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Facebook owner Meta is considering a multi-billion-euro investment in eyewear group Essilorluxottica as the social media platform steps up efforts to develop smart glasses.
The Silicon Valley company is considering buying a minority stake in the Franco-Italian group, which has a market capitalization of 87 billion euros, according to people with knowledge of the company’s thinking.
The move comes as Meta has been in talks with EssilorLuxottica to deepen its existing collaboration following the successful launch of an improved version of its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses last year, the people said.
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has spent billions in recent years trying to enter the wearable-tech market, including by developing virtual-reality headsets, while Paris-listed EssilorLuxottica SA is also pushing deals to attract a new generation of shoppers.
There is no guarantee an investment will be made, according to people close to the talks. Meta is working with Morgan Stanley on the matter, one of the people said.
EssilorLuxottica shares rose about 5% on Thursday following the Financial Times report.
Meta, Essilor Luxottica and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
The first Ray-Ban Metaglasses were released in 2021, but the latest generation, released last October, sold more glasses in a few months than the previous model had in two years, Essilor Luxottica CEO Francesco Mirelli said at an event earlier this week.
The latest version of the glasses will allow users to live stream what they see directly to Facebook and Instagram, and in the US, the glasses will be integrated with Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant, allowing owners to ask the glasses for more information about what’s in front of them.
This week Essilor Luxottica agreed to buy U.S. streetwear brand Supreme for $1.5 billion. The eyewear group is teaming up with Meta to launch a new version of Supreme’s smart sunglasses to better target younger consumers, according to people familiar with the deal.
Meta and rival Apple are racing to develop unobtrusive augmented reality glasses that could one day replace smartphones as next-generation computing devices, but the technology is still in its early stages and consumers are reluctant to strap cumbersome devices to their faces.
On an earnings call in April, Zuckerberg said the outlook for smart glasses has “improved a lot” and that it’s one of the “big areas” he’s investing in for his augmented reality and virtual reality division, Reality Labs.
He previously said that glasses “need to have a fully holographic display to become a big market,” but the success of the Meta Ray-Ban proves the opposite.
“If we want to democratize wearable AI, we think eyewear is a little bit different than a phone or a watch, and the designs people want are very different,” he added. “So we think our approach of partnering with a major eyewear brand will allow us to serve a larger market.”
Founded seven years ago through a complex €50 billion merger of the late Italian billionaire Leonardo Del Vecchio’s eyewear group Luxottica and French lens maker Essilor, EssilorLuxottica has grown steadily to become the world’s largest eyewear maker.
Acquiring technology and engineering companies has been core to the company’s strategy over the past few years: in 2022, the group acquired Israeli hearing technology start-up Nuance Hearing, which is developing glasses featuring its acoustic beamforming technology.
This week, Essilor Luxottica acquired an 80% stake in Heidelberg Engineering, a German company specialising in eye surgery technology, as part of a move into medical technology.
