Smartphones changed everything two decades ago, and now the race is on to figure out what replaces them. EssilorLuxotticaESLOF

CEO Francesco Milleri thinks he knows the answer — and it’s sitting on people’s faces right now. The company behind Ray-Ban, Oakley, and a third of the world’s eyewear is betting that AI-powered smart glasses will soon become the central device in people’s lives while smartphones fade into pockets permanently.

Production ramps up fast: Meta’sMETA

growing stake in EssilorLuxottica — now its second-largest shareholder — signals a long-term platform bet rather than a short-term experiment. Sales more than tripled in Q2 2025 and have already crossed 2M units since the second-generation Ray-Ban Meta glasses launched in Oct. 2023. To keep pace with demand, EssilorLuxottica is expanding its manufacturing capacity to 10M units a year by December.

• Revenue from Meta’s collaboration reached ~€365M ($424M) in 2024, projected to rise to €800M ($930M) this year and potentially exceed €6B ($6.98B) by 2030, per Barclays.
• Meta’s access to EssilorLuxottica’s network and manufacturing expertise solves the distribution problem that doomed GoogleGOOGL
  Glass and still limits most wearable tech.

May The Smartest Shades Win

Smart glasses blur the line between tech and eyewear, requiring fittings, prescription lenses, and real-world adjustments to work for everyday users. That’s where EssilorLuxottica’s global dominance gives Meta’s partnership an advantage. As the maker of frames for Prada, Armani, and Chanel, EssilorLuxottica offers the infrastructure smart glasses require — with thousands of retail locations equipped for fittings, unlike AppleAAPL

or Google’s parent Alphabet, which lack that physical presence. And its rivals are now racing to catch up.

• Google invested $100M in Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster, while Apple reportedly shelved its Vision Pro overhaul to prioritize smart glasses.
• ByteDance, Xiaomi, and Huawei are also entering the market aggressively, racing to close the gap with Meta.

The vision play: Meta’s equity stake acts as a strategic lock-in before rivals can strike similar deals. Zuckerberg has set a goal of 5M units sold by year’s end, arguing that people without AI-powered glasses will soon face “a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage.” EssilorLuxottica gains deeper tech integration and R&D backing, while Meta secures the manufacturing scale and retail network it couldn’t build alone. The strategy is clear — control the hardware, shape the software, and dominate the ecosystem before others can catch up.