Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It's a pleasure to be here.
Novadaq is a medical imaging company. Most of you are familiar with what medical imaging is I'm sure. MRIs, CT scanners, and ultrasound are all common in the health care industry to diagnose patients who have complex diseases.
We are a little bit different. When we think about diagnosing a patient who has cancer and we image the patient, it's really to ultimately treat the patient. But what happens to the patients who have been diagnosed with diseases when they go into the operating room to be treated by a surgeon today? The surgeon actually has no tools except his own eyes, or the memories he goes with, to remove the cancer, to fix a cardiac surgery disease, and so on.
Novadaq represents a Canadian innovation where we actually bring imaging to the operating room, to the surgeon, where he can actually visualize how blood is flowing, what normal blood flow is, where there are cancer cells in several cases, where tissue is dying, or where tissue has higher metabolism where it should be normal metabolism.
For the first time surgeons are actually able to visualize and thereby treat the patient. Based upon statistics, we have at this point treated over 100,000 patients, mostly in North America. Typically, given we can treat these patients for the first time correctly, statistically we have probably saved 500 lives at least, if not more. We have probably saved hundreds of millions of dollars in costs, if not more, because doing these types of surgeries correctly the first time reduces health care costs.
In several ways we are a wave of the future. We are a company that is actually changing the way surgeries will be done in the future. The reception in the surgical community has been quite strong.
Let me give you some facts about our company.
We were incorporated in April 2000. The initial intellectual property for our company came from the National Research Council. It was developed in Winnipeg. Today we have a market capital of approximately $1 billion. We're listed both on TSX and on NASDAQ, so we're a dual-listed company. We employ about 300 people worldwide. Of those, about 150 are in Canada. Most of the people we employ are highly educated, typically earning $100,000 to $200,000 or more in salaries, so a high salary and upper middle-class employment.
The other unique thing about us is we have invested approximately $400 million in developing this technology and building our company. Of that $400 million, about $300 million was actually imported from the United States.
What's interesting about our company is that the intellectual property is ours, but the money actually came from outside to help build the company. In fact, more than 95% of what we sell is outside of Canada. We're using Canadian talent, using other people's money, and building business in Canada.
Our revenues today are in the range of about $50 million to $65 million. We're one of the fastest growing North American medical device companies. We're growing at about 30% to 40% per year. We expect, if anything, that growth rate will increase over time so we will continue to employ more and more Canadian middle class or upper middle-class members. We actually have the potential to be in the hundreds of millions, quite frankly in the billions of dollars because of the value proposition of our company.
Today, obviously, the United States is our number one market. We are in all the top hospitals in the U.S. There are approximately 50 cancer centres that are considered the top cancer centres in the United States. In every one of them our technology is standard of care. We have another approximately 1,000 hospitals in the U.S. that use our technology. Even for technology that is considered the latest state of the art, which is robotic surgery, our imaging technology is incorporated into the robot, and without our technology that robot is not able to perform some of the more critical functions.
In summary, we are a Canadian invention built with Canadian talent. We are changing the way surgery is done and will be done in the future. We have done the right things in terms of importing the capital and exporting our products worldwide. In terms of support, I want to share with you first the support that we have received from Canada.
First of all, the innovation came from the National Research Council. Their ability to help us form the company and support us during the early days with research and development that we desperately needed was critical. I thank the government for supporting them.
The second place that has been very helpful is the business development offices of the consulates around the world. They have been very supportive of us. I can give you several specific examples. The first meeting we had in Japan was in the Canadian embassy. That meeting resulted in a fantastic agreement. We're about to begin marketing in Japan starting this summer. Taiwan is another good example. The consulate organized a lunch with major distributors and we were able to pick the right distributor for us. There is mainland China and Australia, and I can give you a list of others. India was a big success. Last November the consulate and the consul general personally did interviews with the local newspapers, which really gave us a tremendous platform from which to build our momentum. The market there is growing at a rapid pace.
To be honest, I have nothing but good things to say to you about how our company has been helped.
With respect to the needs that we have, I think the first need we have is a bit unusual.
As I mentioned to you, we are built on Canadian talent. In Canada we have great engineering and technologies, but the reality is that with respect to imaging and the management talent that is needed to build a global company like ours, we need to be able to import management from outside of Canada also. I would request that as you look at these tax treaties or equalization treaties, you help harmonize those treaties around the world. Bringing people in, particularly from the U.S., is a difficult task. I originally came from the U.S. and ultimately became a Canadian citizen, but I think I'm more unusual than normal. I'm proud to be a Canadian citizen at this point.
The second thing is that I know you heard from other company leaders here today about how EDC has been helpful. EDC, for all of its efforts, has not been very helpful for a company like ours. The reason is that there is no precedent for our company. We are creating the market. These markets didn't exist. We're teaching surgeons how to do surgery they've never done before. EDC looks at this and they simply see risk. We're asking them to look at the U.S. market, see how the U.S. is adopting our technology, and then overlay that on the risk profile in the developing world and help us with being able to provide the necessary resources for the distributor market worldwide. I think that is probably one place. I think Jean-Paul said it very well, where being a little bit more aggressive and being able to use these corresponding markets as a benchmark would be very very helpful.
With that, I'm open to any questions you might have.