What is the state of this company?

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Anonymous

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Could someone from the inside not using a company computer give an honest view of the state of this company?

Is this a management (CEO and VPs and Directors) that you like to work for?

Is there a long term future at this company?
 






Anonymous said:
Could someone from the inside not using a company computer give an honest view of the state of this company?

Is this a management (CEO and VPs and Directors) that you like to work for?

Is there a long term future at this company?
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The company is in New York State. No. For sale sign on the building.
 






Very uncertain future. Probably a new CEO and management team after the sale of this company in December. Financial health of the company will not be known until 6 to 12 months after the company goes public.
 


















One strong indicator is that their US lens business. This primary driver of B+L revenue is still ranked 4 out of 4 contact lens companies and their last 2 lens launches (Purevision 2 and Purevision 2 Toric) have been less then impressive.

The lens sides leadership may show profits but what you are not seeing is behind the curtain is a company overloading the contact lens distributors with overstock just to hit numbers as the reps who are killing themselves to make sales are missing their numbers quarter after quarter (sales numbers a year ago were posted on a weekly basis, now the reps are lucky to see them every other month and upwards of 80% of the sales force missed there number last year). What you need to understand if you do not already is that those distributors are not consumers, they are middle men for private practice ODs, and these same ODs are still not buying B+L they way they are the other big 3, despite B+L practically giving the product away free right now. This is primary due to ease of use and this creates an even bigger problems in the huge retail market where B+L is getting destroyed. Wal-Mart and Costco ODs don't have time to go through the lens comfort discussion with patients when they can reach for something that works right then and there. Consumers especially in retail want quick, easy, and comfortable and B+L lens struggles at that.

In many ways B+L lens business is very much like their Rochester neighbor Kodak, they are a dinosaur. They have a well know name but lost their market dominance a very long time ago and still think that ODs and patients will listen to the "Vision trumps Comfort" marketing they have been pitching almost the last decade. A great example of the blunders taking place is launches a new lens and called it Purevison2, knowing but not acknowledging that the vast majority of ODs link Purevision as an old lens that is difficult to fit due to comfort. Kudos to the reps that launched PV2 because it was DOA in name alone, and the Toric launch was even worse. Another sad example is that B+L ignored until recently creating a presence in the OD teaching institutions throughout the country so for countless years practitioners were trained on competitors lens.

To actually grow and maybe contend for even the 3rd spot which is a good stretch in sales numbers B+L will need to not just create a lens that competes on a real comfort level but more importantly think outside of the box bringing something dramatically redefines the market. A good example would significantly lowering the cost of manufacturing a new lens so they can sell at a much lower price point while retain current margins (I believe it cost them 3x as much to make a PV2 lens as it does J&J to make a Oasys lens). Currently it seems that B+L believes they are still in a market were there are a total of 3 to 4 lens to compete with not 3 to 4 new lens a year and an already over saturated market that now has upwards of 10 lens per category in them.

Very soon but hopefully post any IPO or buyout the bottom will fall out, distributors will be too stocked to accept more product and the US lens side will no longer be able to fill the gaps and the true losses the reps are seeing every day will come to light. To be honest a true look at the US contact lens side is very disheartening as there are a great deal of good people working very very hard in a market that has passed them by. I only hope that a IPO or buyout finds them in more innovative and forward thinking hands.
 






If B&L is making sales to warehouses that are really not sales so they can show large numbers before the IPO that would be a problem. That is just really transferring inventory as next year if the warehouses are packed with unsellable product B&L sales will plummet.

If they go IPO the banks should ask B&L about this to see if it is true. It is not fair to the small investor to get false, misleading claims about company profitability.
 












If there was something good to say about the B+L vision care products it would be Biotrue. Its launch was a huge success and it has created a solid following with ODs (luckily they didn't name it Renu 2 which apparently their marketing was considering). The only issue now is that the market leader, Alcon is part of Novartis who also owns Ciba. Overnight their voice grew ten fold and so did their leverage in packaging deals of lens rebates matched with solution savings. Depending on the month Ciba is the second largest lens company and that gives them a lot of customers looking to save money not just on their lens but their solutions and you can bet in this economy people want savings (keep in mind there is a good gap between B+L in 4 and whom ever is in 3rd wether that is Ciba or Cooper).

B+L vision care reps are outnumbered at best 3 to 1 vs Alcon/Ciba and at worst as high as 5 to 1. This voice and leverage has definitely slowed Biotrue's initial momentum coupled with the fact that the single largest independant OD organization, Vision Source, has what could be looked at as a solutions exclusivity contract with Alcon. This means that thousands of private practice ODs aren't even touching Biotrue.

It is a long answer to a short question, but in summary, the solutions side is a lot better then it was 2 years ago, but the initial momentum of Biotrue is being blunted by some smart tactics. In comparison it is and a ton better then the lens side of their business. I don't think you would find a lens rep that wouldn't tell you they wish they had been the ones to carry and get payed on Biotrue instead of the solutions sales force that was hired.
 












Anonymous said:
If B&L is making sales to warehouses that are really not sales so they can show large numbers before the IPO that would be a problem. That is just really transferring inventory as next year if the warehouses are packed with unsellable product B&L sales will plummet.

