By Roland Piquepaille
Here is December, and countless articles are published every day about gifts for the holiday season and forecasts about the year to come. Red Herring chose, cautiously, to focus on technology in the Top Ten Trends for 2005. By limiting itself to predictions for only next year, the online magazine doesn't take much risks. However, the link above will lead you to no less than ten different stories. Some trends started this year, such as the war for searching files on your desktop or for putting double cores on computer chips. Other articles talk about Internet telephony, the battle for your digital home, fuel cells or biotech advancements. But the one which caught my eyes is about baby boomers and the exploding market for the global medical devices market, which could reach $160 billion worldwide next year. Read more...Just for fun, here is the introduction of the Red Herring article looking at some past predictions.
Laying out technology trends is a treacherous undertaking. Those predictions can end up haunting the luminaries who pronounced them after they've proven to be ridiculous. Just consider these: Bill Gates was quoted in 1994 saying, "we'll have infinite bandwidth in a decade's time." And George Gilder proclaimed in the pages of Forbes in 1992, "just as the old integrated circuit made transistor power virtually free, the new all-optical network will make communications power virtually free."
Now, let's jump to "Baby boomers left to their own devices," aptly subtitled "As an aging population continues to seek the fountain of youth, the medical equipment market promises answers." Here is the opening paragraph.
Living longer is no longer the goal. Living longer, while looking and feeling young, is now baby boomers' big wish -- and the market's command. As more than one-quarter of the U.S. population, 40- to 60-year-olds represent huge potential profits for successful treatments.
Below are selected excerpts.
Along with cosmetic improvements, spine conditions are getting a lot of attention, as herniated discs, misaligned vertebrae, degenerative disc disease, and spinal fractures are quite common among the elderly. The boomers are a large and savvy group that demands solutions, however expensive they may be, according to Frost & Sullivan analyst Alpesh Gandhi. "Baby boomers are more aware of a lot of the products and procedures," he says. "They do more research and are more aware of what treatment they need."
And the market for these medical devices is huge.
The global medical devices market is currently estimated at between $135 and $145 billion, according to Frost & Sullivan figures. The high estimate for 2005 is $160 billion. That makes it even bigger than biotech, which is now between $110 and $120 billion and is expected to grow to nearly $128 billion in 2005, according to Frost & Sullivan analyst Vikram Wadhwani.
Nearly half of medical devices revenues, about 45 percent, represent the U.S. market -- the world leader. Several factors help the U.S. dominate. Europe is slower to adapt new products where distribution is more complex, U.S. patients and doctors are more open to newer technologies, and technology that's developed in other countries, namely Japan, eventually migrates over to the U.S. because it is a better market, according to Mr. Gandhi.
Red Herring adds that the approval process by the FDA is shorter for medical devices than for drugs, so it's easier to make money for the companies investing in non-surgical solutions for example.
Another trend is finding non-surgical solutions, says Robert Bellas, a general partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, which invests heavily in seed-round medical device startups.
A big market for less-invasive procedures offers alternatives to cosmetic surgery. One startup that Morgenthaler helps fund through its incubator, The Foundry, is Thermage, based in Hayward, California. The company's product, Thermacool, has been approved by the FDA and is being used by dermatologists and plastic surgeons. Thermage claims its non-surgical device uses radio frequency to increase the amount of collagen below the skin's surface, promising similar effects to those of facelifts and liposuction, minus the downtime.
For more information, please read the whole collection of Red Herring articles -- today and next year.
Source: Red Herring, December 13, 2004
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Famous quotes containing the word trends:
“Power-worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)