B&L Surgical Rumor-Victus

Quote

Anonymous

Guest
Adam Grossberg and Dr. Cal Roberts were in St. Louis yesterday and mentioned that B&L Surgical and the splinter company TPV that was spun off a few years back with the Refractive equipment. Will be coming back together by the end of June to support the Victus Femto Second Laser platform for cataract surgery.
 












makes no difference. lost first to market. Alcon smoked ya. Going to keep smokin ya.

no financial benefit to practice to have femtosecond other than patient demand to have one and if you gotta have one, they are going to go alcon.
now proven in more sites, bundled surgical & pharma back room deals.

you're toast. B&Ls two divisions don't even talk to each other and the rep turn over in both has fragmented any long lasting surgical relationships.
toast toast toast.

good luck trying to sell that pig.
 












Anonymous said:
Our femto will be half the cost.
Click to expand...

The best thing you can say about your femto is that it will be cheaper??? I don't have a dog in the fight. I don't work for any surgical company, but I've been at the meetings and have talked to MDs with Alcon's femto.

the only thing femto has going for it is the "perceived" clinical benefit by the patient. Your top tier surgeons with the best outcomes have no clinically significant difference in their outcomes. The docs that probably need it the most will never buy it and the other half of the docs don't buy into the clinical but want to have what will draw the patients.

alcon's femto is the patient draw, you missed first to market. now you're going to sell on price. That's pathetic. It means you have no better value. Actually only half the value. Then alcon will drop theirs or bundle in surgical.

point is B&L has been a day late for the past 10 years in pharma & surgical. even over paying for eyeonics was just a classic example.

B&L is not developing their own tech anymore. They lost what made the company what it was. It was an innovator for 130 years. since the 90s it hasn't done anything original that has been a true value add to the Docs. They've come up with some good things but they haven't worked in the market. Like some lenses and retisert. They have to come up with something original that the market wants or the company is done. I think it's done as a whole. The name will live on in contacts and solutions.
 






Funny pissing match.
Alcon is one of the best marketing companies in the world.
B&L has better lenses (minus MF and Toric) and a vastly superior phaco machine.
AMO has a better multi focal.
Leaves Alcon with a tinted toric with glistenings.
You guys can't just drink your company Kool Aid.
As a surgeon doing a couple thousand procedures a year and over 1000 cataracts, this technology WILL be driven by price......hide and watch.
 






Ohh a doctor on cafe pharma that also isn't on the dole for Alcon.
That's like finding a unicorn on B&Ls cafepharma site.
I don't work for any of them but here is the problem with that market.

No one sells anything up front. The docs demand to have a device for 6 months to a year. Then the competitors start bidding, the docs swap out devices, try that one for 6 months.

The docs use the companies. In the end the final price point will be whoever goes lowest with all the perks added in and B&L still will not win that war. You now have like 7 competitors in the femto space and a few in the cataract realm alone. (i'm not really up on my femto because I really don't care about it, just recalling from trade shows the past year.)

It's a crowded space. It's really not "new" femto has been around for 10 years now. new for cataract... 2 years old. still not new. Other companies beat B&L to the early adopters. That's a huge edge! I would not want to be selling femto second and I wouldn't want to be selling it for B&L in 3rd or 4th to market. Long sales cycle. Installations before getting paid. Forget that.
 






Anonymous said:
No one sells anything up front. The docs demand to have a device for 6 months to a year. Then the competitors start bidding, the docs swap out devices, try that one for 6 months.


I think it's not a stretch to assume that when you make a comment like this, you've never sold a product in the OR before. Nobody holds on to capital for 6 months and any manager that would approve a 6 month evaluation is a moron.

Perhaps this is actually the problem with B&L Surgical...
Click to expand...
 






You're assumption is wrong. Obviously you don't sell capital because it happens all the time. Every MD wants things for free for a perdiod of time to evaluate. When you have something brand new and very expensive you're not selling your first several units without demos. 6 months to 1 year and still trying to get doctors to pay their bills is common. Once you agree to the 3 month trial, then the doc still isn't happy, wants an extension, are you going to deinstall or extend? You extend to try and save the deal. De-installs of 1 year trials are heartbreaking. Has happened to me and many others I know. If the equipment doesn't perform as promised, you're gone. Sometimes you have to threaten to pull device to get the dead-beat docs to pay because they are just sucking you out. I think the original point is B&L is going to have a tough time capturing this segment this late to market. Early adopters get the free demos, by now they have purchased the femto they were deciding on. Now B&L will have to go get second tier docs to buy system out right, good luck with that.
 






Some might not realize the difference between low end capital standard of care type stuff that's well established, low end OR supplies and high end capital.
A femto definitely falls in high end capital in my opinion. I've never sold a surgical device. I sold very high end imaging devices to the same customers and they've pulled the same stuff on me others and their femto reps.
Every rep in capital has customers that have slow paid no paid buyers remorse.
 






Anonymous said:
Our femto will be half the cost.
Click to expand...
Nonsense - the Victus has had a price tag of >600K euro outside the US. and although it is promoted as a refractive flap maker as well as femto cataract - its flaps are woeful, so bad that after trying to get it to work for almost 12 months some KOLs have reverted back to their intralase for refractive surgery.
So the TPV multifunction femto system is now a very very expensive cataract laser
 






Top Bottom
Back
Quote