And we think that’s growth in the mid-single digits. Digital equipment sales continued to be impacted by lower average selling prices and it’s hard to again give you an absolute as to when we expect this to normalize. My sense is, and that’s what our equipment people say, it will normalize sometime in the first quarter of next year. If you look at our international business, overall, volumes of consumer build merchandise held steady across most regions. If you project that into the international equipment sales, there is a slowdown in large equipment in parts of the world. But there are also some unique reasoning for that in places — for example, in places like Australia, there was a tax incentive that ended. So yeah, I think there is some caution amongst our customers in parts of the world because of the macroeconomic issue in parts of Europe.
I don’t think it’s necessarily bad in any one country. Overall speaking, I think health insurance is, in the U.S. typically provided through employment could be a lagging indicator. So this could impact activities, hard to tell. And if it does, it’s probably mostly higher end procedures. I think we indicated that on the implant side in North America, we did see some softness on the premium side. Outside the U.S., of course, we have countries — there’s a lot more government payment to support. So it’s hard to give you an indication of really how far down people’s views would go of the economy having an impact on dentistry. But from the past, it’s never been significant. By the way, we are seeing similar trends between private practices and the large practices.
But of course, equipment sales for the DSOs are not as strong as they were given the cost of interest. But we also have to understand that DSO sales could be lumpy, they always have been. On patient traffic, if you take a look at the ADA [ph] survey, it did indicate some patient traffic slowness in the third quarter, probably mostly in September. There’s an argument that it’s because of the flu, traditional flu, COVID-19 impact. And then you go and you take a look at implants in Europe where they were okay. So there’s not a definitive downward trend, but there is a little bit of caution at the margin. And I think we have to take that position. At least, we have to plan for that.
Jeff Johnson : Yeah. That’s helpful. Thank you, Stanley. And so that kind of helps maybe level set us on the core assumptions. Ron, just my follow up then is, as I see it, and correct me if I’m wrong, there’s three variables on the cyber that we need to think about heading into next year. Do you continue to run any kind of customer retention programs on the spending side? Do you have any kind of just higher core spending on cybersecurity that you’ve got to put in place here that you have to put in place that’s going to structurally take the OpEx side higher? And then three, is there any kind of customer loss? Do you lose maybe 1% or 2% of revenue or something like that? Because not everybody comes back either for risk-mitigating reasons or other reasons.
So just any comment on kind of the two spending categories. Will those be higher next year? And the customer retention, I know it’s hard to predict, but would it be safe to build in maybe just a little bit of bleed away of customer? Or do you think you get pretty much most of that back in? Thank you.
Ron South : Sure, Jeff. I think I’ll kind of address the first item around customer retention and the third item of customer loss somewhat together. And I think we will have a greater feel for that in the coming weeks. The — as I was saying earlier, the restoration of — or the reactivation of our website will bring us much more intelligence in terms of what that customer retention and what the potential for customer loss might be, and as a result, what the necessary investment may be to recover some of that business and some of those customers. And that will be taken into consideration when we communicate our 2024 guidance in February of next year. I think in terms of higher cyber spend, like everything else, we’ll assess where we think is — what is the appropriate investment if we believe it’s necessary relative to anything else, we will do that.
But I think right now, we’re still in the midst of understanding the cause of this. The forensic investigation is ongoing. And we will invest accordingly according to that, if necessary. If it’s necessary to increase that investment, we will.
Operator: Thank you. And the next question comes from the line of John Stansel with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question.
John Stansel : Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I just want to talk about some of the swing factors that could move you from the $0.55 to $0.75 in the cybersecurity headwind. What are some of the factors that you could see? Is it really just a time to ramp back up to 100% of like pre-incident levels? Or is there anything else built in there that we should be thinking about as we look at that?
