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EssilorLuxottica

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EssilorLuxottica is a Franco-Italian eyecare and eyewear group formed in 2018 by the combination of Essilor, the French lensmaker, and Luxottica, the Italian frame manufacturer and retailer [1]. It owns Ray-Ban and Oakley, licenses eyewear for most large luxury fashion houses, runs roughly 20,000 retail locations including LensCrafters and Sunglass Hut, and employs more than 200,000 people [2][3]. Since 2021 it has been the eyewear half of the partnership with Meta Platforms that produced Ray-Ban Stories, Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, Meta Ray-Ban Display and Meta Glasses, a lineup that sold more than 7 million units in 2025 by the company's own count [4]. That business made an optical manufacturer whose oldest predecessor dates to 1849 into a central supplier of consumer AI glasses, and it has moved both the group's revenue growth and its margins.

The company

Essilor traces to the Association Fraternelle des Ouvriers Lunetiers, a Paris craftsmen's cooperative founded in 1849; the modern company was created in 1972 by the merger of Essel and Silor and listed in Paris three years later [1]. Its lens franchises include Varilux progressive lenses, invented by Bernard Maitenaz and launched in 1959, plus Crizal coatings, Transitions photochromics and the Stellest myopia-control lens [1].

Luxottica was founded in Agordo in 1961 by Leonardo Del Vecchio, who built the industry's first vertically integrated eyewear business: licensing (starting with Giorgio Armani in 1988), retail (LensCrafters, acquired 1995) and owned brands (Persol in 1995, Ray-Ban and Arnette from Bausch & Lomb in 1999, Oakley in 2007) [1]. Del Vecchio, who died in 2022, was the architect of the 2018 tie-up [1].

ItemDetail
Formed2018, combination of Essilor and Luxottica [1]
ListingEuronext Paris (Compartment A), ticker EL, ISIN FR0000121667; CAC 40 and Euro Stoxx 50 [5]
Shares outstanding463,289,594 at 2025-12-31 [5]
FY2025 revenueEUR 28,491 million, up 11.2% at constant exchange rates [4]
Employeesmore than 200,000 [2]
R&D51 facilities worldwide [2]
Retail networkclose to 20,000 stores after the Top Charoen investment in Thailand [3]
Chairman and CEOFrancesco Milleri; Deputy CEO Paul du Saillant; CFO Stefano Grassi [3][4][12]

Owned brands include Ray-Ban, Oakley, Persol, Vogue Eyewear and Arnette; licensed houses include Armani, Bulgari, Chanel, Prada, Versace, Dolce&Gabbana, Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Tiffany & Co., Michael Kors, Coach, Ferrari, Jimmy Choo, Swarovski, Brunello Cucinelli and Moncler [1]. Its retail banners run from LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Pearle Vision and Target Optical in North America to GrandVision, Vision Express, Apollo and Salmoiraghi & Vigano in Europe [6][21].

The Meta partnership

EssilorLuxottica had experimented with connected eyewear before, announcing partnerships with Google for Glass and with Intel for Oakley Radar Pace in 2014 [1]. Neither appears in the group's current wearables lineup. The group's own history page dates the collaboration to 2020, while the 2024 partnership announcement says the two companies "have been collaborating successfully since 2019" [1][7]. The first product, Ray-Ban Stories, shipped in 2021; the redesigned Ray-Ban Meta line followed in 2023, running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 platform [8]. Qualcomm silicon and Meta's software supply the compute and the assistant; EssilorLuxottica supplies the frames, the lenses, the prescription fulfillment and the shop floors.

On 2024-09-17 the two companies announced a new long-term agreement "under which the parties will collaborate into the next decade to develop multi-generational smart eyewear products" [7]. Milleri used the announcement to credit the group's Chief Wearables Officer, Rocco Basilico; Mark Zuckerberg said the companies had "the opportunity to turn glasses into the next major technology platform, and make it fashionable in the process" [7]. Bloomberg News later reported that the extension runs 10 years and calls for periodic reviews of items such as pricing and production volumes [9].

ProductAnnouncedEntry price at launch
Ray-Ban Stories2021USD 299 [9]
Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 1)2023USD 299 [17]
Oakley Meta HSTN2025-06-20USD 399, Limited Edition USD 499 [24]
Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2)2025-09-18USD 379 / EUR 419 [10]
Oakley Meta Vanguard2025-09-18USD 499 / EUR 549 [10]
Meta Ray-Ban Display2025-09-18, US retail 2025-09-30USD 799 [10]
Ray-Ban Meta Blayzer Optics and Scriber Optics2026-03-31, retail 2026-04-14USD 499 / EUR 469 [6]
Meta Glasses2026-06-23USD 299 [11]

Manufacturing scale and ownership of chains such as LensCrafters and Sunglass Hut are what the group brings to the arrangement [9]. Speaking on the group's third-quarter earnings call on 2024-10-17, Grassi said Ray-Ban Meta had become the top-selling product in 60% of Ray-Ban stores across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a figure widely picked up in tech coverage the following week [23]. Oakley Meta followed on 2025-06-20, announced by Chief Wearables Officer Rocco Basilico as "part of a broader multi-brand, multi-technology strategy" [24].

