Caren Mason
Analyst · Mizuho Group. Anthony, your line is now open
Thank you, Brian. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us on today’s call. STAAR achieved 30% net sales growth in the third quarter, which reflects strong EVO ICL unit growth in APAC and strong accelerating growth in the U.S. despite constant currency challenges and in Europe macroeconomic headwinds. In the third quarter, global ICL unit growth was up 40% year-over-year. We advanced our patient awareness, engagement and market building initiatives for EVO in the U.S. during and subsequent to the third quarter, highlighted by media campaigns with global entertainment celebrity, Joe Jonas and NBA player Max Strus and introduced our presbyopia lens EVO Viva to surgeons at our experts meeting preceding the Annual Congress of the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons. In China, we concluded another successful peak busy season that put EVO on track to exceed a 25% share of refractive surgery market units by year end. However, due to tighter COVID restrictions in China, resulting in expected delayed demand in the fourth quarter, ongoing headwinds in Europe, weakness in the yen and euro, and lower other products sales, we now anticipate total net sales will be approximately $285 million for fiscal 2022, which represents $300 million adjusted for constant currency. Our fiscal 2022 outlook includes ICL sales of approximately $272 million representing 28% year-over-year growth and other product sales of approximately $13 million. As you know, today, it is vital that STAAR focus on the significant growth opportunities we have with our premium EVO products. At the same time, our low-margin other products business, which represents approximately 5% of sales and consists of cataract IOLs, IOL injectors and injector parts, has faced increasing supply chain challenges. As a result of third-party materials and supply chain challenges that only affect our other products business we will no longer be able to support other products as we have historically. We will continue to support customers of other products through the end of 2023. As we look to fiscal 2023, despite the aforementioned challenges, we expect to achieve approximately 30% ICL sales growth year-over-year to approximately $355 million in total company net sales, which contemplates limited sales from other products. We see tremendous growth potential for our EVO family of lenses globally and look forward to continuing our focus, efforts and resources on especially large growth opportunities in the U.S. and Asia in 2023. Turning back to the third quarter of 2022, for the third quarter, global ICL unit growth was up 40% year-over-year. By geography, we achieved strong ICL unit growth in China, up 52%; the United States, up 63%; Japan, up 40%; South Korea, up 49%; and APAC distributor markets, up 47%, all as compared to the prior year quarter. In the U.S., we are pleased with our progress in advancing the adoption of EVO lenses through patient awareness and surgeon engagement. After our August partnership announcement with singer, songwriter and actor, Joe Jonas, we launched EVO brand advertising featuring Joe in the U.S. on September 26. The campaign included targeted geographic and multi-channel advertising to our core 21 to 35 year old target population on YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, display advertising and search engine marketing. Last month, we announced our partnership with NBA player, Max Strus, a sharpshooter for the Miami Heat. Max is another example of a person with a myopia prescription of less than minus 5 diopters, who had EVO lenses implanted and is now thrilled with his new 2010 vision, which is better than 2020. Max joins other EVO brand ambassadors in the U.S., including a top model, a TV chef, a style expert and blogger of fitness and wellness coach and others who are helping to inform potential patients about the benefits of EVO based on their own EVO experiences. Each of our ambassadors speaks to potential EVO patients with a unique voice that we believe will continue to build momentum and contribute to EVO’s broad success in the U.S. YouTube is the second most popular search engine for our target audience. In August, we launched our EVO ICL educational series on YouTube, which has now expanded to 8 videos as we added individual videos about Joe and Max’s decision to choose EVO. The EVO ICL channel on YouTube is now approaching 6 million video views. Going forward, we will continue to partner with new micro, macro and celebrity EVO brand ambassadors in the U.S. since we have experienced through our earlier partnerships that we can successfully expand our engagement with potential patients. We are also engaging with U.S. refractive surgeons. Our goal is to accelerate education of our lens, so that surgeons may increasingly transition the mix of vision correction options or entire practices to lens based solutions with our EVO family of lenses. As of today, we have trained and certified over 550 U.S. surgeons on EVO since FDA approval approximately 7 months ago. We remain on track to meet or exceed our goal of training and certifying 600 U.S. surgeons on EVO in 2022. Please take note that “the number of surgeons trained” is just one of the metrics we establish, manage and measure for surgeon and patient engagement. Our U.S. commercial organization and STAAR management is working diligently to assist patients in their journey for visual freedom from glasses and contact lenses and to assist surgeons in their confidence and desire to offer the EVO lens based solution to appropriate patients seeking visual freedom. We are focused on transforming the refractive industry for qualified patients to an EVO lens-based industry. We are pleased to report accelerating unit growth in the U.S., up 63% year-over-year in the third quarter and up from 36% in Q2. We anticipate unit growth in the U.S. will further accelerate in the fourth quarter to approximately 100% year-over-year. Innovation and strengthening the moat around our business remains a strategic imperative for STAAR. This includes potential expansion and enhancements of our EVO lenses to new indications and execution of other R&D, clinical and regulatory pathways to get our existing and next generation products to market and to certified surgeons. As we look to fiscal 2023, our outlook is for a strong trajectory of growth for EVO ICL continued market share gains, prudent investment, growing earnings, and many happy new EVO ICL patients and surgeons. Patrick?