Quid, I'm curious about the type of position of these folks you talked to... Clinical, Engineering, Finance, Marketing types?
It is presumed (and reasonable to believe) that JnJ and Medtronic will be entering the general/abdominal robotic surgery market in the foreseeable future. Intuitive is pushing their SP system as being beneficial for patient outcomes. Surgeons who have tried the SPORT system have been very clear with their opinions on ease of use. My question is this: Why would new entrants to the market not want to employ the state of the art technologies to optimize the patient care experience?
At this point, I can only hypothesize that maybe ISRG and Titan have single port tech wrapped up too tightly with their IP portfolios, and additional entrants in the market will need to rely on old tech, like some of ISRG's earlier patents which have expired. If that was true, Titan should truly have an absolutely golden pathway being paved ahead of us for the next 10 to 15 years!
In your conversations with these folks, both said "no single port" but did either say why? Are you still in contact with these people, and able to toss out that question? The answer could really improve Titan's outlook as an investment, which would benefit all of us greatly!
Or to use common iHub vernacular... It would be HUUGEEEEEE!
Also... Thank you for sharing! It's nice to have folks like you and BigT (and several others, of course!) who maintain a pleasant demeanor and add rational content to the board.
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I recently spoke with mid levem leadership at JNJ, for what it's worth they anticipate having a robot competing with the daVinci platform in ~2 years. They stated no single port. Medtronic said the same in a recent conversation. However JNJ said their strategy is both to buy and make their own robots. I also learned VERB has access to utilize all Google's patents.