Meta Ray-Ban Display was the first product in the line with an in-lens display, sold with a wrist-worn electromyography band; EssilorLuxottica described it as combining "the best of our two companies in terms of our lens technology and wearables design expertise, and Meta's leadership in AI and software architecture" [10]. The 2026 additions moved in the opposite direction. The Blayzer and Scriber Optics frames targeted prescription wearers, and Meta Glasses, launched jointly on 2026-06-23, dropped the Ray-Ban and Oakley branding to reach "more price-sensitive consumers" at USD 299 [6][11]. Reuters reported that the lower-priced models would be manufactured outside EssilorLuxottica's own facilities, which makes the common description of the group as the maker of every pair of Meta glasses inaccurate as of mid-2026 [12].

The feature set the partnership sells is largely Meta AI running against the glasses' sensors: hands-free capture, speech recognition for voice commands, real-time machine translation between languages, and computer vision queries about what the wearer is looking at [6]. Meta's Orion augmented reality glasses, which Meta said in September 2024 would not reach consumers, indicate where the display side of the roadmap points [25].

Meta's stake in EssilorLuxottica

On 2025-07-08 Bloomberg reported that Meta had bought just under 3% of EssilorLuxottica for around EUR 3 billion (about USD 3.5 billion), and that it was considering further purchases that could take the holding to roughly 5% over time [13]. Reuters confirmed the substance the following day, citing a source who put the stake at nearly 3%; EssilorLuxottica declined to comment and Meta did not immediately respond, and the shares rose 5.4% to EUR 252, the biggest gain in the STOXX 600 that day [14]. Neither company published a formal confirmation at the time.

The direction of that transaction matters, because it is frequently reversed in secondary write-ups. Meta bought equity in EssilorLuxottica. EssilorLuxottica did not take a stake in Meta's Reality Labs glasses business, and no such transaction has been reported.

What AI glasses did to the financials

The figures below are the group's own, with each period and each definition stated as the company states it.

PeriodReported by the groupFigure
Q3 2025RevenueEUR 6,867 million, +11.7% at constant exchange rates, +6.7% at current rates [15]
Q3 2025Headline"Best quarterly performance ever for the Group" [15]
FY2025RevenueEUR 28,491 million, +11.2% at constant exchange rates, Q4 +18.4% [4]
FY2025AI glasses volume"AI-glasses selling more than 7 million units in the FY" [4]
FY2025Adjusted operating margin16.0% at constant exchange rates, "impacted by US tariffs and AI-glasses" [4]
FY2025Free cash flowEUR 2.8 billion, EUR 400 million above 2024 [4]
Q1 2026RevenueEUR 7,127 million, +10.8% at constant rates, +4.1% at current rates [3]
Q2 2026AI glasses"AI glasses almost doubling in revenue in Q2" [16]
H1 2026Revenue growth+9.7% at constant exchange rates, Q2 +8.7% [16]
H1 2026Adjusted operating margin18.6%, gaining 80 basis points to 18.9% at constant exchange rates [16]
H1 2026Free cash flowEUR 1.07 billion [16]

Two points in that table are easy to garble. The Q3 2025 release headline reads "Best quarterly performance ever for the Group", and the accompanying comment from Milleri and du Saillant is "Achieving our best quarter ever since the creation of the Group" [15]; the comparison the company makes is against the period since the Group was created in 2018, not against the longer separate histories of Essilor and Luxottica. The two margin figures are also on different bases: 16.0% for FY2025 is stated at constant exchange rates, while 18.6% for H1 2026 is the reported figure, with the constant-currency equivalent at 18.9% [4][16]. They are different periods on different measures, not a before-and-after.

Reuters put H1 2026 adjusted operating profit at EUR 2.75 billion, up 15% and ahead of a Visible Alpha consensus of EUR 2.46 billion, with Q2 revenue of EUR 7.7 billion slightly below the EUR 7.8 billion expected; Grassi attributed the profit beat to price mix and to US tariff refunds rather than to volume alone [12].

