Cochlear Plc Ord (CHEOF) Q4 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Cochlear FY26 Results Analyst and Media Briefing. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Digg Howitt, CEO and President. Please go ahead. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Let's get underway. So in FY26, as always, our mission is central to what we do and we enabled over 55,000 people to hear for the first time or to regain their hearing and more than 50,000 of our over 800,000 recipients received a new speech processor last year, giving them access to better hearing. I'll give an overview of the year and then focus on actions to drive growth in the developed adults market. In FY26 sales revenue grew 2% in constant currency to $2.3 billion and underlying net profit was $322 million. These results were below the expectations we set last August but they were at the upper end of the guidance we revised in April and revenue in the second half was up 6%. During the year we advanced our strategic priorities including successfully launching the Nucleus Nexus system which I'll cover in more detail later. and when market growth slowed we acted quickly to optimise our cost base lowering fixed costs to fund investment in growth programs and Sarah will talk to this later. We accelerated work to medicalise hearing loss and we are working to make adult cochlear implantation the standard of care for people with severe to profound hearing loss by building clearer treatment pathways and expanding medical referral channels. Despite lower sales growth We increased R&D investment to...