EssilorLuxottica Q3 2026: Eye Care Carries the Ray-Ban Maker as Smart Glasses Slow

EssilorLuxottica, the Franco-Italian group behind Ray-Ban, Oakley and Varilux lenses, is growing fastest where glasses become medicine. In the third quarter of 2026, sales of its myopia-management lenses, which slow the progression of short-sightedness in children, rose 24 per cent. The AI glasses it makes with Meta grew 20 per cent, a sharp deceleration from a second quarter in which they had almost doubled. Group revenue reached €7.49 billion.

Investors took the balance as reassurance. On 21 October, the morning after the figures, the shares rose more than 11 per cent in early trading, clawing back some of the ground lost by a company whose market value had nearly halved from its €149 billion peak a year earlier.

The quarter stood out in a season that has left the luxury market after Q3 2026 with little growth to show. Revenue rose 9 per cent at current exchange rates and 7.2 per cent at constant currency in the three months to September, and beat analysts’ expectations of €7.36 billion. The company’s own stores, among them LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut and Salmoiraghi & Viganò, grew 10.6 per cent, with comparable-store sales up 6.8 per cent, while sales to opticians and retailers rose 3.4 per cent against double-digit growth a year earlier. Asia-Pacific was the strongest region, up 15.7 per cent. North America, the largest, grew 4.7 per cent.

The traditional business still carries the group. Ray-Ban and Oakley frames grew in volume and value, and the luxury licences, with Chanel, Prada and Miu Miu named by the company, grew again after a weak second quarter. For the first time, EssilorLuxottica disclosed what its wearables earn: €486 million in the quarter, about 6.5 per cent of sales, across the AI glasses and Nuance Audio, a pair of glasses with built-in hearing support whose second generation arrived in September. Roughly a third of the smart glasses left the shop with prescription lenses. In Europe, sales of AI glasses fell against a strong quarter a year earlier.

The medical business kept expanding. Stellest, the myopia lens for children, received market authorisation from the US Food and Drug Administration in September 2025 and is now stocked by about 12,000 American opticians. Stefano Grassi, the chief financial officer, said it gained good traction during the back-to-school weeks. Over the year, the group has also folded the eye-clinic operators Optegra and Signifeye into the business.

Glasses are moving from the fashion counter towards the clinic. The logo still sells, steadily and at a mid-single-digit pace, and Kering Eyewear, the eyewear business of Gucci’s owner, grew 4 per cent on a comparable basis in the same quarter. The fastest growth at the world’s largest eyewear company now comes from lenses that change how a child’s eye develops, from eye clinics and from frames that help people hear.

For the people who wear them, a pair of glasses is becoming something prescribed, fitted and followed over years, and the optician who sells it is becoming part of a system of care. AI glasses are the most contested part of that future. Bernstein describes their threat to traditional eyewear as a sword of Damocles over the group, and Google plans to bring its own Gemini glasses to market before the end of 2026.