HOYA turns 85 years of optical-glass chemistry into two very different businesses. Life Care earns 62% of revenue. It is the world's second-largest maker of eyeglass lenses and also sells the MiYOSMART myopia-control lens, the Eyecity contact-lens retail chain in Japan, intraocular lenses (IOLs) and PENTAX Medical flexible endoscopes. Information Technology earns 38% of revenue but more than half of profit. HOYA is the leading supplier of EUV mask blanks, the substrates on which photomasks for leading-edge logic and DRAM are patterned. It is also, in effect, the only supplier of glass substrates for hard disk drives (HDDs). It makes FPD photomasks, and its Optical Solutions business makes optical glass, CUPO polarization glass for optical transceivers, and lenses for wearables. In FY2025 the group earned a 34.6% pretax margin and a 21.1% ROIC while carrying ¥532 billion of net cash. It is now putting more capital into AI-driven capacity, while reviewing whether to keep its endoscope business.
**Company description.** HOYA describes itself as a global med-tech company and a leading supplier of high-tech and medical products. In healthcare it supplies eyeglasses, medical endoscopes, intraocular lenses and optical lenses. In information technology it supplies key components for semiconductor devices, LCD panels and HDDs. Its statutory business report sets out three reportable segments:
**Life Care:** health-care products such as eyeglass lenses and contact lenses, plus medical products.
**Information Technology:** glass components and materials that semiconductor manufacturing, digital devices and imaging depend on.
**Other:** after the sale of the speech-synthesis software business, mainly information-system services.
**Business model.** HOYA runs a portfolio of niche businesses, each among the top players in its market and each run with its own P&L. Head office allocates capital using ROE and ROIC hurdles and rotates the portfolio by buying and selling businesses. Management calls this "profitable growth": revenue growth with expanding margins.
The two segments behave differently:
**Life Care:** sells mostly to eye-care professionals, optical retailers, hospitals and consumers. Demand is steady and grows with population ageing and rising myopia. More than 80% of Life Care sales come from Europe, the Americas and Japan.
**Information Technology:** sells to a small number of very large industrial customers: photomask makers and chipmakers for blanks, HDD makers for substrates, and panel makers for FPD masks. More than 80% of IT sales are in Asia. One customer group of the IT segment accounted for ¥92.8 billion of revenue in FY2024, up from ¥54.8 billion in FY2023.
**Revenue model.** Almost all revenue comes from selling manufactured products. Services make up a small share: prescription-lens laboratory finishing, contact-lens retail through Eyecity (including subscription plans and the hoyaONE private-label brand), and endoscope service. The subscription-software income from ReadSpeaker ended when that business was sold in FY2025. HOYA does not disclose a split between product, service and subscription revenue.
**Value chain position.** The two segments sit at different points in their supply chains:
**Semiconductor chain:** HOYA is a tier-2 materials supplier. It polishes and coats quartz substrates into mask blanks, which photomask makers (merchant mask shops and chipmakers' in-house mask operations) pattern into photomasks for EUV and DUV lithography. In display, HOYA patterns FPD photomasks itself, including through its Chongqing joint venture with BOE.
**Eye care:** HOYA is vertically integrated, from lens design and casting through prescription laboratories to distribution to eye-care professionals. In Japan it also owns the retail channel for contact lenses.
**End markets.** Life Care serves vision correction (single-vision, progressive and myopia-management lenses), contact lenses, cataract surgery (IOLs), gastrointestinal and pulmonary endoscopy, orthopaedic and dental bone substitutes, metal implants, and endoscope reprocessing. Information Technology serves advanced logic and memory lithography (EUV, phase-shift and DUV blanks), display panels, nearline data-centre storage (3.5-inch HDD substrates, including those for heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR), legacy 2.5-inch drives, optical communications (CUPO polarization glass for transceivers), smart glasses and wearables, and other optical components.
**Independent characterization.** HOYA is two companies with one balance sheet:
**A defensive consumer-medical franchise:** Life Care's eyeglass and contact-lens operations behave like a consumer-staples business with a pricing tailwind from myopia management. Endoscopes and IOLs are the weaker links, squeezed by Olympus's dominance in endoscopy and by China's volume-based procurement for IOLs.
**A high-margin AI-infrastructure materials business:** IT runs at a segment pretax margin above 50% because it combines near-sole-supplier positions with long customer qualification cycles.
The portfolio is moving toward IT and the eye-health core, and the medical-device periphery is being pruned.