EssilorLuxottica ….The ‘FANG’ Of Your Eyes

Yesterday I was blogging about BIG.

It’s not just the internet giants that have gotten big.

There is a FANG (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google) of your eyes. The company is EssilorLuxottica.

My favorite read of the weekend was this piece by The Guardian titled ‘The Spectacular Power of Big Lens’.

I know quite a bit about Luxottica (here is the Wikipedia page) because I used to love Oakley before they were acquired by Luxottica.

I did not know anything about Essilor but now I do.

Over the last generation, just two companies have risen above all the rest to dominate the industry. The lenses in my glasses — and yours too, most likely — are made by Essilor, a French multinational that controls almost half of the world’s prescription lens business and has acquired more than 250 other companies in the past 20 years.

There is a good chance, meanwhile, that your frames are made by Luxottica, an Italian company with an unparalleled combination of factories, designer labels and retail outlets. Luxottica pioneered the use of luxury brands in the optical business, and one of the many powerful functions of names such as Ray-Ban (which is owned by Luxottica) or Vogue (which is owned by Luxottica) or Prada (whose glasses are made by Luxottica) or Oliver Peoples (which is owned by Luxottica) or high-street outlets such as LensCrafters, the largest optical retailer in the US (which is owned by Luxottica), or John Lewis Opticians in the UK (which is run by Luxottica), or Sunglass Hut (which is owned by Luxottica) is to make the marketplace feel more varied than it actually is.

Between them, Essilor and Luxottica play a central, intimate role in the lives of a remarkable number of people. Around 1.4 billion of us rely on their products to drive to work, read on the beach, follow the whiteboard in biology lessons, type text messages to our grandchildren, land aircraft, watch old movies, write dissertations and glance across restaurants, hoping to look slightly more intelligent and interesting than we actually are. Last year, the two companies had a combined customer base that is somewhere between Apple’s and Facebook’s, but with none of the hassle and scrutiny of being as well known.

Now they are becoming one. On 1 March, regulators in the EU and the US gave permission for the world’s largest optical companies to form a single corporation, which will be known as EssilorLuxottica. The new firm will not technically be a monopoly: Essilor currently has around 45% of the prescription lenses market, and Luxottica 25% of the frames. But in seven centuries of spectacles, there has never been anything like it. The new entity will be worth around $50bn (£37bn), sell close to a billion pairs of lenses and frames every year, and have a workforce of more than 140,000 people. EssilorLuxottica intends to dominate what its executives call “the visual experience” for decades to come.

This is one of the most incredible mergers I have read about in years. These trends sometimes sit right under (in this case OVER) our noses.

Have a great week.

PS — Tomorrow I will dive into a bunch of trends in a new ‘Momentum Monday’.

Originally published at Howard Lindzon.