Strategy and businesses
Hearing Instruments business
Our culture of innovation regularly delivers breakthrough advances, bringing the delight of hearing to ever more consumers.
Sonovaʼs Hearing Instruments business operates through our Phonak, Unitron, and other local and private label brands. We are a market leader in developing, manufacturing, and selling hearing aids and wireless communication products through a multitude of channels, including independent audiologists and Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) clinics, large hearing care chains, and government health agencies. We are proud of our track record of innovation, regularly delivering step-change improvements in our consumersʼ hearing experience through our rigorous focus on the essentials of hearing performance and ease of use.
Our market-leadership strategy calls for excellence in each aspect of our business: in continuous innovation, in extending the breadth of our solutions portfolio, in enriching the experience of our business partners and the consumers they serve, and in improving our processes and expanding market access.
Innovation is a journey marked by repeated technological breakthroughs
Over many years, Sonovaʼs Hearing Instruments business has time and time again elevated consumer experience through a cadence of industry firsts: multi-microphone directionality, automatic sound classification, adaptive directional beamforming, rechargeable lithium-ion battery power, and universal Bluetooth® connectivity. Each of these breakthroughs has been further refined and extended through our continuous cycle of technology platform advances. There are always improvements to be made in the key aspects of hearing experience: sound quality, speech understanding in noise, connectivity, reliability, and personalization. We therefore take a structured multi-disciplinary approach to product development: collaborating with clinical, technology and research organizations, investing in in-house innovation capabilities, building competence in proprietary technologies, and driving a culture that links innovation with learning from the market.
Launched in August 2024, the Phonak Infinio family of hearing aids, powered by the new ERA chip, achieves remarkable improvements in sound quality and connectivity. These include first-fit satisfaction – 93% of users prefer Infinio at first fit over a key competitor – 45% reduction in listening effort, 21% less fatigue , and up to six times the previous Bluetooth® transmission power, for more stable connections with uninterrupted handsfree calls and streaming over significantly greater distances. All this comes in a durable water-resistant format, Swiss-engineered to withstand everyday challenges, with fitting and programming options that allow audiologists and consumers to personalize the hearing experience.
Infinio alone represents a major step forward in hearing performance and ease of use – but it is not the whole story. Understanding speech in noise has always been the challenge that consumers most want their hearing aids to tackle, and successive sound-processing advances have certainly improved the experience of listening to conversation in noisy environments. Now, however, there is a completely new solution that delivers unprecedented performance: Phonak Sphere™ Infinio, powered by our proprietary DEEPSONIC™ deep neural network chip, an industry-first innovation that works together with ERA in a dual-chip system. The result of six yearsʼ development and trained on 22 million sound samples, DEEPSONIC has 4.5 million neural connections that perform 7.7 billion operations each second, allowing real-time artificial intelligence to separate speech from the babble in the background – no matter which direction it is coming from. Where even our own industry-leading classic noise-cancelling technology delivered around 6.4 decibels improvement in signal-to-noise ratio, Sphere Infinio achieves up to 10.2 decibels, making consumers 2 – 3 times more likely to understand every word, from any direction, compared with leading competitors1).
The marketʼs response to Infinio has been strongly positive: 98% of hearing care professionals (HCPs) at the launch event said that they thought the new platforms would “change the lives” of their patients. The new products have gained significant market share and established traction with major-market customers who had not ordered the previous platform. We also saw an upward impact on product mix, demonstrating that consumers recognize the clear step change in hearing experience that these innovations provide.
The sound quality, connectivity, and personalization advances introduced with Infinio all contain the potential for further performance improvements and consumer benefits. The DEEPSONIC chip continues to be trained in new listening situations to further improve performance and efficiency in upcoming product releases - the innovation process never stands still.
Commercial excellence sustains the strongest launch in our history
The Phonak Infinio portfolio was introduced to a thousand customers at a launch event in the Sphere venue in Las Vegas. More than twenty industry journalists with a combined reach of over 100 million followers were given an exclusive introduction to the technology; their response was overwhelmingly favorable. Compared with previous launches, we achieved much higher reach and social media engagement, and greatly increased the volume of website traffic. Infinio and Sphere are big advances, and we wanted to make sure that the stories were heard. Breakthrough innovation deserves breakthrough communication.
The launch program also went beyond communication to include training and education for HCPs. We launched the new platforms in more than 70 countries, training HCPs in more than 10,000 clinics around the globe. The training and the sound demos allowed them to experience firsthand the groundbreaking innovation and how Infinio and Sphere Infinio will transform the lives of their clients – as we say, hearing is believing. The result is that consumers have been coming to HCPs to ask specifically about the unique capabilities of our two new platforms.