All Article articles – Page 115
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Rebound in Safilo’s European sales, thanks to Polaroid
Safilo's European sales rose by 26.2 percent to €128.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2012, with a 24.7 percent increase in local currencies, thanks to organic growth as well as the new Polaroid house brand, which contributed to more than 50 percent of the increase. Polaroid Eyewear was bought ...
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Spy launches a “Happy Lens” while results improve
With many companies introducing “blue light” features in their lenses these days, this American producer of sunglasses and sports eyewear got a lot interest at the recent Vision Expo show in New York around a new patent-pending lens which, it claims, makes the wearer feel good because its filters let ...
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S&P sees Luxottica's outlook improving
Luxottica has announced that Standard & Poor's changed its outlook on the group from stable to positive on March 27. At the same time, the rating agency affirmed its “BBB+/A-2” long- and short-term corporate credit ratings for the group.Standard & Poor's said that the change in outlook follows another year of strong ...
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Essilor posts 19% revenue growth in 2012
Essilor saw its overall revenues increase by 19.1 percent to €4,989 million against 2011. The growth on a comparable basis was by 5.2 percent. The management is budgeting organic growth of 7 percent in 2013, driven in particular by emerging markets and by another massive campaign in North America, worth ...
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Mister Spex grows by more than 50%
Mister Spex, the leading German online retailer, increased sales by more than 50 percent from €17 million in 2011 to €26 million in 2012. While Mister Spex recorded 300,000 clients at the end of 2011, the number of customers increased to 500,000 at the end of the last year. These ...
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Germany's optical industry grows mostly abroad
Thomas Truckenbrod, president of the German opticians' association, ZVA, reported at the Opti ‘13 trade show in Munich that the German ophthalmic optics market recorded stable sales in 2012, but with a decline of about 3 percent in the number of frames sold in the stores. Higher average prices offset ...
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PFO Global acquires Optima
Optima Inc. is a U.S.-based subsidiary of a Japanese maker of high-index lenses which has developed a patented casting process for polycarbonate lenses, called Resolution, that makes them free of distortions and birefringence. However, it has sold its products mostly to independent opticians in the U.S, where polycarbonate makes up ...
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Online sales of contact lenses stir U.K. after reports
The U.K. contact lens community is in an uproar after three articles within a month in The Sun newspaper told of lens wearers losing an eye. An executive from the industry, the British Contact Lens Association and the Association of Contact Lens Manufacturers are all getting involved in the commotion.The ...
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Allison cuts debt, launches new lines and has a new CEO
Allison is about to start a new page in the chapter of a history that began in 1997. After a long period of restructuring, recapitalization by its owners ? Paladin Capital Partners of the Carisma Group ? and the sale of its production facilities at Volta Mantovana, the group has ...
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Hans Anders introduces brands and buys a Swedish chain
Direkt Optik is a profitable Swedish chain of optical retail stores, established by the British Crown Eyeglass group back in 1992, but it has a market share of less than 4 percent with its 13 corporate stores and 22 franchises. It was also facing a problem of succession as some ...
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Salmoiraghi launches an innovative website
Salmoiraghi & Viganò, the leading Italian optical retail chain, has launched a new institutional website featuring an innovative service for “virtual glass fitting.” Visitors can “try on” the new collections of the Italian optical chain from a virtual mirror online. It is the first service of this kind to be offered ...
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Optical Business Barometer sees another uptick
Independent eye care professionals in the U.S. are feeling more positive about their business, according to the latest Optical Business Barometer from Jobson Research. In January, the overall index was 3.8, compared with 3.7 in December, and matching the 3.8 of January 2012. The scale goes from 1, which is ...
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Big confusion in the British trade show scene
Dawn Kime, event director of The Eye Show, cancelled its first session, which was due to be held in the Excel exhibition center of London on Feb. 12-14, less than two weeks before it was going to take place. The new fair was going to host about 100 different companies, ...
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Italy's eyewear grows mainly in emerging markets, domestic market collapses
Italian production of prescription frames and sunglasses has continued to grow thanks to the good performance of export markets such as Germany, the U.S. and emerging countries, but the domestic market has shrunk drastically in the past five years. A full 90 percent of Italian production is currently used for ...
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Danish and U.S. companies merge
Bellinger House, the Danish eyewear company, has merged with Los Angeles-based Entourage of 7.Bellinger House, founded in 2003 by Claus Bellinger Diederichsen and his wife, Malene, sells the Bellinger, Blac and Kamaeleon brands. Its headquarters, including design, logistics, accounting, customer service, production and marketing, is based in Aarhus, Denmark. Its ...
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A.T. Cross may concentrate on eyewear
A.T. Cross Company is looking at strategic alternatives for its Cross Accessory division, home of the 257-year-old Cross pen business. C.W. Downer & Company will advise the company on possibilities. No definite decision has been made about the fate of the division, and no timetable has been set for action. ...
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Fielmann continues to improve
Germany's largest optical retail chain continued to raise its domestic market share in 2012. In a market that is estimated to have declined by 1 percent, Fielmann boosted the volume of spectacles sold by 4.9 percent to 7.1 million pairs, and the first few weeks of 2013 give it reason ...
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Luxottica deploys new growth initiatives
Luxottica continued to grow strongly in 2012 in terms of sales, and even more so in terms of profits. The management expects this pattern to be repeated for the fourth year in a row in 2013, with sales going up in the high single digits and profits moving up about ...
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Hoya improves sales and profits markedly
Operations at the company's superlaboratory for eyeglass lenses in Thailand have been completely restored. This led Hoya Vision Care to recover around 90 percent of the sales level it had reached before the flooding on the global basis, and to raise its global sales of lenses by 40 percent in ...
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Advice is given for online sales of contact lenses
The European Contact Lens Forum is providing guidance to vendors as well as customers on how to deal with online sales of contact lenses, which continue to grow. It has posted two new documents to its website, www.eclf.eu: a “best practice” document to help contact lens sellers give customers the best, and most ...
