As the world’s No. 3 implant company, Osstem Implant contributes to improving people’s oral health by helping about 110,000 dentists worldwide provide better medical service. Taking a step further, we contribute to promoting health of a greater number of people by developing higher-quality products and securing many more dentists

In more specific terms of vision, the company aims to grow into the world’s top implant company by 2026 by establishing subsidiaries in 46 countries and achieving USD 1.78 billion (AED 6.53 billion) in annual sales. After that, it aims to increase the proportion of its overseas sales to 85% and achieve USD 7.74 billion (AED 28.42 illion) in annual sales by 2036.

As such, my role is to solidify the ground for making Osstem Implant the world’s No. 1 implant company and, furthermore, the world’s No. 1 dental service company.

“Customer feedback serves as the driving force for elevating our R&D capabilities”

With the goal of growing as the top global implant provider, the company is currently concentrating more resources on R&D. The percentage of R&D investment in our revenue rose from 7% in the early days of my tenure to 11% now, while the number of researchers increased from around 300 people to over 600 people during these years.

After being inaugurated as the CEO of the company, I made efforts to spread the ‘feedback system’ of the research institute to the entire organization of the company. I did so in order to ensure that any negative effects of any policies lead to an understanding of the reasons for such effects through a verification stage. I ensure the verification of policies whenever they are planned and established, and receive feedback from customers when our products are sold. Feedback requires continuous contact. We can improve the capabilities and job quality of employees through constant feedback. The secret to technological development is endless repetition.

As soon as I joined Osstem Implant, I was appointed as the head of the R&D Center in Busan. In the initial phase, I focused on establishing a system for the R&D center. In five years, I succeeded in developing a new type of implant by applying stress mechanical engineering, which is my field of major. This was highly evaluated as ‘quality product’ in stress distribution effect, but not popular among dentists. It is because it involved a complicated procedure although the long-term stability after procedure was good. In other words, it was a technically sensitive implant for dentists.

As I realized that surgical procedures should be conveniently conducted in order to raise the success rate of medical instruments, I have devoted myself to the development of products with enhanced convenience since then. I optimized the shape of the screw, and the thickness and angle of the implant to enable dentists to easily plant the implant in ulitis, resulting in a big success.

Since each individual has a different oral structure, it is common that 3~5 surgical procedures out of 10 procedures are satisfactory when implants are used without optimizing the shape of the screw and thickness and angle of the implant. In this case, dentists highly welcomed such implants that are optimized for individual cases as their satisfaction ratio rose to 80~90%. Thanks to this, Osstem Implant could dominate the domestic market that had been dominated by imported products in a short period of time.

Digital Dentistry as Envisioned by Osstem Implant

Although there may be slight differences by time, it is crucial that oral health service providers pay more attention to digitalization and build their digital capabilities. I could perceive long ago that digital dentistry was the major movement of the age in the dental industry. Given that it is our core business and the degree of its technological difficulty is high, we have long been heavily investing in digital dentistry as I foresaw the necessity of developing our unique technologies.

Currently, we have launched equipment, such as milling machines and printers, and we are expected to introduce software products, such as computer-aided design (CAD), soon. Once digital dentistry is fully equipped, dentists will be able to treat patients more easily with a higher success rate. When they can simulate the position, direction and angle of placing implants based on the 3D image data of patients secured through computerized tomography (CT) and scanner, I believe that dentists can then minimize the side effects of surgery, while narrowing the skill gap between dentists. Thus, when digital dentistry becomes completely available, the ability gap between global dentists, as well as those in Korea, will be reduced, and this outcome corresponds to the management philosophy of the company that aspires to realize the healthy life of mankind.