How to quadruple the size of the laser eye surgery market

In this post, we show how laser refractive surgeons who capitalise on the presbyopic market opportunity can access a market that is four times the size of the current market for traditional laser eye surgery. If that interests you, read on.

The chart below shows the number of LASIK procedures (in thousands) performed by European surgeons from 2004 to date. It also indicates projected numbers from 2016 to 2020.

Most observers would agree that when compared to the heyday of 2004 to 2007, the curve that follows looks relatively flat.

How can you – as a laser eye surgeon – stimulate growth?

Laser manufacturers have tried by introducing improvements to traditional LASIK laser eye surgery, like wavefront-guided procedures, femtosecond laser flaps, and SMILE. Results improved. Complication rates declined. Today, LASIK is as safe and effective as its ever been with a high success rate.¹https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0161642007010524

As you can see, however, consumers have responded tepidly. We’re still not seeing the growth we all so optimistically imagined would continue from the mid-2000s.

What’s going on?

We think we’ve identified the problem – every advancement in laser refractive surgery has had one thing in common. We’re optimising a procedure for only one market segment – people with refractive errors – like shortsightedness, longsightedness and astigmatism – that dislike their glasses and contact lenses enough to opt for laser eye surgery. So far, we estimate 30 million people have had LASIK. That sounds like a big number, but considering how many people have shortsightedness – that’s 0.1% or 1 in 1,000 worldwide. That’s an exceedingly small penetration rate.

Since ZEISS introduced SMILE in 2010, it has offered a glimmer of hope. Surgeons have since performed over 1 million procedures, and today ZEISS claims that over 10% of global laser vision correction procedures are SMILE. While worth celebrating, there is still a long way to go for laser vision correction to go mainstream.

Imagine opening the door to a market 4 times the size

With refractive surgery for presbyopes (e.g. PRESBYOND ™), however, we’re looking at opening a whole new market.

We presented a 10-minute talk to a group of over 350 surgeons at the ZEISS ERLS 2018. In it, we explained the 3 reasons we think the presbyopic market is ripe with opportunity. And, we showed how laser refractive surgeons who capitalise on this opportunity could access a market that is five times the size of the current market for SMILE and four times the current market for traditional laser eye surgery.

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While we wait for ZEISS to release the official video, we’ve recorded a version of this talk for subscribers to our blog. Just sign-up as a blog subscriber, and we’ll send you this video as part of our subscriber exclusive content by Friday, July 22, 2018 (you do have to confirm that you’re ok to get e-mails from us).