Tipped Article27 Mar 2025 12:37
Extract from Small Company Sharewatch in Feb.HTtps://www.scsw.co.uk/issues/february-2025/inspecs/
Meta deal.......EssilorLuxottica and penned a 10-year deal with its Ray-Ban brand, which having bought Nuance Audio can incorporate hearing aids into the frame (pending FDA clearance). These look just like any other pair of spectacles but a device inside the arm of the glasses can isolate speech sounds in front of the wearer. In the UK, Essilor’s £40m-cap rival, Inspecs (SPEC; 41.75p), has been busy. Its Norville lens division has been working on smart glasses designed to assist workers in Amazon warehouses and even surgeons in operating rooms. Until now CEO Richard Peck has been preaching patience but the expectation is that current consultancy agreements will convert into firm orders. Established in 1988, Inspecs started its journey as a supplier of corrective eyewear frames to retailers, like Specsavers. For years, it sourced acetate frames from China but evolved, shifting from low-margin, own-label products to high-margin branded frames. By licensing popular brands, such as Caterpillar, Barbour and O’Neill, Inspecs found a way to add more value to its product offerings. But the real game-changer came with the acquisition of Eschenbach, a German wholesaler that gave Inspecs access to 80% of independent opticians in Germany and 40% in the US. Eschenbach added Titanflex (No.1 brand in Germany) as well as the new Optaro smartphone lens attachment/App to enlarge text by up to 15x, offering assistance for users with visual impairments. The company has turned to vertical integration, which will push gross margin and ebitda margin up from the present 51.4% and 8.7%. In FY24, the frame factory in Vietnam was completed (nameplate of 12m frames) and it has begun to shift production in-house, initially acetate frame manufacturing from third-party suppliers in China. Not only do factory workers earn 60% less than Chinese counterparts but Vietnam also isn't impacted by Trump’s tariffs, a point not lost on US buyers. With 45,000 optical stores in the US versus 5,000 in the UK and 6,500 in Germany, Peck says FY25 has started well. Peel Hunt forecasts EPS of 6p rising to 7.3p next year, dropping the PE to 5.7