Company: STAA
Filing Date: 2025-09-26
Form Type: DFAN14A
Source: 0001213900-25-092390
Chunk: 3

Company: STAAR SURGICAL CO
Filing Date: 2025-09-26
Form: DFAN14A
Chunk 3
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 confidence. STAAR kept shipping to a distributor,
which built up inventory and masked weakening end-user demand. When the distributor refused to pay for $27mn in unsold goods, STAAR could
no longer book that revenue.

“But the market didn’t vanish,” Bailey
said. “Even STAAR’s own projections, disclosed in the proxy, show normalization ahead. This is a hiccup, not a structural
collapse.”

That misstep, in Bailey’s view, eroded STAAR’s
leverage. What should have been a moment to press for value turned into a forced “capitulation”.

Tech as strategic lever

Bailey noted STAAR’s EVO ICL lens as
central to the refractive surgery future.

“ICL isn’t optional anymore,” he said. “For companies in
refractive, especially those with lasers, a phakic lens is becoming essential, and, at the moment, STAAR has the leading technology.
Alcon’s legacy laser operations are losing share in Asia to newer platforms like Zeiss’s SMILE. They need EVO for both
defense and growth.”

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This would give STAAR bargaining power — if management
had preserved it.

As Bailey put it, “STAAR is debt-free, cash-rich, with
a differentiated product and global footprint. A wiser CEO would have said, ‘Come back in six months, after China stabilizes and
costs are cleaned up. Then we can talk premium — the one you first offered.’”

Benchmarks and precedent deals

The most striking comparison is Alcon’s 2010 acquisition
of LenSx — a pre-revenue femtosecond-laser platform — for $744mn. STAAR, by contrast, is a profitable, mature company with
decades of clinical adoption and longstanding relationships with surgeons.

Bailey’s and Aeschlimann’s modeling implies that
with disciplined restructuring, STAAR could reach operating margins of between 27% and 30%. That suggests a standalone valuation in the
range of $28 to $44 per share. With historical industry-level acquisition premiums applied, the “right” price should be in
the $50–$60 zone.

“Sell now, you hand over the upside,” Bailey
said bluntly. “This is not emotional. The facts favor preserving negotiating power.”

Time is more on STAAR’s side than Alcon’s, he
argued.

“STAARs own words confirm the