Manufacturing and the waveguide question

Capacity has been the visible constraint. On the Q3 2025 call Grassi said the group would bring forward its plan to build 10 million units of annual wearables production capacity, adding that "we are in a position to anticipate that build-up capacity before what we shared at the beginning, so it will come earlier than the end of 2026" [17]. Bloomberg reported in January 2026 that Meta had suggested doubling capacity to 20 million units, or more than 30 million [9].

On 2026-06-09 EssilorLuxottica announced its first wearable production lines in Italy, converting a production area at the historic Agordo plant, with lines starting in the second half of 2026 and operations set to begin by early 2027 [18]. On 2026-06-16 it announced a long-term joint development agreement with Applied Materials covering "waveguides, adaptive lens systems and materials innovations", run from a dedicated collaboration lab on Applied Materials' Silicon Valley campus, with no financial terms disclosed [19]. The waveguide is the optical layer that makes an in-lens display possible [19].

What is actually announced is a joint R&D agreement and an Italian assembly plant. Trade coverage published around the H1 2026 results framed this as EssilorLuxottica targeting waveguide manufacturing in its own right, but that reading is inference from the Applied Materials agreement rather than a stated company plan; the group has not announced that it will manufacture waveguides itself [16][19].

Nuance Audio

Nuance Audio is EssilorLuxottica's own product, not a Meta one, and it is the group's clearest move into AI in healthcare adjacent hardware. On 2025-02-03 the company announced FDA clearance for the over-the-counter Nuance Audio Glasses along with CE marking under the EU Medical Devices Regulation, describing the Nuance Audio Hearing Aid Software as "the first FDA cleared, preset Software as Medical Device (SaMD) in the U.S." [20]. The glasses put open-ear speakers and a directional microphone array into a normal-looking frame, aimed at the roughly 1.25 billion people the company says have mild to moderate hearing loss [20][21].

US sales began on 2025-04-08 through LensCrafters, Target Optical, Pearle Vision and other optical and audiology retailers, at what the company described as approximately one quarter of the average price of traditional prescription hearing aids; it did not publish a list price in that release [21]. By the FY2025 results the group reported Nuance Audio available in 12 markets and 15,000 doors [4]. On 2026-01-15 it published clinical results from Western University in Canada and the National Acoustic Laboratories in Australia, reporting up to 29% improvement in speech understanding in noise versus unaided listening and a 3.48 dB signal-to-noise ratio improvement [22]. These are company-published findings.

Pricing tension, margins and market reaction

The partnership has not been frictionless. Bloomberg News reported on 2026-02-24 that Meta and EssilorLuxottica have had "repeated, and at times pointed, internal debates over how to price and promote" the glasses, described by one person as a push-and-pull that never became a standoff [9]. The reported pattern is structural: Zuckerberg has lobbied for lower prices to build scale, while EssilorLuxottica remains tied to luxury-segment economics where cheap frames can undercut margins [9]. Bloomberg cited two specific episodes, both unconfirmed by either company. Before the 2021 Ray-Ban Stories launch, Zuckerberg reportedly floated about USD 250 and the partners settled at USD 299 after weeks of review; in November 2023 Meta pushed to include Ray-Ban Meta in Black Friday discounts and EssilorLuxottica objected, with no discounts running in the end [9]. Asked about it, EssilorLuxottica told Bloomberg that "our alliance, leveraging strengths from each group, has been very impactful and is stronger than ever"; Meta said it joined that response, and both declined further comment [9].

The margin effect is documented rather than rumored. EssilorLuxottica's own FY2025 release names AI glasses, alongside US tariffs, as a drag on the 16.0% adjusted operating margin [4]. Bloomberg reported that adjusted gross margin fell 2.6 percentage points in 2025 to 60.9% of revenue, with executives attributing about two-thirds of that to AI glasses [9]. Investors have taken the point: Reuters noted on 2026-07-28 that the shares had nearly halved from their mid-November peak, partly on concerns about the smart glasses outlook and profitability [12].

The AI glasses market is also filling up. Bloomberg's February 2026 piece listed Apple accelerating its own glasses work, Alphabet re-entering the category with Warby Parker, OpenAI hiring Jony Ive for a hardware push, and Asian entrants led by Xiaomi; it also cited an IDC estimate that smart glasses would grow at more than 29% a year to nearly 30 million units and USD 10.8 billion by 2029 [9]. Regulatory and privacy pressure over always-on cameras falls on the whole category rather than on EssilorLuxottica specifically, though the group owns the shops where the glasses are sold and fitted. Its own stated direction, across the Applied Materials agreement and the Agordo conversion, is toward augmented reality optics and the manufacturing that on-device AI eyewear requires [18][19].

