Acteon disputes Air Techniques' market share claims

Acteon is disputing claims made by Air Techniques in a recent press release about sales growth and caries detection device market share.

Acteon markets the SoproLife caries detection system, while Air Techniques markets the Spectra, also for caries detection.

In the Air Techniques release, the company claimed its Spectra device led the caries detection aid category in dollar sales with a 2010 market share of almost 50%.

But Acteon points out that no data sources for this claim were cited.

"The claim was most likely made via an analysis of a recent Strategic Data Marketing (SDM, www.sdmdata.com) report," Acteon said. "This sales and marketing database is frequently the source for sales and marketing statistics for the U.S. and U.K. dental industries."

Focusing on a single product category and making a global conclusion about market share can lead to a distorted impression of that product's position in the market, Acteon noted.

"Because the Spectra device is a single-purpose device, it is categorized in one place and one place only, as a caries detection device," the company said. "On the other hand, Acteon's SoproLife device is both a caries detection device and intraoral camera. Therefore, it may vary on how it is classified in certain market data reports according to the dealer who is providing the information."

Also, Acteon is a provider in the integrated dental chair manufacturer market, and "hundreds of sales of the SoproLife as an integrated option on a delivery system or chair from a manufacturer may be counted as a delivery system as a whole and not broken out with their individual components," the company noted. "It is virtually impossible to really make an accurate claim of leading a product category in dollar or unit sales without taking into account these other factors."

A true and unbiased analysis of market share would require an accounting of sales of both Spectra and SoproLife by their SKUs, ignoring the arbitrary and subjective categorization process, Acteon added.

In response to Air Techniques' claims of market share dominance, Acteon said it contacted the four largest dental distributors in the U.S. (two national and two regional), which collectively represent more than a 75% market share of equipment and technology sales. "Using unit sales data, we have compared the performance of Spectra versus SoproLife in terms of number of units sold in the U.S. throughout 2010," Acteon said. This data shows that SoproLife outsold the Spectra device by almost a 2-1 margin, the company added.

"We thought we should make this information available to clarify the message that is being delivered to the market as well as clinicians," said Wyatt Wilson, vice president and chief operating officer of Acteon. "When someone is spending a few thousand dollars on a certain technology, we want to make sure he or she has all the information available to them prior to their purchase."