And there’s benefits to the doctor because every time they open one of these single-use devices, the image quality is brand-new image quality. Whereas, when you have a reusable device, they get used over and over and over again, and eventually, the image quality degrades over time until someone decides that it’s not good enough. So for all the stakeholders in the process of using and inventorying the products, single-use had substantial benefits. The challenge that the industry had over many decades, because there have been attempts at single-use as far back as the late 1990s, the challenge was getting the price points to a place where single use could be supported by the economics of the systems. And so the thing that changed that dramatically was the advent of CMOS sensors and so-called chip-on-tip endoscopes, which we have particular expertise in, and which we enhanced that expertise of by acquiring Lighthouse Imaging.
So the entire market really is moving in that direction. We just recently commissioned market study to be able to understand the segmentation of the medical device market into various different sizes, so we can target the parts of the market that are particularly relevant for the micro-optics capability that we have. And in that market study, it reconfirmed things that we had seen sort of in the public domain that indicate that the compound annual growth rate over the next 10 years for single-use products is expected to be 2x to 3x larger than that for reusable devices. So all of the things you hear us talking about when we’re talking about the excitement over having not only one single-use product but a second single-use product that uses the same kind of economics and same kind of business model is really because we think that we can get access to the single-use medical device marketplace, which, as I say and as you implied, is growing in a much faster rate than it was any time in the past.
Unidentified Analyst: Well, thank you for repeating that for me. I’m new to your company. Thanks. You’ve been very helpful, and good luck.
Joseph Forkey: Great. Thanks a lot, Chris. Thanks for the questions.
Operator: [Operator Instructions]
Robert Blum: Hey, Joe. This is Robert Blum here. Just while we wait to see if anyone else does jump in the queue, I just had one maybe topic I wanted to touch on here. It’s sort of on the aerospace defense side. You’ve had a couple of programs. You mentioned sort of one that’s a possibility, I guess, here going forward. When you think about how you’re approaching this from a sales and marketing standpoint, you’ve talked in the past about going through a number of the sort of industry conferences, primarily on the medical device side of the equation. Is defense something now that you’re taking maybe a more proactive view into as opposed to, I think maybe in the past, it was almost kind of – it fell in your lap, we’ll call it. So maybe just expand a little bit more on how you’re sort of approaching the aerospace defense market going forward?
Joseph Forkey: Yes. Thanks for that question, Robert. So the way you described it is exactly right. I want to start by saying that for many years, and anyone who’s been with the company for very long has probably heard me say this to the point where they’re sick of hearing it, but part of our strategy when we started with this sort of business approach of engaging with customers with our unique technology in the development phase all the way through to the production phase, one of the key points that we decided on was to be very strategic and very focused in both the technology that we developed and in the markets that we use our limited sales and marketing resources for because we were a very, very small company. We’re still a small company.
