덴탈아리랑 헨리샤인 회장 특별인터뷰_ HENRYSCHEIN Stanley Bergman DNN Interview

I want to let you know that I personally have great admiration for the Korean people. The Korean people have been through enormous adversity over centuries, but particularly last century with the Second World War and then all the activities after the war. And the Koreans come out of that very strong. It's a democracy that thrives. I've been there several times. I've done quite a lot of work advancing relationships between Korea and the United States, and I've always had great pleasure in that. So my admiration to the Korean people and of course the dentists of Korea.

So yes, the question is why is Henry Schein strong, if you will, and it relates to our values. Because I believe that you can come up with the greatest strategies, but if you don't have values, you will not be successful. And you can have a very bad strategy, but if you have the right values, you will correct that strategy and come up with a winning strategy. And values drive culture. The culture can change over time. So the culture is very different today to what it was 45 years ago, but the values are the same as they were when Henry and Esther opened the doors 90 years ago. So values are important, and values lead to the ability to drive change. Because if your customers trust you, your suppliers trust you, your team trusts you, your investors trust you, and you use all of that to advance society in general, if you live out those values, in the end you can go to all of those constituents and say, change is coming, and they will trust you. And the only way to make progress is to advance change. It's always been the case over the centuries, and we are in a very exciting time in dentistry today. Huge amount of change. And we believe that Henry Schein, as we have many partners, have earned the right to go to the dentist and say, please follow us with these changes, because they're good for you. Because we've had our great values for so long, and it's the values that drive and change the ability to ever change.

Well, this is, you know, quite frankly, Henry Schein reinvents ourselves every three years. But perhaps the first major change was that in our dental business, we came up with a catalog which listed all the dental products. We published a price, and if a dentist wanted the product, we would have it available. And that price was a fair price, not the lowest, but a fair price for the value of service we've provided. So the first major change was to introduce that catalog in the 70s. And in the 80s, we automated the supply chain way ahead of others in healthcare supply. We had computers drive the business, the supply chain, the pricing, product description, and then we had a supply chain system for us dealing with our suppliers and shipping the products. So if you received an order, we received an order today, it'll leave the warehouse today and be delivered tomorrow. So we conceived that idea 40 years ago, that was a huge change. In the 90s, we went to the dentist in America and said, you need a computer to run your office. And that was quite revolutionary because computers were viewed as toys for kids to play games. And we said, get a computer to run your practice, and at the same time, get a computer to operate your electronic medical records. Remember, dentists had those cards then. The next major change was to take Henry Schein global throughout the world, so we could now learn about best dentistry from throughout the world and bring it to dentists locally. Think global, act local. That's been a key part of our success. And then we moved along and we entered into dental specialty, which we manufacture ourselves: implants, orthodontics, endodontics. And then most recently, in the last seven, eight years, we focused on digital dentistry. Of course, today it's quite standard in the industry, but we were able to go to the dentist of the world and say, now's the time to digitalize your practice. That was a huge move for Henry Schein. It relates to one thought: remaining relevant. We need to be relevant to our customers. In other words, what's important to them is important to us. So that's very, very important. And so we spend a lot of time listening to our customers and then delivering what we believe our customers need, that relevancy. And then of course, you need to figure a way to communicate your message. So firstly, we're on the ground in 32 countries, but we service dentists around the world. Any dentist anywhere can buy a product from us. Medical is primarily in the U.S., a little bit in Europe. Our U.S. medical today is about the same size as our U.S. dental for distribution. But one difference in dental, we also have the specialty businesses and software businesses. We have a small specialty business in dental and medical, but it's not big. The big specialty business in dental and of software. So unfortunately, our biggest markets in the world, the only one we're not in is Korea. And we do not go into a market generally on our own, we seek a partner. And we've never had an opportunity to have a partner in Korea yet. We will be there someday. We'd like to have a partner invite us, and then we will be strong partners. So we do sell product in Korea, our own-made products: endodontics, orthodontics, some implants, some other products. But on the distribution, we're not there yet, and we are seeking a partner in Korea, which is the biggest economy that we're not in yet. Well, what we would expect is for us to invest in our partner's business and grow the business together. Of course, we have products to bring, but we have huge know-how in the supply chain, in building relationships with customers, and we believe we can help any partner in Korea grow their business as we've done in 32 countries around the world with some of the... well, each country we generally partner with, why not, number one and number two, and it's paid off for those partners. Of course, we buy a lot of products from Korea today. But of course, today we have scanners and other products that we import from Korea. We sell some of the Korean implants in different parts of the world and other products in general on the imaging side too. Yeah, of course, Korea leads in implants as well, and we sell the Korean implants in a number of countries. I think in China, we're a big customer of Korean implants, and we're ready to work with any of the major implant or other companies in Korea.

