Earnings Calls

How to read this tab

This tab reads all 12 of Sonova's semi-annual results calls from November 2020 (H1 FY2020/21) through May 2026 (FY2025/26) — every call the company has held over six fiscal years — so you don't have to. Sonova's fiscal year ends 31 March; it reports twice a year, and management runs a webcast alongside each release. The synthesis below is the multi-year arc: how the story, the guidance, the KPIs and the tone moved, plus the small tells you would skim past in any single transcript.

Where the business stands now

Sonova closed FY2025/26 (year to March 2026) as a share-gainer in a still-soft market. The combined Wholesale-and-Retail (ex-divested Consumer Hearing) business grew 7.5% in local currency, group normalized EBITA rose 17.3% to CHF 811.2 million, and the board proposed its highest-ever dividend of CHF 4.70 [1]. Under new CEO Eric Bernard the company met its guidance, but three of the levers that got it there — a divested Consumer Hearing unit, a renamed segment structure and a third change of profit metric in three years — are exactly the kind of small print this tab exists to flag.

Source: FY2025/26 results, continuing operations [2].

The six-year narrative arc — how the framing moved

Reading the calls in sequence, the Sonova story passes through five distinct chapters, and the framing management leans on changes sharply at each turn:

1. COVID rebound and the "permanent margin" claim (FY2020/21–FY2021/22). The Nov-2020 call opened with group sales down 21% in local currency, then a September return to growth. By the May-2021 call, then-CEO Arnd Kaldowski was insisting the crisis-driven margin step-up was structural — "I believe it's more on the permanent side" — reinstating a dividend and launching a CHF 700 million buyback. The company then acquired the Sennheiser Consumer Division in March 2022, its bet on consumer hearables [3], and scaled the buyback to a three-year, up-to-CHF 1.5 billion program [4].

2. Semiconductor shortage and inflation (FY2021/22–FY2022/23). The confident 2021 tone gave way to "puts and takes." Supply shortages of microelectronic components delayed product launches and lifted costs [5]; Kaldowski pushed through the "first list price increase in January." By May 2023 he was contrite, conceding the prior-year outlook "was more positive than what has unfolded" and that Sonova had "underestimated where the inflation will go."

3. The Costco trough (FY2022/23–FY2023/24). The single biggest recurring drag was the non-renewal of a hearing-instruments contract with one of Sonova's largest US customers (Costco) [6]. It stripped roughly a hearing-instrument point of growth for a year and dominated four consecutive calls' Q&A. FY2023/24 sales grew just 3.2% in local currency — the cycle low [7]. Meanwhile the buyback was quietly suspended to protect the balance sheet.

4. The Sphere AI supercycle (FY2024/25). The narrative flipped back to offense with the launch of Phonak Infinio and Phonak Sphere — a new AI chip (DEEPSONIC) targeting speech-in-noise [8]. FY2024/25 sales accelerated to 7.6% in local currency [9].

5. New regime, new metrics, new ambition (FY2025/26). Kaldowski departed after seven years — admitting on his final call, "I have failed in seven years to be at the place where I would say one of them is truly ready" about internal succession — and Eric Bernard (ex-WS Audiology) became CEO, with Elodie Carr-Cingari as CFO [10]. The new team promptly divested Consumer Hearing (classified as discontinued operations) and renamed the segments Wholesale and Retail [11], retired the old midterm targets and set a new CHF 6 billion revenue ambition by FY2030/31 [12].

Guidance versus delivery — the credibility scorecard

Assembling each year's guidance and checking it against what landed is the single most useful thing the multi-year corpus gives you. The record is mixed-but-improving: one clear miss (FY2022/23), a low-end year (FY2023/24), then three straight in-range deliveries.

Sources: FY2023/24 [13], FY2024/25 sales [14] and EBITA [15], and FY2025/26 [16]; FY2021/22–FY2022/23 figures from the earnings calls.

Two credibility tells stand out. First, the FY2022/23 miss was self-admitted — management cut guidance in August 2022 and still landed below the original May-2022 range on both sales and EBITA, an unusually candid mea culpa on the FY2023 call. Second, and more subtly, the three "MET" years each ride a change in the profit yardstick: FY2024/25 introduced "normalized EBITA" (folding restructuring in), and FY2025/26 switched again to "core EBIT" while carving out Consumer Hearing — which alone lifts the reported margin by roughly 230 basis points. The guidance was hit; the goalposts also moved.