If they go IPO the banks should ask B&L about this to see if it is true. It is not fair to the small investor to get false, misleading claims about company profitability.
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Holy craps! I worked at BL from the 1980s till 1998. They are still front loading distributors???
They would put pressure on us to sell lots of lens by end of quarter by offering all these rebates. The following quarter docs did not want lens as they had tons of them stocked. They also had the distributors stocked. Yeps we had lay offs back then.
 






Anonymous said:
If B&L is making sales to warehouses that are really not sales so they can show large numbers before the IPO that would be a problem. That is just really transferring inventory as next year if the warehouses are packed with unsellable product B&L sales will plummet.

If they go IPO the banks should ask B&L about this to see if it is true. It is not fair to the small investor to get false, misleading claims about company profitability.
Click to expand...

Omg lol! Someone look up the cover of a Business Week from about 20 years ago with then CEO Dan Gill on the cover. Same crap, we would sell the distributors lenses in Dec to register the sales for end of year and ship the stuff in jan. Front loading distributors among other stuff. What is it with Rochester people? Yes mgt from Kodak and BL just never learned. Two world class companies went downhill and lost their market leadership. They should use mgt as an example for case studies. Everyone is so conservative that no one knows how to be innovative. I guess they keep hiring the same mentality for leadership. Amazing I left 15 years ago and this company is stuck.
 






Anonymous said:
Omg lol! Someone look up the cover of a Business Week from about 20 years ago with then CEO Dan Gill on the cover. Same crap, we would sell the distributors lenses in Dec to register the sales for end of year and ship the stuff in jan. Front loading distributors among other stuff. What is it with Rochester people? Yes mgt from Kodak and BL just never learned. Two world class companies went downhill and lost their market leadership. They should use mgt as an example for case studies. Everyone is so conservative that no one knows how to be innovative. I guess they keep hiring the same mentality for leadership. Amazing I left 15 years ago and this company is stuck.
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The sad thing is that when you left and they were pulling the bait and switch they were the #1 contact lens company and still owned brands like Ray Ban. Flash forward to 2012, they are a distant #4 and still paying Ciba royalties on every Purevison lens sold.
 


















Anonymous said:
B+L may be at the bottom now but within six months B+L will be #1 with the recent introduction of a number of new products.
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You mean the new Daily, good luck with that. Word is it will be at a premium price, so your bringing out a lens that is going to cost more not less in a lens catagory that is the smallest. You just totaly validated the post aboves point of B+L having no clue what they are doing.
 






Anonymous said:
You mean the new Daily, good luck with that. Word is it will be at a premium price, so your bringing out a lens that is going to cost more not less in a lens catagory that is the smallest. You just totaly validated the post aboves point of B+L having no clue what they are doing.
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The new daily is simply the best lens on the market. People will pay for the best. Best in comfort, best in convenience, best optics, best oxygen permeability, and it is biotrue because it moisturizes as it sits on your eye.
 






Anonymous said:
The new daily is simply the best lens on the market. People will pay for the best. Best in comfort, best in convenience, best optics, best oxygen permeability, and it is biotrue because it moisturizes as it sits on your eye.
Click to expand...

It is true. Rarely in history does a breakthrough product like this hit the market. This lens should revolutionize the contact lens business. The IPO price will be HUGE.
 






Anonymous said:
The new daily is simply the best lens on the market. People will pay for the best. Best in comfort, best in convenience, best optics, best oxygen permeability, and it is biotrue because it moisturizes as it sits on your eye.
Click to expand...

This statement is so outlandish I cant tell if this person is just pulling peoples chains but, if you have worked in any sales job in the OD industry and live in the real word this statement is not just naive, but just plain ignorant. The optics story has never stuck and never will. How's the HD labling going, oh wait the FDA still hasn't approved that. You do realize management has been feeding the salesforce the same story your spewing for the last 6-8 years. The same years they watched themselves go from dominace to an afterthought. Case in point, wasn't it only a little over a year ago the same claims were being made about the PV2 toric and a year before that PV2? Both lens don't hold a candle to their competition and play a 4th lens role in a good 60% of ODs (that's a conservative number).

In the real world, B+L has two serious launch challenges, very little presence in Vision Source the largest private OD organization, fiercely loyal to Cooper & Ciba with almost 3000 private ODs including more infulentual AOA presidents then any other. As for your WalMarts, Costcos, and other major retailers good luck having one of those ODs push a dramatic increase in cost of lens to their patients who are already happy in what they are wearing, but both these obstacles really won't matter because B+L will most likely do their limited fit set launch dance that has worked so well before.

Sadly if the above statement was serious they have no true understanding of the daily market. All daily lens are comfortable what truly sold the Solflens daily when it was launched was that B+L finally came out with a comfort comparable lens in a packaging that did not suck and most of all it was cheaper then the other dailies. As for the oxygen statement, seriously, dailies due to the fact they are replaced everyday don't need a high dkt and has almost a non existent rate of oxygen related adverse events (and you won't have the highest dkt because that honor goes to TrueEye). Comfort and cost and pretty much all of the current dailies have comfort.

If B+L intends for this miracle daily to change anything they will need to go after the 2week market owned by Oasys with an optics story that hasnt worked for the last 10 years, a lens that will require a very cost sensitive market to pay more for something that could be as comfortable because no matter how you cut it Oasys may be a lot of things but it is what all lens measure themselves against in comfort. Bottom line, ODs rarely switch healthly happy patients to lens that cost more, they will not try to fix something that is not broken and take the risk of upsetting an already happy patient.

Welcome to reality
 












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