References

  1. ^"Our History." EssilorLuxottica. essilorluxottica.com/...history
  2. ^"Group." EssilorLuxottica. essilorluxottica.com/...group
  3. ^"Q1 2026 Revenue." EssilorLuxottica, 2026-04-22. essilorluxottica.com/...q1-2026-revenue
  4. ^"Q4/Full Year 2025 Results." EssilorLuxottica, 2026-02-11. essilorluxottica.com/...q4-full-year-2025-results
  5. ^"Stock and Shareholders Information." EssilorLuxottica. essilorluxottica.com/...nd-shareholder-information
  6. ^"EssilorLuxottica and Meta Expand AI Glasses Portfolio with Ray-Ban Meta Optics Styles." EssilorLuxottica, 2026-03-31. essilorluxottica.com/...xpand-ai-glasses-portfolio
  7. ^"EssilorLuxottica and Meta Announce Long Term Partnership, Shaping the Future of the Smart Eyewear Category." EssilorLuxottica, 2024-09-17. essilorluxottica.com/...unce-long-term-partnership
  8. ^"Introducing the New Ray-Ban | Meta Smart Glasses." Meta, 2023-09-27. about.fb.com/...new-ray-ban-meta-smart-glasses
  9. ^"How much are AI Ray-Bans worth? Meta spars with EssilorLuxottica over pricing." Bloomberg News, published via SiliconValley.com, 2026-02-24. siliconvalley.com/...essilorluxottica-over-pricing
  10. ^"EssilorLuxottica and Meta build on their successful partnership with new AI glasses that offer a glimpse into the future." EssilorLuxottica, 2025-09-18. essilorluxottica.com/...partnership-new-ai-glasses
  11. ^"EssilorLuxottica and Meta expand the accessibility of wearables category with new collection." EssilorLuxottica, 2026-06-23. essilorluxottica.com/...a-new-wearables-collection
  12. ^"Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica beats estimates as tariff refunds boost profit." Reuters (Elisa Anzolin and Gianluca Lo Nostro), published via Global Banking & Finance Review, 2026-07-28. globalbankingandfinance.com/...s-ai-glasses-myopia
  13. ^"Meta Reportedly Invests $3.5 Billion in EssilorLuxottica, Further Strengthening Smart Glasses Partnership." Road to VR, 2025-07-10. roadtovr.com/...vestment-3-5-billion-smart-glasses
  14. ^"EssilorLuxottica shares jump after reports that Meta bought 3% stake." Reuters (Elisa Anzolin and Juby Babu), published via Yahoo Finance, 2025-07-09. finance.yahoo.com/...akes-around-3-stake-202022761
  15. ^"Q3/9M 2025 Revenue." EssilorLuxottica, 2025-10-16. essilorluxottica.com/...q3-9m-2025-revenue
  16. ^"Q2/H1 2026 Results." EssilorLuxottica, 2026-07-28. essilorluxottica.com/...q2-h1-2026-results
  17. ^"EssilorLuxottica sales boosted by Meta AI glasses." Reuters (Gianluca Lo Nostro), published via Yahoo Finance, 2025-10-16. finance.yahoo.com/...les-boosted-meta-ai-180222988
  18. ^"EssilorLuxottica to start wearable production in Italy." EssilorLuxottica, 2026-06-09. essilorluxottica.com/...arable-production-in-italy
  19. ^"EssilorLuxottica and Applied Materials Join Forces to Advance Augmented Reality Optics Platforms for Next-Generation Smart Glasses." EssilorLuxottica, 2026-06-16. essilorluxottica.com/...lied-materials-join-forces
  20. ^"EssilorLuxottica receives FDA clearance and EU certifications for Nuance Audio, making it available to consumers in the U.S. and Europe." EssilorLuxottica, 2025-02-03. essilorluxottica.com/...fications-for-nuance-audio
  21. ^"Nuance Audio Glasses Now Available in the U.S." PR Newswire, 2025-04-08. prnewswire.com/...ow-available-in-the-us-302423365
  22. ^"EssilorLuxottica unveils new clinical findings demonstrating significant improvements in hearing performance with Nuance Audio Glasses." EssilorLuxottica, 2026-01-15. essilorluxottica.com/...g-performance-nuance-audio
  23. ^"Meta's smart glasses outsell traditional Ray-Bans in some stores, even before AI features roll out." TechCrunch, 2024-10-21. techcrunch.com/...even-before-ai-features-roll-out
  24. ^"EssilorLuxottica and Meta to launch Oakley Meta, creating a new category of Performance AI glasses for athletes and fans alike." EssilorLuxottica, 2025-06-20. essilorluxottica.com/...meta-to-launch-oakley-meta
  25. ^"Introducing Orion, Our First True Augmented Reality Glasses." Meta, 2024-09-25. about.fb.com/...rst-true-augmented-reality-glasses

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