The KPI trend — a decelerating then recovering top line

Source: FY2023/24 [17], FY2024/25 [18] and FY2025/26 [19]; FY2021/22 and FY2022/23 from earnings calls.

The shape tells the cycle: a 29% post-COVID snap-back, a slide to the 3.2% Costco/inflation trough, then two years of ~7.5% recovery powered by the Sphere launch. Underneath the headline, organic growth is the cleaner read — FY2024/25 organic was 6.4% [20], building off a first half that organic-grew 4.5% [21]. Throughout, management's market-growth assumption walked down (from 4–6% to 1–3% by FY2025/26) even as Sonova kept outgrowing it on share gains — a recurring "market is soft, but we are winning" framing that only became demonstrably true once Sphere shipped. For FY2026/27, management finally raised its market assumption to 2–4% [22] — the first upgrade in the series, and a quiet tell that the cycle has turned.

Theme sentiment, call over call

The grid below scores management's tone on each recurring theme, 1 (very negative) to 5 (very positive), reading the calls in sequence. It surfaces the cross-currents a single call hides: input-cost pain peaking in FY2021/22, China deteriorating into an outright drag by FY2024/25, and margin/tone both inflecting up as Sphere landed.

Source: analyst read of all 12 Sonova earnings calls, FY2020/21–FY2025/26; corroborating figures cited throughout this tab.

The live cycle — demand, pricing, cost, margin, FX

Margin was the FY2024/25 story. The Sphere launch cost money up front: H1 FY2024/25 adjusted EBITA actually fell 3.7% in local currency to a 17.7% margin as launch and lead-generation costs hit [23], yet management reaffirmed the full-year 6–9% sales and 7–11% EBITA guide [24] — implying a steep second-half margin ramp that analysts (Barclays, BNP, Morgan Stanley) pressed hard on. It was delivered: the second-half EBITA margin recovered to roughly 24%, the year's biggest credibility test passed.

Momentum carried into FY2025/26. First-half sales grew 4.9% in local currency with normalized EBITA up 16% [25], the margin up 1.8 percentage points in local currency [26], and guidance again reaffirmed at 5–9% sales / 14–18% normalized EBITA [27]. New CEO Bernard leaned on fresh product — Virto R Infinio, Phonak's first rechargeable in-the-ear device, and Infinio Ultra [28].

FX (the strong Swiss franc) was a persistent, worsening headwind through FY2023/24–FY2025/26 — routinely a mid-single-digit drag on reported CHF sales and a low-double-digit drag on EBITA — and the new team has made structurally reducing Sonova's CHF cost base an explicit strategic goal.

The two soft spots by FY2025/26 are Cochlear Implants and the (now-divested) Consumer Hearing unit. CI sales fell 11.1% in local currency, hammered by China's volume-based procurement (VBP) regime and an ageing 2021 sound processor [29]. Bernard was unusually blunt on the call: "if we are fully transparent, our latest innovation was brought to market in 2021. So we are slow to innovate versus our competition." A new processor is promised for the second half of FY2026/27, subject to regulatory approval — a hedge that only appeared in the latest call.

Segment scorecard and what changed

Source: FY2025/26 results, Wholesale +9.5%, Retail +5.1%, Cochlear Implants -11.1% [30].

Just as revealing is what management introduced and dropped over the six years — the shifts that never make a headline:

Sources: Consumer Hearing divestiture and segment rename [31]; CHF 6bn ambition [32]; buyback program [33]; remaining items from the earnings calls.

Capital allocation

The dividend has climbed steadily — proposed CHF 4.30 for FY2023/24 [34], CHF 4.40 for FY2024/25 [35], and CHF 4.70 for FY2025/26 [36].

Source: results media releases, FY2023/24 [37], FY2024/25 [38], FY2025/26 [39].

The buyback tells the more interesting story. Sonova ran a CHF 700 million program, scaled it to up to CHF 1.5 billion in 2022 [40], then suspended repurchases entirely from FY2023/24 to deleverage — and, notably, has still not restarted them even with net-debt/EBITDA down to ~1.1x by FY2025/26. Across five straight calls, management has been asked when the buyback returns and has repeatedly deferred, prioritising the dividend, the CHF 6 billion growth ambition, and (implicitly) larger retail M&A. That reticence at low leverage is itself a signal about where the new team wants to spend.

