The geography of the locations of our customers has changed considerably during the 20+ years of LEDAS’ history.
From looking at the map of our customers (below), you may think that we began in our home country and then expanded abroad. In fact, the reverse is true, because in its first years LEDAS mostly provided CAD and CAM software development services in Europe, namely to Dassault Systèmes from France.
In the beginning, we concentrated on developing geometric solvers and engines, a rather narrow field, yet very sensitive to quality. Over the following years, overall CAD software market was our primary focus.
In late 2000s, LEDAS Geometric Solver (LGS) was our flagship product, along with our high-quality R&D (research and development) services for CAD and PLM. Many LEDAS customers were initially interested in licensing our LGS 2D or 3D solvers. This brought Japan, South Korea, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and Israel to our map. The USA and China are the major sources of LEDAS revenues in the last years, and also were initiated through sales of LGS.
Map of LEDAS customers, deeper color indicates larger number of customers
In 2011, we sold off the exclusive intellectual property rights to LGS. We focused more on CAD and CAM outsourcing services, gaining CAM customers from France, Germany, and India. Another important event in early 2010s was getting into the development of NURBS-based 3D kernels, with a particular focus on Boolean operations, NURBS modeling, collision detection, and BVH-based 3D body distance calculation.
In 2015, we started an ambitious Building Information Modeling (BIM) project for a large Chinese investment group. It was great landing this challenging software project for the Chinese construction industry as it represents about half the global construction industry. Thanks to the experience we gained from this project, we advanced in our knowledge of the areas of BIM, Web, and cloud technologies.
The USA became the primary market for our engineering software services as of 2017-2018, when we discovered a big demand for digital medicine, especially in digital orthodontics and dentistry overall. Digital medicine still is a hot topic, thanks to widely available 3D scanners and 3D printers, alongside the rise in personalized medicine.
While a dozen-and-a-half countries worth of LEDAS customers may not seem so impressive on the world map, these countries account for more than 70% of the global GDP. Eight of the top ten world economies enjoy benefits of LEDAS’ engineering services and solutions. (See pie chart below for reference.) “Not a LEDAS customer” is the biggest entry in the chart, so we have a lot to do!
Global GDP: countries with LEDAS customers