Changing lives through better sight and hearing has been the mantra of Specsavers’ Doug and Dame Mary Perkins for 40 years. Optician looked over the company’s annual review to see just how far that simple phrase has brought the business.
Big numbers figure highly in Specsavers’ Annual Review 2023-24. As it celebrates 40 years in business, the headline revenue figure has reached a dizzying £4.01bn across its 11 territories. Around the globe, the business has 2,721 optical, audiology, domiciliary and ophthalmology businesses operated by 43,593 employees and 5,330 partners.
Its 44.6m customers wore 580m contact lenses, sported 24.3m frames and 717,899 hearing aids while ophthalmic procedures totalled 96,602. Geographically, the UK still dominated, contributing £2.172bn of that turnover and the Republic of Ireland contributed a further £166m.
In the UK, there were 929 optical, 260 audiology and 46 domiciliary businesses. In ophthalmology, 18 Newmedica businesses work across 29 locations. Ireland has 63 optical and 22 audiology businesses.
Extended services
Notwithstanding Labour’s recent general election win and Specsavers’ pronouncements on the way the high street could work with the NHS, Specsavers makes a big play of its progress in extended high street and ophthalmology services.
During the year in review, the company captured more than 7.7m OCT scans, completed 240,000 wax removal services, conducted 700,000 diabetes assessments and referred 100,000 glaucoma pathologies. Interesting reading for the new secretary of state for health, Wes Streeting.
Looking abroad, the next biggest hitter is Australia with a turnover of £874.5m followed by the Netherlands on £163.3m, leading Denmark, Sweden, Norway and New Zealand on £100m+ turnovers.
Canada, believed to be Specsavers’ next big target territory, currently turns over £62.3m. Finland on £45.7m and Spain, £6.6m, complete the line up. Profit figures were not supplied but in a world where most corporate optical business do not supply any breakdowns at all, it is an interesting insight into Specsavers.
Despite such huge financial figures, the tone of the annual review was angled towards the softer subjects of people, community and sustainability rather than business growth. The company’s involvement in Great Place To Work surveys features highly and Specsavers tops the poll in Finland and Denmark.
Not unusually, professional education and staff development is also explained but Specsavers’ focus on diversity and inclusion is also impressive. Each region has a diversity and inclusion lead, it has accreditation as a menopause-friendly employer and, last year, 62% of director level promotions were women.
Corporate Responsibility
What is less usual is the inclusion of community support and charitable activity within the section on sustainability. This highlights the £1.5m raised in the UK and Ireland for charitable causes, outreach projects and its work with homeless people around the world. It also said supporting and sustaining communities comes through raising tax revenues.
During the year, the report reveals that Specsavers partners paid £343m in directly attributable tax and in total £905m in taxes were generated for the governments of the countries that Specsavers operated within. The full tax explanation can be seen on the company’s website.
More traditional ‘protecting our planet’ sustainability targets centre around carbon dioxide, products, materials and packaging. Its 2030 targets aim to reduce the volume of packaging by 30% and the content of recycled packaging to the same figure.
It also wants 100% of packaging to be recyclable and all of its paper and card to be sustainably sourced. Progress so far reported has seen energy consumption from renewables reach 60% and the brand’s ReWear frames use 200,000 post-consumer plastic bottles. Elsewhere, water usage has been reduced by 10% and plastic bubble envelopes replaced by recyclable paper alternatives saving 22 tonnes of plastic waste.
Other initiatives have seen dummy lenses collected and recycled while the use of thinner lens blanks has saved the equivalent of 20 tonnes of plastic each year. Second-hand frames continue to be collected for recycling or charity programmes. Looking forward, Specsavers signposted membership of organisations committed to ethical trading, anti-slavery, supply chain codes of conduct to continue sourcing responsibly and sustainably.
Perhaps the emphasis Specsavers wanted to give sustainability was indicated in the report’s sign off. Recalling the founding of Specsavers 40 years ago, it recognised the founders but stressed that it was the thousands of staff who drove the business on. That message was delivered by the founders’ son, John Perkins, group CEO and chief sustainability officer.
