When the Prosthetic Framework Becomes a New Value Item — The Oral “A La Carte Economy” in the Post-VBP Era

# Preface

An interesting coincidence: The automotive industry and the dental industry encountered the same problem at almost the same time — when the price of "standard configuration" is leveled by competition, what will consumers pay for?

The changes in the automotive industry have already pointed the way. A few years ago, consumers with a budget of 300,000 yuan were more inclined to buy an entry-level model from an imported luxury brand — the badge was for others to see, and the features were for themselves to endure. In recent years, the same group has begun to shift toward mid-to-high-end configurations of domestic new energy vehicles. Data from the China Passenger Car Association shows that the average retail price of domestic passenger cars has risen from 151,000 yuan in 2019 to 186,000 yuan in January 2026. The market share of domestic brands in the high-end market above 300,000 yuan is expected to exceed 50% for the first time in 2026. Consumers' willingness to pay has shifted from the car badge to seat comfort, intelligent driving smoothness, and chassis quality — things they use every day.

The dental medical field is undergoing a similar examination.

With the 2025 full-year financial reports finalized, some listed dental chains primarily focused on dental services saw year-on-year revenue declines of 16% to 17%. Among them, revenue from dental implantation dropped even more sharply, with some institutions exceeding 25%. Notably, some institutions attributed the revenue decline in their annual reports to "a significant decrease in the average comprehensive spending per patient." This set of figures has made "patients only care about price after VBP" a popular interpretation.

But in Guangzhou, Suihua Dental has a different feeling. After the first quarter of 2026 concluded, Suihua's assessment was: "The market feels even better than the first quarter of last year." Suihua has 10 clinics in Guangzhou, serving over 3 million patient visits cumulatively. This is not optimism — the implementation of VBP is more like a changeover whistle: the old competition model no longer works, but the market itself has not disappeared.

So, in an environment where the prices of Dental Implants and Dental Crowns are being driven down by VBP, how does Suihua stabilize its operational foundation for Partial Arch Restoration and Full-arch Restoration?

Part of the answer lies hidden in a product long overlooked by the industry — the Prosthetic Framework.

## 01 The Blind Spot in the Dental Restoration Chain

Partial-arch/Full-arch multi-tooth implant restoration consists of four components: Dental Implant, abutment, Prosthetic Framework, and Dental Crown. In the past, the Dental Implant, being the most discussed element, attracted almost all the attention. After VBP, the price transparency of Dental Implants increased significantly, and other components gradually came into the industry's view: Dental Implants as a whole are moving towards a cost-performance orientation, with the market share of domestic brands continuously rising; the other components each have their own evolutionary paths.

Scanning the landscape, one finds a link almost universally overlooked — the Prosthetic Framework.

The Prosthetic Framework is the most homogenized and easily overlooked link in the restoration chain. Unlike Dental Implants, which are well-known to patients, it receives little attention from clinics during procurement. Manufacturers have hardly engaged in any brand building directed at the public. The result is that the vast majority of institutions use Prosthetic Frameworks from similar sources and at similar prices — all domestically milled titanium materials.

When Suihua conducted an internal product review, it noticed this situation: "For the Prosthetic Framework category, other institutions in the market basically use domestic materials. So at this point, we need to choose an imported material for the Prosthetic Framework."

This judgment points to a gap in Prosthetic Framework options — most clinics offer only one configuration, and patients don't even know other materials exist to consider.

Why is this link worth attention? There is a reference logic: When the core products in a system are leveled by competition, those "connectors" that are imperceptible in daily use but unavoidable if a technical problem arises often become key to long-term experience — the real cost of a printer lies in its ink cartridges, and the taste watershed of a capsule coffee machine is in the capsules. In implant restoration, the Prosthetic Framework plays a similar role: functionally necessary, precision-sensitive, but patients hardly know of its existence before surgery.

What Suihua needs to do is not complicated: provide an option that patients who don't want to stop at the standard configuration can judge for themselves.

## 02 A Multiple-Choice Question in the Clinic

The partner Suihua chose is Alberry — a brand of implant restoration components under GF MEDICAL GROUP. GF MEDICAL GROUP has over 30 years of accumulation in precision manufacturing. It started by OEM for multinational dental equipment manufacturers and gradually transitioned to its own products. As early as 2022, GF MEDICAL GROUP obtained the first Class III Medical Device Registration Certificate in China for Customized abutment and crown-bridge solution for dental implantation.

The partner's background is just the starting point. What truly determines "whether this option can be accepted by patients" is whether it can clearly explain the difference and present the evidence.

Alberry's Prosthetic Framework has two noteworthy points. First, data source: The interface data for the Prosthetic Framework comes from the original manufacturer's data authorization for the Dental Implant, not from reverse-engineered replicas. The practical impact of this distinction is that the benchmark for processing precision does not introduce additional errors from the mapping process. Second, full traceability: Each product comes with a Unique Device Identifier (UDI) upon shipment. The material is German imported medical-grade titanium, and the supplier qualifications are clearly verifiable. This traceability system is the insurance for product quality.

After translating the product difference into "explainable and verifiable" terms, the next step is to bring it into the clinic.

Suihua's 10 clinics in Guangzhou began offering this option. The price structure is straightforward: based on the standard titanium Prosthetic Framework, patients can choose whether to upgrade to Alberry's Prosthetic Framework, with a price difference of 4,000 yuan. The matching Dental Crown defaults to mainstream domestic all-ceramic crowns, but patients can also opt for imported ceramic blocks if they wish.

At this point, a more practical question arises: In the clinic, will patients really pay extra for an unfamiliar component? Suihua's answer comes from the concerted effort of three forces.

