Strategy and businesses

We elevate our consumersʼ experience through groundbreaking innovation that powers better hearing performance and consumer experience across our industry and deepens customer relationships around the world.

Sharing joyful moments with family, friends, and colleagues; enjoying the best of music, drama, and storytelling; experiencing the changing moods of nature – often quiet, but always meaningful. Good hearing isnʼt just a gift, itʼs a necessity for a full, rich life. Over more than 75 years, we at Sonova have worked with one simple goal in mind: to bring the delight of hearing to ever more people and empower them to live a life without limitation. Our quest to reach this goal has repeatedly taken us to the frontier of innovation in a broad range of technologies, scientific disciplines, and commercial activities – but our ultimate measure of success remains, “do we transform the consumerʼs hearing experience?” This year, we are proud to announce yet another innovation that meets this high standard.

The Sonova Group

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 relationships with consumers, business partners, and hearing care professionals. The Groupʼs 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 operates through four businesses with their own well-respected brands. Each serves a specific segment of the broader industry through the channels best suited to its customer base, but they also work closely together where those bases overlap, or where the consumer would benefit from a wider range of solutions.

The Hearing Instruments business stands at the core of Sonovaʼs identity as a champion of better hearing. Operating through the globally-known Phonak and Unitron brands, it drives innovation in hearing aids and wireless communications devices. Combining strong audiological expertise with specialist skills in electroacoustics, chip design, wireless technology, software development, and precision manufacturing, its disciplined innovation process regularly sets new milestones in hearing performance, which are then reflected in the offerings of all four businesses.

The Audiological Care business, operating under the AudioNova and other renowned national brands, leverages the full range of Sonova products with expert professional hearing care, delivered in-store and through other channels with audiological expertise, efficiency, and personal attention.

Consumer Hearing offers a range of premium wireless headphones, earbuds, and soundbars under the Sennheiser brand (under license), providing a deep immersive experience for consumers who love great sound, along with early-entry hearing devices that seamlessly address the first stages of hearing loss.

Cochlear Implants, operating under the Advanced Bionics brand, provides complete hearing solutions for those whose hearing loss is too advanced for hearing aids. Its solutions bring Sonovaʼs audiological and technical innovations to a new group of consumers, helping to transform their hearing experience.

A strategy that delivers

Sonovaʼs strategy is closely aligned with our mission – and it has proven to be effective. Innovation leadership is the driver for every strategic cycle. Each successive innovation is brought to market by expanding consumer access, extending value-adding partnerships, and investing in high-potential developing markets. At the same time, we continuously identify and implement opportunities for process improvement, structural optimization across the businesses and functions, and commercial excellence. Where appropriate, organic development is supplemented by strategic M&A activity.

This year, the strategic cycle has gained powerful impetus from the launches of the Phonak Infinio and Sphere Infinio platforms, the fruits of more than six years of intensive technical development. Infinio delivers significant sound quality and connectivity enhancements over its predecessor, Lumity. Sphere Infinio adds groundbreaking technology: a proprietary new chip that combines real-time processing with artificial intelligence to instantly separate speech from noise in any direction, providing substantial hearing benefits for consumers. These launches, representing the largest marketing effort in our history, have significantly elevated our innovation leadership in the eyes of customers across the globe and created further growth opportunities for our Audiological Care business. The unique value proposition of Advanced Bionics cochlear implants combined with Phonak sound processors has opened the door to new business, and the Sennheiser brand, with its strong presence in the audiophile market, has established further commercial partnerships. Sonova X, our business system and mindset for continuous process improvement, has grown in six years from a new idea for Sonova to an integral part of day-to-day work in all our businesses, delivering significant improvements in quality, sales conversion, productivity, and – most importantly – customer satisfaction.

The next step in a rich history of breakthrough innovations

Our Sphere Infinio platform, with its DEEPSONIC Deep Neural Network chip, supports an unprecedented leap forward in tackling the central challenge to delivering good hearing: making speech more comprehensible in noisy environments. Its technical performance (signal-to-noise ratio) is markedly higher than that of the best solutions previously available – and this is just at the start of tapping into the technologyʼs potential. From the first moment of experiencing it, consumers and their audiologists have been overwhelmingly positive in their response.

How is such revolutionary innovation achieved? By building on our tradition of innovation. Sonovaʼs history is regularly marked by industry firsts: multi-microphone beam steering, digital processing, wireless communication, universal connectivity, rechargeability, and now real-time AI sound processing. Over many decades, we have been willing to commit to high-risk, long-term development projects when we were convinced that they would transform consumer experience. We constantly reinforce our in-house audiological and technological expertise through strong partnerships and interaction with the academic, industry, and start-up communities. Our “open innovation” culture accelerates time-to-market by leveraging all our core competences, while embracing the diversity provided by partnership and acquired talents – all in the service of a clearly-defined shared goal. Six years ago, the goal was “significantly improved speech-in-noise performance,” a goal that we knew would require entirely new enabling technology. Now that goal has been more than achieved – and on schedule.

ESG: sustainable business success

Our environmental, social, and governmental (ESG) strategy, IntACT, continues to drive substantial progress toward meeting Sonovaʼs targets in a broad range of material topics.

These include increasing access to hearing care around the world: this year we achieved a 67% increase in units sold in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) compared to the 2018/19 financial year, combined with 555 graduations, up 50% compared to the 2023/24 financial year, from our Swiss International Hearing Academy (SIHA) training program for hearing care professionals in these countries.

Our diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives have further increased the share of women in senior management from 28.3% to 30.5% and middle management from 39.9% to 41.6% over the previous financial year.

We are achieving significant reductions in our environmental footprint, including a 24.5% reduction in our Scope 1-3 CO₂ emissions compared to the 2019/20 financial year on a comparable basis. We have also lowered our energy consumption per full-time employee (FTE) by 13% compared to 2022/23.

Sonovaʼs ratings from external ESG agencies and indices remain consistently high: we are included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the eleventh consecutive year, ranking shared first out of 275 companies in the health care equipment and supplies sector. MSCI has again awarded us their highest-possible AAA ESG rating, and Sustainalytics listed us in first place out of more than 200 assessed companies in the medical devices industry. Sonova also ranked #1 in healthcare and #18 overall in TIME Magazineʼs “Worldʼs Most Sustainable Companies.”

You can find further detailed information in our ESG report.