MegaGen Brand Guidelines: A Dentist-Founded Implant Maker From Daegu, AnyRidge & R2GATE

A study group, an engineer and seventy investors.

MegaGen was set up on 3 January 2002 as MegaGen Co., Ltd., with Kwang-Bum Park as chief executive, according to both the company’s own timeline and a January 2018 profile in the Daegu daily Maeil Shinmun. Park is a dentist, a graduate of the dental school at Kyungpook National University and the director of a dental hospital in Daegu, the newspaper reported. He told it that the idea grew out of one of Korea’s most active implant study groups in the late 1990s, where dentists kept saying that American and European implants did not suit Korean patients well, and that the plan took shape after he contacted an engineer while studying in the United States in 2000.

The company describes itself as “started by dentists and driven by dentists.” Maeil Shinmun gave the detail behind the phrase: 68 of the 70 original investors were dentists, and around half of them were still shareholders in 2018, acting as both users and advisers. Park said the first product reached the market in November 2004, after three years of development.

The early years were not smooth. Park told the paper that an attempt to list the company on the stock market failed and left it in debt, and that he took back day-to-day management in 2009. MegaGen’s timeline records a venture-company designation and a medical-device manufacturing permit in 2003, a company research institute in 2004, and in 2005 the merger of MINEC, the clinician-education network it still runs, into MegaGen Implants Co., Ltd.; it lists ISO 9001 and 13485 certification from DNV the same year. Exports began in 2006, Park said, and by 2018 they made up about two-thirds of the business.

AnyRidge, Xpeed and R2GATE.

MegaGen’s timeline lists a run of implant systems through its first decade: Intermezzo, cleared by the US FDA in 2005; ExFeel and Rescue, cleared in 2006; and EZ Plus, cleared in 2007, the year EZ Plus and Rescue also received CE certification. The company says Rescue, launched in 2006, was made for cases with reduced bone, with lengths from 5 mm.

The turning point, in the company’s telling, was AnyRidge, announced in 2009. Park described it to Maeil Shinmun as the product behind the firm’s growth, an implant longer and sharper-tipped than earlier designs that could be placed almost anywhere. In 2011 AnyRidge and the Xpeed surface received an innovative-products award from the Prime Minister on Korea’s 46th Day of Invention, and in January 2012 AnyRidge won the IR52 Jang Young-sil prize from the Korea Industrial Technology Association, the company’s timeline says. Xpeed, launched with the AnyOne implant system in 2012, is a calcium-incorporated layer formed on the titanium surface, according to MegaGen’s manufacturing page.

Digital work followed. MegaGen announced R2GATE, a digital surgical-guide system, in 2012, and Park told Maeil Shinmun it was a representative example of the company’s digital dentistry, adding that the firm’s future lay there rather than in implants alone. In 2017, the timeline says, MegaGen merged the International Digital Dentistry Association into the company to strengthen its digital services. The current range, as the company’s site presents it, also takes in the BLUEDIAMOND implant and R2Playground software.

How the implants are made is set out on the company’s site. MegaGen says fixtures are machined on CNC multi-function machines from pure titanium to the ASTM F67 standard, with titanium alloy to F136 for prosthetic parts, and that laser marking is done in-house. Implants are anodised in colours by diameter — purple for small, blue for regular, yellow for wide and green for super-wide — and gamma-sterilised by an FDA-registered contractor, the company says.

Titanium, screens and congresses.

Dental implant and digital-dentistry companies sell to a narrow, expert audience, and their pictures show it. The typical product image is a small titanium screw shot on a white or pale grey ground, often beside its abutment and the driver that seats it, and lit to show the thread and the surface. Packaging tends to follow the same order: clean white boxes, colour codes for sizes, and the product line’s name set larger than the company’s.

Digital dentistry adds a second set of images. Intraoral scanners appear as slim wands next to a laptop or a cart, and the screen matters as much as the hardware: a coloured three-dimensional render of an arch, a planned implant position inside a CT slice, or a crown being shaped in design software. Milling machines and printers are shown with the blocks and discs they cut, and finished work is usually photographed as a single milled crown or bridge on a neutral surface.

The third subject is the clinician. Implant makers run training courses, symposia and hands-on sessions, and their brochures and press releases often show lecture halls and dentists at practice models rather than patients. Trade fairs carry much of that presentation: IDS, the International Dental Show in Cologne, and the congresses of the European Association for Osseointegration are where companies set up large stands, launch product lines and gather speakers.

The result is a category that looks clinical and orderly, with white space, steel greys and one or two accent colours carrying most of the identity. The companies in this guide include implant makers from South Korea, Europe, Brazil and the United States, alongside firms in intraoral scanners, lasers and CAD/CAM software. Each guide sets out who founded the company, who owns it now and what it says about where its products are made, separating documented facts from the company’s own claims.

Gyeongsan, Daegu and a Straumann deal that ended.

MegaGen began in an industrial park at Jain-myeon in Gyeongsan, and outgrew it. On 5 January 2018 it held the opening ceremony for an automated factory and research centre in Daegu’s Seongseo 5th industrial complex, Maeil Shinmun reported; the company’s timeline records the same ceremony. Park said at the time that the plant could make five million implants a year. The company lists its head office and factory in Dasa-eup, in Daegu’s Dalseong county, and has kept a Seoul branch, MegaGen Tower, since 2013.

For a time it looked as if MegaGen would join a larger group. In March 2014 the Swiss implant maker Straumann bought convertible bonds from MegaGen, with an option to convert them into shares and to buy a controlling stake in 2016, Dentalcompare reported, adding that MegaGen would stay an independent company and brand. In July 2016 Straumann said it would exercise those rights; MegaGen disputed the conversion price and the method of calculation and started arbitration under ICC rules, Straumann said. On 28 February 2017 Straumann announced that it would no longer pursue an investment in or partnership with MegaGen, which had instead repaid the bonds in cash with interest. MegaGen’s press releases, as recently as December 2022, name Park as chief executive.

The company says its products sell in more than 100 countries through over 90 distributors and 12 affiliates, and its timeline records the CLEAN Implant Foundation’s “Trust Quality” certification in 2017. For a design guide, MegaGen shows a dentist-founded maker that tells its story through named implant systems, a coloured anodising code and digital planning software. Compare it with Osstem Implant, another Korean implant maker, and with Straumann. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a cool steel grey and a bright cyan with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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