Paragon 28, Inc. (NYSE:FNA) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Albert DaCosta: The reality is that — like Steve was alluding to, I think some of the products we’ve launched more recently, really since the end of ’19, ’20, ’21 were pretty high medical education demand products. And the appetite for medical education right now is pretty strong. I think surgeons — everybody has got a little bit of — they’re zoomed out a little bit, so to speak. And so I feel like there’s just a really strong energy around getting there. Ironically, as I’m saying this, we’ve got a great course going on here at our facility where we’ve got 48 surgeons from around the world here, great faculty, and they’re just taking in all of our products right now. And so I think the ratio, Kyle, to answer your question, is still probably around 50-50 where our medical education courses tend to see about 50% new surgeons to Paragon 28 and about 50% of our attendees roughly are current users looking at additional products.

But of course, like what we’ve got going on right now, even though there may be some focus on particular products, is exposing them to the entire portfolio of Paragon 28. And then the other part of your question is soft tissue. I think the response has been tremendous for some of the more recent launches. Ex Fix has been really strong, soft tissue has been really strong, and it’s really demonstrating the complementary effect some of these products have to all of our other products. We’re getting into these surgeries in a more meaningful way, which is fun to see, and the response to that technology has been great. So I hope that answers your question.

Kyle Rose: It absolutely does. And I’ll throw in Steve here too. You talked about the investments in SAP. I just wanted to see, I guess, when does that go live? And then over what time period do you expect that to start translating to some of the profitability you talked about?

Stephen Deitsch: So Kyle, we launched SAP in the United States on April 1st of this year and we’re already starting to see benefits from that in terms of having visibility into products and inventory management and getting the right products to the right place at the right time, but not too much — not more than enough — more than the products that we need. And it’s going to translate — and it is translating into profitability for us as well beyond inventory. Our teams have better visibility across the board to our operations on a monthly basis. And we mentioned that we’re going to provide guidance for 2023, specifically for EBITDA as well as cash flow when we release our fourth quarter earnings. So we won’t get into too much detail on that today, but we do expect continued operating leverage even at a faster pace than what we saw this quarter.

We’ve really put in a nice baseline of investments in R&D, sales force expansion, medical education and also infrastructure to run a public company, but those investments won’t continue at the kind of pace that they have since the IPO just over a year ago.

Operator: The next question today comes from the line of Mike Matson from Needham & Company.

Mike Matson: So, you’ve obviously launched a lot of new products and it’s good to see that it’s driving such strong growth, or one of the component’s driving the growth at least. But with the soft tissue products and the Ex Fix products, I know that those were kind of the mean holes that you had in your portfolio. So from here on out, particularly in ’23 and ’24 and beyond, is it really going to be more about launching improved versions of the existing products versus entering new categories? Are there still some product categories that you could enter here?