STRATEGY AND BUSINESSES
We drive innovation by transforming solutions, redefining services, and enriching interactions throughout the consumer hearing journey.
Hearing is connecting to the world: the soothing sounds of nature make us feel at home in our surroundings. Music links us to other people and cultures. The voices of friends and loved ones offer us energizing social interaction. Sonovaʼs ultimate goal is to deepen and enrich these connections, bringing the delight of hearing to people at every stage of their journey with innovative technology and services, easy-to use interfaces, and seamless access to our professional support through multiple points of contact.
The Sonova Group is a leading global provider of hearing care solutions. Its businesses are deeply connected, sharing innovation, customer access, talent, and market expertise across their various activities. They collaborate in R&D, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and customer support to ensure sustained, fruitful contact with consumers, business partners, and hearing care professionals. The Groupʼs structured innovation process develops new breakthrough capabilities for ever-better hearing experience, while rapidly extending the benefits of new technologies right across the industryʼs broadest solutions portfolio.
Sonova consists of four businesses. Each serves its unique customer segment through established and well-known brands, but they also cooperate to address the full range of hearing needs in a continuous, life-long consumer journey, supported through multiple (increasingly digital) channels and extending from audiophile equipment through solutions for every type of hearing loss to hearing-related medical services.
The Hearing Instruments business, with its well respected Phonak and Unitron brands, is a global innovation leader in hearing aids and wireless communications devices, regularly launching new technology platforms that advance consumersʼ ability to hear and actively engage in life.
Audiological Care, represented principally by the AudioNova brand, provides consumers with expert professional hearing care and the full range of Sonova products using an “omnichannel” approach that gives consumers the choice of how they interact with us – whether through our fast-growing network of physical stores or our integrated suite of digital channels.
Consumer Hearing, operating under license through the Sennheiser brand, provides immersive hearing experiences at home and on the go with its range of soundbars, audiophile, and true wireless premium headphones – extending to innovative new early-entry hearing products that bridge the gap to hearing aids.
Cochlear Implants, operating globally under the Advanced Bionics brand, links the audiological innovations of Phonak with its own expertise in cochlear implant design to provide new solutions for those whose hearing loss is too advanced for hearing aids.
Our strategy is straightforward and unchanged, because it has proven to be effective. We aim to lead innovation, expand consumer access, extend customer reach, invest in high-growth markets, drive continuous improvement, and leverage M&A to accelerate growth.
Each of these strategic vectors offers its own set of growth opportunities. Industry-leading innovations in hearing performance introduced with Phonakʼs Lumity platform have been extended across the Hearing Instruments product portfolio, and a substantial step-up in R&D investment has set the stage for further fundamental breakthroughs to be revealed in the near future. Remote programming in our Advanced Bionics cochlear implants, enabled by Phonak technology, transforms the experience of patients and audiologists alike, saving travel and waiting time, and offering patients the chance to be more self-sufficient. Sennheiserʼs temperature and heartbeat-sensing MOMENTUM Sport earbuds and All-Day Clear over-the-counter hearing aids in the US open up new growth paths for Sonova. Further store openings, well-integrated acquisitions, and evolving digital sales and support channels in Audiological Care broaden consumer access and spur growth in high-potential markets. And the initiatives across the Group established through Sonova X, our business system and mindset to improve processes, have freed up resources to invest in further growth and have meaningfully improved the delivery, quality, and reliability of our products and services, further enriching the consumerʼs experience.
Peopleʼs desire for good hearing lasts a lifetime, but the ways of fulfilling that desire change over time. Our aim is to accompany our consumers throughout their lifelong journey, offering multiple opportunities to connect, explore, and understand how we can broaden and deepen their hearing experience.
It begins with scale: Sonova, as a global company focused on hearing, offers the same high level of engagement as well as the same broad portfolio of innovative solutions to people everywhere. Our companies work together to leverage our capabilities across our different businesses, sharing market, technology, and audiology insights – as well as access to consumers when their hearing needs change and require a more powerful solution.
Our products are built around audiological performance and connectivity: all our hearing aids link seamlessly to virtually all phones, tablets, and laptops; our new Sennheiser MOMENTUM True Wireless 4 earbuds feature Auracast™ broadcast audio, a new Bluetooth® LE Audio standard. Our Marvel CI cochlear implant sound processors allow remote programming via the patientʼs mobile device. The technology itself helps to open up new horizons and initiate dialog between the consumer and Sonova.
In the Audiological Care business, a dedicated in-house team ensures that our first contact with the consumer – whether digital, on the phone, or in person – is established on the basis of real interest, not just a demographic profile. This personal, informed approach through online and offline channels establishes strong, trustful relationships with consumers at a younger age and earlier in their hearing journey. Our tinnitus-management app, SilentCloud™, offers consumers and hearing care professionals a unique benefit that naturally leads to conversation about other hearing needs. The experience-based format of our World of Hearing stores gives consumers and their families a self-paced introduction to the reality of hearing loss and the available solutions. Meanwhile call centers, audiology stores, online communities, and phone-based apps enable an “anywhere, anytime” connection to consumers.
This omnichannel ecosystem, combining proven in-person service with novel online engagement powered by connectivity, reflects Sonovaʼs commitment to elevating the consumer journey, and opens up unique opportunities to build consumer loyalty, expand value, and drive sustainable growth.
We remain convinced that constantly improving our environmental, social, and governmental (ESG) performance goes hand-in-hand with our long-term market success: good ESG practice is good business practice. Each year we make substantial progress in implementing IntACT, our ESG strategy.
IntACT continues to deliver year-on-year achievements across key sustainability topics: in this financial year, our diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives have further increased the share of women in senior and middle management positions over the previous year (from 22.0% to 28.3% and from 36.4% to 39.9%, respectively), and we have further improved our high employee engagement level (currently 83%) in 2023.
We are achieving significant environmental footprint reductions, including a 28% reduction in our Scope 1-3 CO2 emissions since 2019 on a comparable basis. Despite growing our business by 3.2% in local currencies, we have reduced our total packaging weight by 9.4% compared to the 2022/23 financial year. Our climate targets have been officially approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).
Sonovaʼs ratings from external ESG agencies and indices remain consistently high: for the first time, MSCI has awarded us their highest-possible AAA ESG rating. Sustainalytics ranked us in second place out of more than 200 assessed companies in the medical devices industry, and we are included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the tenth consecutive year, ranking fourth out of 279 companies in the health care equipment and supplies sector.
You can find further detailed information in our ESG report.