CONFIRMED
EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear giant behind Ray-Ban Meta, disclosed the exact revenue of its wearables business for the first time: €486M in Q3 2026, according to Reuters. Overall revenue beat expectations, but Reuters reports that smart glasses growth slowed to 20% after nearly 100% in the previous quarter.
What we know
EssilorLuxottica published Q3 2026 revenue on October 20 after the Paris market close. Reuters reported total revenue of €7.49B, ahead of the €7.36B consensus compiled by Visible Alpha. The company’s own release puts the figure at €7,486M.
The headline number for us is €486M. That is the wearables line, and it does not cover only Ray-Ban Meta. It also includes Nuance, the company’s hearing-aid glasses. So this is the first hard number we have, but it does not isolate how many Meta-branded frames ended up on faces.
Growth is where things cool off. Reuters reported smart glasses sales rose 20% in Q3, compared with nearly 100% in April to June. Reuters said the slower pace partly reflected a tough comparison with Q3 2025, which was a strong quarter.
Management is pointing at the holidays. In its statement, EssilorLuxottica said new AI glasses launches and the rollout of Nuance Audio Plus will strengthen wearables for the season. On the earnings call, the CFO said the 20% growth did not yet include material support from the products shown at Meta Connect 2026.
The market liked the overall picture. Reuters reported shares rose about 10% on October 21, saying resilient core eyewear demand outweighed the slower smart glasses growth. That bounce comes after a rough stretch: Reuters said the stock has roughly halved over the past year, citing concerns over competition, smart glasses privacy issues, profitability and governance.
For broader context, nine-month revenue reached €22,304M, up 6.8% at current rates and 8.9% at constant rates. The company says it plans solid revenue growth and broadly aligned adjusted operating profit growth, on average, over the next five years at constant exchange rates.
Two things floating around are wrong. An auto-generated earnings-call summary published by Investing.com claimed there was no clear Q3 beat, which the company release and Reuters contradict. A syndicated copy of the Reuters story also carries a “Q3 2023” subheading. The dateline and content cover Q3 2026, so that is a labeling error on the republishing site.
What we don’t know yet
We still do not have a Ray-Ban Meta unit or revenue figure on its own, since Nuance sits in the same bucket. We also do not know how much of the holiday quarter the Connect 2026 hardware will carry. The CFO only said it had not yet contributed materially.
Some numbers in circulation remain unconfirmed. FashionNetwork reported 21% wearables growth and nine-month wearables revenue of about €1.26B, up 79%. That does not match the company’s 20%, and we are not treating those figures as confirmed. FashionNetwork also reported that Q4 2025 benefited from significant smart-glasses sell-in to Meta, and that Morgan Stanley flagged the Q4 outlook as a key challenge. If that is accurate, Q4 2026 faces another tough comparison.
Privacy is the other open question. Investing.com reported that Dutch retailer Hans Anders suspended Ray-Ban Meta sales in the Netherlands and Belgium over privacy concerns. We could not confirm that through an approved source, so treat it as context, not fact.
What it means
Twenty percent growth on a business doing nearly half a billion euros a quarter is not a collapse. It is what happens when a category moves from novelty spikes toward normal hardware cycles. For comparison, Dow Jones/MarketWatch reported in July 2025 that Ray-Ban Meta sales tripled in H1 2025, so the easy multiples were always going to fade.
The real test is Q4. If the Connect 2026 lineup and Nuance Audio Plus show up in holiday numbers, the slowdown looks like a comparison problem. If they do not, the “smart glasses boom” framing gets a lot harder to defend. As a player waiting to see whether face computers stick, I will be watching that number more closely than this one.
