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The Cooper Companies, Inc.
CooperCompanies makes contact lenses and women's health and fertility products, selling them to eye doctors and surgical customers around the world.
CooperCompanies is really two businesses wearing one name. The bigger one, CooperVision, makes soft contact lenses — the daily, monthly, and specialty lenses that eye doctors fit onto patients who don't want glasses. The smaller one, CooperSurgical, sells the tools and devices used in women's health: things like fertility treatments, contraception, and instruments for gynecological surgery.
The lens business is the engine. CooperVision sells to eye care professionals and distributors rather than straight to shoppers, and it competes with giants like Alcon and Johnson & Johnson's vision unit by carving out niches — toric lenses for astigmatism, multifocal lenses for people over 40, and myopia-control lenses for kids whose eyesight is getting worse. That last category is a genuine growth bet: slowing myopia in children is a newer market, and Cooper has been pushing hard into it. CooperSurgical is the smaller, steadier segment, selling to hospitals, fertility clinics, and OB-GYN practices. It has grown largely by buying up smaller device makers and folding them in — a roll-up strategy that adds products and customers without Cooper having to build them from scratch. Fertility is a particularly attractive corner because demand keeps rising and the devices are consumable, meaning clinics reorder again and again.
The company is based in San Ramon, California, and its shares trade on NASDAQ. Its edge is specialization: it doesn't try to be everything to everyone, it picks specific corners of eye care and women's health and tries to own them. The risk is the same coin flipped — contact lenses are a mature, heavily competitive market, and CooperSurgical's growth depends on continuing to find and integrate acquisitions well.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026