So, I think we're one of the companies in the world that is focused on social responsibility as a business. In other words, doing well by doing good. There's a Harvard study on us, which we'd be happy to share with you. Doing well by doing good, it's based on the notion of Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of America, the notion of being enlightened self-interest. In other words, self-interest business, but also enlightenment for society. And the notion is that you can, as a business, do very well if you're aligned with the needs of society. So Henry and Esther had that idea 90 years ago. They didn't understand there was no ESG. In fact, we've been very active with our foundation and with Henry Schein philanthropy for decades. We never called it ESG, that's a new term. But we aligned Henry Schein's way of doing business with the needs of society. So I suppose one could say we were one of the original companies in ESG, but we started way before the idea was even born under the concept of ESG. So that's the social part, including environmental part. But we've also been quite active in the arena of diversity in dentistry. We have many programs at Henry Schein that reach out to diverse groups of dentists.

Well, as I said, the customer early on, I mentioned the customer is at the center of everything. Our job, by the way, most of our business is in a free market world where dentists are earning a living and running a practice. I mean, there's some government dentistry, but most of our business is servicing the free market. And in that context, practitioners own a business. It's our job to help the practitioners operate a more efficient business so they can provide better clinical care. So they go hand in hand: the operational side, which has to be run like a business, and the clinical part, which should be whatever's best for the patient. And that's been our philosophy. Help our customers operate a more efficient practice so they can provide better clinical care. There's a huge opportunity today in the world for dentists because there's a recognition that there's a direct correlation between good oral health and good healthcare. So the dentists need to be active in talking to the medical practitioners, talking to politicians, talking to companies, those that pay for healthcare, to explain that if you take care of your teeth, you will live longer. I would say that's the number one area dentists should focus on: advancing oral health. And my recommendation to the dentist is, of course, they run a very good practice, so they're going to be in their own practice like a business, but make sure that the patients get the best quality care. But the dentists have to be active in their community advocating for dentistry. If dentists don't do it, I don't know who will. Yeah, I think what's important on the industry side is that we all are focused on helping advance oral health. We need to all work to get the message out that oral health is important.

Well, I think it will be in two areas: one is 3D printing and the other is in AI, artificial intelligence. We launched a product this year at the Greater New York meeting, it deals with artificial intelligence. We have a huge amount of data in our systems, yeah, because we store all the x-rays, all the images, and now we're using AI to go through those images to look for people that are likely to have caries, people that need implants, people that need aligners, people that need endodontic treatment. And we're giving a list to our customers detecting issues digitally. In fact, everything digitally, technology, getting the dentist in America and then later in other parts of the world to use a computer to run their practice, first for accounting, then for the electronic medical record, and now intraoral devices. No question, dentistry is a great place to be in the year 2023 and beyond. Essentially, we know that so many people are ill because of dentistry. Non-communicable diseases are the biggest cause of healthcare failure, and dentistry is one of the key non-communicable diseases, in addition to cardiac, cancer, pulmonary, and diabetes, and mental health. Dentistry is one of those key non-communicable diseases that if we all work together, the world will be healthier. And dentists have that opportunity. We just need to get more patients into the dental office, and the world will be a better place. People will be healthier, live longer lives, and it will be good for dentistry and good for those that sell products. But without doing that, I would say that dentistry is a great place to be at the dawn of 2023.