sustained period before many of us arrived at the company of de-investing on the implant side, of three or four years of double-digit sales rep turnover, and with a sales team that was, quite frankly, too small. So we increased the sales team by about 40%-50%. We've had very low turnover there in the past two years. We feel our portfolio is reasonably robust when we talk to customers. We're working on the digitalization side of that portfolio to ensure that the connectivity that customers want is there. We have invested in clinical education in the past 18 months as well. That is a core driver of performance in the implant space, and we have yet to see traction on it, as I noted, Rachel. We are doing a deep dive to understand why. It doesn't seem to be the products.

Obviously, the reps need time to bed in and not only influence the individual who places the implant, but the network of referrers that send patients to that implantologist. You have to remember that when a dentist sends a patient for an implant, the implantologist implants the screw. The patient comes back to the referring clinician for the restoration. So not only do we have to convince the dentist or the implantologist to put in a DS screw, we have to convince the referrer that the DS restoration and the whole system is of merit and of value. And then on the premium versus value implant, we have seen growth in value over the past number of quarters. It's still about 20%-25% of our business.

It is present globally, and some of the headwinds that we experienced in the Q3 timeframe were related to Turkey, and it's a big value implant market for us, and the implications of the war in Israel and Gaza on our ability to sell product into Israel. So that was a unique factor in 2024.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. Then maybe just shifting over to distributor relationships. Can you spend a minute talking about your relationships with your distribution partners and any changes in channel dynamics that might affect your sales strategy here?

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

Yeah. So I would say no changes in channel strategy with the exception of the creation of our virtual sales team. In dentistry, there are about 200,000 dentists in the U.S., let's say 110, 120,000 individual practices. And dentists are on many street corners, and to have a commercial team that's in cars driving around every city and town in the U.S. is a proposition that's very, very expensive. So we wanted to increase our reach, and we created a virtual sales team. As I noted in the prepared remarks, we have in excess of 100 people now sitting in our Charlotte office making phone calls each and every day. As I noted, 16,000 phone calls since the first phone call was made on the morning of November 7th, 6,000 customers contacted, and the feedback has been very positive.

These customers, we have a long tail of accounts that buy product from us, but not that much product from us. And so having reps that are able to reach out to them and engage with them, we feel is a positive thing. With respect to the part of your question on distributors, we continue to work very closely with all distributors and with our two main ones in particular. We're speaking to Henry Schein and Patterson in particular every week. They continue to execute for us, continue to service our products, continue to sell our products, and we remain committed and in discussions with them at all times. So no changes on our sales plans except for the addition of a virtual sales team that drives demand for everyone, us where we're direct and our distribution partners where we're indirect.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. That's helpful. Maybe just shifting over then to the cost savings. Can you spend a minute talking about how you're progressing towards your $80 million-$100 million run rate cost savings target for 2025, and then what impact do you anticipate that will have on your margins?

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

So yeah, we feel we're well on track. We had identified in excess of 70% at our last update. We think we're going to realize, we're very confident we're going to realize those savings throughout 2025. As we noted, we plan on reinvesting some of that into different parts of our business to drive growth, improve our efficiency, improve our hygiene, and to make us a more robust competitor in the dental industry.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. And then maybe in the last minute or two, Simon, can you just walk us through what do you think is the most underappreciated aspect of the Dentsply story?

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

We have been diligently focused for the past two years on improving the foundations of our company from ERP to SKU to network to quality to more disciplined R&D. And I think once we get past, once we really get into an execution mode commercially and the macroeconomic environment begins to turn, or at least begins not to provide headwinds to us, I think the benefits throughout our P&L are going to be realized very, very swiftly. We've systematically reduced costs, taken costs out of our company, which will benefit us in the medium to long term, and that's what we've been intently focused on for the past two years.

Rachel Vatnsdal
Executive Director of Equity Research, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. And with that, we are out of time. So thank you so much, everyone, for joining us today.

Simon Campion
President and CEO, Dentsply Sirona

Thank you.

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