Water, Water, Everywhere . . . And Yet

Competing on price is not, of course, an unfamiliar reality—production/high volume laboratories have been the perceived competitors of small laboratories for decades. But now, with digital technology available to all size laboratories, the competitive arena enables some laboratories to make a comfortable profit via sheer volume and that is one of the causes of industry-wide price erosion.

As you see from our cover story, The Race to the Bottom is the takeaway mantra of respondents to LMT’s 2014 Fee Survey and it isn’t pretty. Because of price competition—fueled largely by full contour zirconia, which has turned into a commodity of sorts—C&B fees have been mostly stagnant. Many laboratories are churning out more units yet raking in lower profits. Not good.

So what are we going to do to turn things around?

There are no black-and-white...