A tribute to Leonardo Del Vecchio, the craftsman of the construction of the group that we celebrate today after a year of mourning. We are succeeding in this with a record year and excellent growth prospects. Francesco Milleri opened Essilux’s annual meeting commemorating the founder, the first for Milleri, already CEO since 2021, as President and the first without Del Vecchio. Not just an entrepreneur, but a friend. He was brilliant and visionary, he shaped the optics industry by creating an unprecedented industrial reality with ethical values ​​and a vision for the future that we are driving in a market worth 100 billion worldwide. Focus on innovation and research, designers and engineers – 30 research centers around the world with around a thousand in-house researchers and 11,000 patents. This is where the new Ray-Ban Stories are born, the connected glasses developed with Meta, the new version of which will be launched later this year, and soon also the Reverse collection with concave lenses that combine the refractive, astigmatism, prismatic and resolving powers of the glass are optimized.

The results

The meeting was an opportunity to take stock of the 2018 trip. Since the day the merger between Essilor and Luxottica was signed five years ago, we have almost doubled the size and value of the group. Today we are stronger than before. From 46 billion capitalization to currently over 80 billion, from 16.2 billion in sales to 24.5 billion at the end of 2022, net income up from 1.8 billion to 2.9 billion, a jump that increased the distribution from 1, 4 billion has enabled dividends to rise by 55%. And it has created jobs as the number of employees has reached 190,000 (+36%). Between the stock plan and welfare, we gave them back 3 billion on top of normal pay. There are 72,000 employee shareholders, 40% of our employees, a base that we want to expand so that those who work with us also have responsibility.

open company

Today’s success of EssilorLuxottica is based on a clear strategy: we have chosen to operate as an open and connected company, focusing on a vertically integrated model, ranging from holistic innovation to distribution in the omnichannel market. Paul du Saillant, Deputy CEO of Essilux, said this during the ongoing ordinary and extraordinary shareholders’ meeting in Paris, underlining that EssilorLuxottica implements this strategy through a unique and very atypical combination of assets in our industry, which characterizes the group today. In particular, Du Saillant cited an excellent brand and product portfolio with 18,000 stores and 200 online sales platforms, an innovative platform, a unique market model, a complex logistics chain and a global presence in 150 countries and a good balance in mature markets , with two historical bases in France and Italy. The manager spoke about an incredible development and the change in size that EssilorLuxottica has achieved in the last five years, thanks mainly to four aspects, namely the strategic model, our assets, our recent successes and our human dimension.