Liechtenstein and false teeth, separating fact from legend

Among the Liechtenstein facts doing the rounds online, one always grabs attention, that it’s the land of false teeth. There’s something real in it and a fair bit of embroidery. The real part is a Schaan company with almost a century of history. The embroidery is the line about it being the world’s biggest exporter, which I haven’t been able to confirm in any reliable source.

A teeth factory that came for the tax breaks

The story starts in Zurich in 1923, with the ‘Zahnfabrik Ramsperger & Co. AG’. In 1933 it moved to Schaan under the name Zahnfabrik Ramco AG. The Historisches Lexikon is quite plain about why. In the middle of the world economic crisis, Liechtenstein’s government wanted new businesses and offered the firm cheap land on the site it still occupies, plus five years without paying tax.

At the time it was, in the Lexikon’s words, a small works making porcelain teeth. In 1937 it employed 102 people, 93 of them women, which tells you a lot about what it meant for families in what was then a farming village. In 1951 it became Ivoclar AG, in 1956 Vivadent was founded, and in 2001 the two merged. The company kept growing at home for decades. It had 223 staff in Liechtenstein alone in 1957, 524 in 1970, 685 in 1990 and 716 in 2008, when the whole group counted 2,258 people and turned over CHF 631 million. The Lexikon dates those figures to 2011, so I read them as history rather than the present. To place the town, see my guide to Schaan, the country’s most populous municipality.

From porcelain teeth to a dental group

Bit by bit the company stopped being just a teeth factory. The Lexikon lists three lines, namely prosthetics such as artificial teeth, tooth-coloured filling materials, and prevention products such as caries-risk tests and fissure sealants. It grew at home, with plants at Triesenberg and Schellenberg from 1967, and abroad, with its own factories from 1954 and acquisitions such as a dental alloy maker in Buffalo in 1986.

Today Ivoclar describes itself as a family business headquartered in Liechtenstein with more than a hundred years of history. It employs around 3,700 people, has 56 subsidiaries and branches, manufactures in Liechtenstein, Austria, Italy, the United States and the Philippines, and ships to about 130 countries. Research and training are concentrated in Schaan, where a centre opened in 2000 trains thousands of dentists and technicians a year.

Is it the world’s biggest exporter of false teeth?

This is where I have to be careful. The claim turns up on plenty of fact lists, but I haven’t found it in Liechtenstein’s official statistics, in the Historisches Lexikon or on Ivoclar’s own website. So I’m not treating it as true, and I’d suggest you don’t repeat it as fact either. I’d rather lose a catchy anecdote than tell you something I can’t stand behind.

What the Office of Statistics does say is that dental products are one of the important branches of the country’s industry, alongside machinery, equipment, vehicles and food. And that industry provides 32% of all jobs, which is extraordinary in Europe. Where all that industrial weight comes from is analysed in why Liechtenstein is so rich.

What it says about the country

The Ivoclar story interests me more than the anecdote, because it shows how Liechtenstein got rich. A small, poor country goes looking for industry in the 1930s with tax incentives and ends up with two global companies in Schaan. It wasn’t a one-off. The Historisches Lexikon describes how in the 1920s the government also courted foreign capital with low taxes, a liberal company law of 1926 and a trust law of 1928, the roots of today’s financial sector. Factories and finance grew from the same instinct, a tiny state making itself attractive to outsiders. The other is Hilti, founded in 1941, whose story is on Hilti in Liechtenstein.

For visitors there’s no teeth factory to tour, or at least none I’ve found open to the public. What you can do is pass through Schaan knowing that this town, which most visitors only pass through, is where much of the country’s economy is decided. And if you like this kind of thing, I’ve got a whole sourced list of Liechtenstein facts.