First, look at the patients. During consultations, Suihua noticed a simple fact: Patients coming for Partial Arch Restoration or Full-arch Restoration care about different things. Some repeatedly ask about the material's origin and processing precision, others care more about the doctor's experience and post-operative guarantees, and some ask about the price upfront. If only one Prosthetic Framework configuration is offered, it essentially responds to all different needs with one solution. Introducing Alberry provides a verifiable response for those patients who inquire further about materials.

Second, look at the payment psychology. The average spending for Suihua's Partial Arch Restoration is between 40,000 and 60,000 yuan. A patient who has already made a decision at this level has a different psychological state from someone who just walked in asking for a price — they have already mentally completed the step of "I want to do this," and now face the question of "what material to use." The 4,000 yuan upgrade difference, placed within an already determined payment framework of 40,000 to 60,000 yuan, carries far less psychological weight than a separate 4,000 yuan expense.

Source: "Guidelines for Pricing Dental Medical Services (Trial)"

Finally, there is the "permission" from the policy level. The "separation of technical service fees and consumable costs" reform promoted by the NHSA separates the medical service fee from the consumable cost for dental implantation. On this basis, the "Guiding Principles for Pricing Items of Oral Medical Services" further clarifies that for personalized products like Prosthetic Frameworks that are "tailor-made," a "flat-rate" model is adopted, with prices independently determined by medical institutions, no longer linked to VBP prices. Personalized products now have a formal position at the policy level — provided prices are transparent and patients are informed.

With these three conditions combined, Suihua conducted verification for over four months. Its internal statistics show that patients choosing Alberry's Prosthetic Framework now account for 20% to 30% of Partial-arch/Full-arch orders. Moreover, according to Suihua's internal assessment, this proportion still has room to grow.

20% to 30% validates something more important than numbers: When patients have access to verifiable information, a significant portion will make their own judgment and be willing to pay for what they consider worthwhile. For clinics, this means there is another dimension to discuss with patients besides price.

## 03 Pausing Amidst Inertia

Before Suihua started offering the Alberry option, "patients willing to pay for Prosthetic Framework material" was just an industry hypothesis. After over four months and across 10 clinics, it has become a discussable real proportion — 20% to 30%. This figure answers a question: When material differences are verifiable, do patients still make decisions based solely on price? The answer is that some people will make their own choice.

But this option also faced initial skepticism at Suihua: The market is already so competitive, why offer patients a more expensive choice? This reaction is understandable — when the entire industry is discussing price cuts, introducing a higher-priced option intuitively goes against the grain. The recognition wasn't achieved through internal meetings; it was the patients in the clinics, one after another making their own choices, that gradually helped the team understand the significance of this move.

This hides a deeper question: When the industry is under pressure, why is the first reaction of most people to reduce options and lower prices?

A reasonable explanation is that the benefits of contraction are immediate. Cutting a product line or lowering a price shows results the next day. Adding an option to the list or spending time introducing a new material to patients yields returns further down the road. The psychological weight of these two actions is unequal — the former provides immediate certainty, the latter only future possibility. When anxiety is pervasive, most people choose the former.

When the entire industry contracts in the same direction, some equally important links are collectively ignored. Not because those links lack value, but because everyone's attention is focused elsewhere.

What Suihua did, in essence, was pause amidst this collective inertia. When most peers defaulted to "domestically milled titanium is enough for the Prosthetic Framework," Suihua noticed during its internal product review that this link had almost only one configuration. Instead of following the inertia, it placed an option in the direction of imported materials in this overlooked corner. This was not a procurement action but a directional judgment — Suihua believes that above the price band leveled by VBP, there still exists a quality space that patients are willing to pay for. This judgment was not mainstream at the time, but it gave everything that followed a starting point.

Ampere Force renewed contracts with four global leading precision machining suppliers: Switzerland's ROLLOMATIC, Switzerland's KKS, Germany's Zapp, and Switzerland's WILLEMIN-MACODEL.

And Suihua's choice happened to meet the right product. The material origin, processing precision, and supplier qualifications of Alberry's Prosthetic Framework — every item is verifiable. The reason patients are willing to choose it after learning about it is fundamentally because the option itself withstands scrutiny. What Suihua did in this process was to ensure that patients could learn about this existing information before making a decision — what's different about the material, what the specification differences mean, explain it clearly, and then let the patient decide.

Suihua's strategic judgment answered "why do it," and Alberry's product strength answered "why it can be done." The former is the insight to discover a blank space, the latter is the confidence for that blank space to be recognized by patients. Both are indispensable — without insight, the option cannot stand; without product strength, the option would never appear on the patient's list.

The lesson from this case is bidirectional. For medical service institutions, it points to the potential dialogue space hidden in a collectively overlooked link. For upstream manufacturers, it validates one thing — verifiable product differences have the opportunity to be recognized and chosen by patients in the clinic. The collaboration between Suihua and Alberry is a mutual recognition between a judgment and a product within a time window.

# Afterword

When the market generally believes that patients only care about price after VBP, the reality is richer. Just as car consumers shifted from chasing imported base models to choosing domestic high-end configurations, when product strength catches up and information becomes transparent, consumers' decision-making focus naturally shifts from "price" to "long-term use value." Similar changes are occurring in the field of Dental Restoration.

Policy trends are also echoing this trend. The implementation of separating technical service fees from consumable costs and allowing independent pricing for personalized products shows that policymakers recognize a simple fact: Medical consumption is not only about "cheapness." Patients' right to choose between different qualities and price points is equally worthy of respect and protection.

What Suihua validated with the Prosthetic Framework is not just the selection rate of high-quality Prosthetic Frameworks. It validates that even in the VBP era, dialogue about quality can still occur between clinics and patients — and this is precisely the signal that the "optional configuration economy" is beginning to grow in the dental field.