Where the truth leaked — the Q&A

Analysts pressed hardest, quarter after quarter, on the same handful of worries, and management's answers ranged from crisp to evasive:

The Costco loss (FY2022/23–FY2023/24, deflected). Nearly every analyst on four calls asked why the large US contract was lost; management confirmed it was "a little bit lower than 5% of group" but never gave a clear cause, cycling between procurement strategy, price and product reliability. By FY2025/26 the customer had returned as a tailwind — but the years of non-answers were a tell.

The second-half margin ramps (FY2023/24–FY2024/25, answered crisply). Repeatedly challenged on the implied H1-to-H2 EBITA acceleration, management gave a consistent price-plus-volume-fall-through bridge — and then delivered it, which is what ultimately rebuilt credibility after the FY2022/23 miss.

Cochlear Implants' innovation gap (FY2025/26, unusually candid). Rather than deflect the CI decline, Bernard conceded the product was last refreshed in 2021 and that Sonova is "slow to innovate" in CI — candour that stood out against Kaldowski's more defensive style.

Underlying growth ex-tailwinds (FY2025/26, semi-deflected). Citi's Veronika Dubajova repeatedly decomposed reported growth to ~4% once VA-channel and Costco tailwinds are stripped out; Bernard defended "broad-based" share gains but declined to confirm the ex-tailwind number — a soft spot worth watching.

Money quotes

Peer and industry cross-read

Because peer earnings-call transcripts were unavailable in this corpus, the comparison below reads the industry through the peers' most recent annual-report management commentary. The genuine hearing-care peers are Demant (manufacturer plus retail, like Sonova) and Amplifon (pure hearing-aid retail); EssilorLuxottica is an adjacent entrant via its Nuance Audio hearing glasses. On the themes that matter most, the picture is more consensus than divergence — which makes Sonova's outperformance within a soft market the real story, not a contrarian macro call.

Sources: Demant market and 4-6% [41], ASP [42], KIND [43], AI range [44], EBIT margin [45], US/China [46]; Amplifon demand [47], acquisitions [48], closures [49], margin [50]; EssilorLuxottica Nuance Audio [51]; Sonova figures per this tab.

The reads that matter for the thesis:

• Demand is a genuine industry signal, not a Sonova problem. Both true peers describe 2025 in near-identical language — Demant says the hearing-aid market "grew at a slower pace than normal" [52], Amplifon that growth was "below historical and expected levels" with recovery "in the region of 3%" into 2026 [53]. Sonova's soft-market framing is consensus; its ability to grow ~7.5% against it is the differentiator.

• Pricing consensus. Demant quantifies industry ASP at "around -1%" on geography and channel mix [54] — consistent with the ASP headwinds Sonova flagged pre-Sphere. Nobody in the peer set claims real pricing power; Sonova's post-Sphere ASP lift is a product-cycle effect, not an industry one.

• M&A is where peers diverge. Demant made its biggest-ever retail move — "The KIND acquisition makes Demant a leading retailer in Germany" and adds ~10% revenue [55] — while Amplifon simultaneously acquired 248 clinics [56] and closed "approximately 160 underperforming hearing care centres" [57]. Sonova, uniquely, is sitting on a paused buyback and a low balance sheet while signalling appetite for larger retail deals — dry powder its peers are already deploying.

• The one place Sonova looks like the outlier: the low end. EssilorLuxottica's Nuance Audio hearing-enhancing glasses are "now available across 15,000 stores in twelve markets" [58] — an entry-level, retail-distributed encroachment that neither Sonova nor its true peers has an answer to, and which Sonova's "deliberate late adopter" posture on consumer/OTC devices leaves it exposed to. That is the divergence to watch.

• Margins: Sonova is winning. Its normalized EBITA margin of 22.5% sits above Demant's 17.2% EBIT margin [59] and Amplifon's 21.4% EBITDA margin [60] (which fell 1.9 points and now needs a self-help program to recover) — and it is expanding while theirs compress. On profitability, Sonova is the clear industry leader.

Overall industry pattern: consensus on demand, pricing and geography; split on M&A tactics and margin level; a single genuine company-vs-peer outlier risk at the OTC low end from EssilorLuxottica.