"Big Fish in a Small Pond": a 29.5% margin without a price war

An operating margin approaching 29.5% and a return on equity above 20%. Without a price war. These are the record figures in HOYA’s Integrated Report 2025, for the fiscal year ended 31 March 2025. But what is the business strategy lesson that every independent optical practice should draw from these numbers?

The answer lies in a Japanese management philosophy summed up in one phrase: "Big Fish in a Small Pond".

The numbers first

HOYA closed the year with revenue of ¥866.0 billion (+14%) and operating profit of ¥255.8 billion (+22%): the ratio between the two is the 29.5% we are talking about. The most interesting figure, however, sits below the surface. The group lives on two very different divisions: Life Care, meaning spectacle lenses, contact lenses and medical, which accounts for 64% of revenue with a 17.3% margin, and Information Technology, meaning hard-disk substrates and semiconductor mask blanks, which accounts for 36% of revenue with a 54.1% margin.

The data as a table

HOYA, fiscal year 2024 (ended 31 March 2025). Source: Integrated Report 2025, Financial highlights.

Division	Revenue (¥bn)	Share	Operating margin
Life Care (lenses, contact lenses, medical)	550.9	64%	17.3%
Information Technology	311.1	36%	54.1%
HOYA Group	866.0	100%	29.5%

What does this table tell us? That even in the lens business, the one closest to us, HOYA does not chase volume. It works on categories it created itself, which everyone else then runs after.

The strategy: create the category instead of chasing it

HOYA refuses the race for undifferentiated mass volume. It applies instead a rigorous discipline of category creation, in three moves:

1. It spots a latent need before anyone else.
2. It creates and names a new market category: it did so years ago with BlueControl for blue light and, more recently, with MiYOSMART for myopia management.
3. It dominates that high-value niche, with very high barriers to entry for whoever comes later.

The same recipe works for the independent optician

You will never be able to compete on volume or on the display space of the big chains in shopping centres. If you try to be a "small fish" in the ocean of volume, you will always be squeezed on margin.

You have to apply the same discipline: become the "big fish" in your local niche.

Specialising deeply in paediatric myopia, advanced presbyopia or clinical optometry is a strategy decision, not a catalogue decision. Products on a price list are not enough: you need to train the team in ethical up-selling and build a communication protocol that belongs to your practice alone. It is the same reasoning I follow in my analysis of the EssilorLuxottica 2025 report and, at the opposite end of the market, in the case of Jacques Marie Mage and the strategy of renunciation.

For 30 years I have worked alongside independent opticians to turn market scenarios like this one into practical, profitable positioning strategies. The starting point is always the same: reading the numbers of your own practice, as we do with Trade Up, and deciding where it is worth being big. I also covered this in the webinar The map and the compass, on the new cycle of the optical market. For practices outside Italy, the programme is The Charismatic Practice.

In which niche is your practice, or does it want to become, the "big fish" in your area? If you want to think it through on your own numbers, book a call.