Hard Discount in the market of essential dental materials

According to Dr. Tibor Handa (General Dental Practitioner with special interest in Endodontics and founder of the webstore FairTradeDental.Com) many of his colleagues have turned toward alternative purchase channels in recent years because of the extreme prices of the European market and the loss of revenue caused by the latest financial crisis. That is why he founded a Hard Discount dental shop based purely on online sales.

The Sales Team at FairTradeDental. Com continuously monitors the market of each dental product group to ensure their prices are always kept low – as opposed to their competition who come up with special offers only. You are a dentist who started trading with dental products in addition to your dental practice. What motivated you? Are you not afraid that your profession is a handicap rather than an advantage in dental sales and your colleagues will not accept you in this new role?

I have been working as a dentist for 14 years (at the time of the interview) and have seen the way of dental practices are being run. During these years, I was always wondering what could be done to make a practice more efficient. I think that conscious buying is the simplest, quickest and safest form of reducing your costs as a dental practice owner. In my experience, several dentist decided to leave traditional traders because of the extreme prices of the European market and get their dental products from ebay and other alternative channels. I am convinced that the existence of a Hard Discount dental webstore, such as FairTradeDental.Com with its low operation costs, is perfectly justified on the market. 

Since I am a practitioner myself, I know exactly the problems dentists are facing, so I can find the best solutions for our customers as an expert. When searching the market for products, I can decide which items are worth to be marketed. They have to be good value for money and no uncertainty about their quality.

Can a dental webstore based purely on online sales be profitable on the European market? Why did you chose this business model?

The level of online sales is still growing year by year and traditional stores have taken steps to this direction. Our advantage is that our business model itself is built on that in the first place. We are not using traditional dental means.

We define ourselves as a discount retailer and as such the most efficient way of reducing costs is if we minimize the associated costs that are usually passed on to the customer. For that reason, we don’t employ representatives with a medical background and we don’t have expensive showrooms. We don’t spend a lot of money for enormous stands at dental showcases. We don’t have company cars. Each penny saved in this way turned back into business, ie. this is how we can market goods at such a low price. 

Also because of your sources of supply. Don’t you think that in the case of medical products people still are a little bit unsure about the Far East and about China in particular?

I have been following the development of the quality of Chinese medical products for more than a decade. I have been testing them regularly and I have to say that in most areas they should be considered amongst world leaders.

We only have the image in mind of poorly paid Chinese workers on never-ending production lines assembling well-known branded products for the Western World, but China doesn’t only deal with contract manufacturing. Chinese companies joined the world leaders with their own innovations, just think of Huawei or ZTE in the telecommunications field. „Made in China” products can’t be laughed at any more.

I would like dentists to see the commercial tendencies more clearly and not to believe to their long-standing prejudices. Evidently, China is a much more complicated than the Japanese or Korean markets: a continental-scale country where different types of producers and qualities are presented. The trump cards of our company are that we know exactly how and who it is worth entering into a business with and who are the ones to to avoid.

This article was published in the Dental.hu
professional magazine in November 2013

Dr. Tibor Handa’s portrait: 
Tibor is a 39 years-old general dental practitioner with special interest in Endodontics.

He graduated from the Faculty of Dentistry at the Semmelweis University in Budapest in 1999 with cum laude. He has been practicing for 15 years and been pursuing his activities in private practice for 6 years. He has been dealing with the trade of dental devices since 2006 in addition to his dental practice, and in 2013,  after several years of preparation, Tibor founded his successful dental webstore called Fairtradedental.com.