Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Robbie Marcus, the MedTech analyst at JPMorgan. I'm really happy to introduce our next speaker, CEO Al White of Cooper Companies. Al will do a presentation followed by some Q&A.
Thank you, Robbie. Welcome, everyone. Go ahead and jump right into this. For those of you who do not know us, we're the Cooper Companies, a medical device company, and we have two business units we'll discuss today: CooperVision and CooperSurgical. CooperVision being the larger part of our business, about two-thirds of our revenue is contact lenses, and the other part being CooperSurgical, which is fertility and more of a women's healthcare business. A couple of highlights to set basis here. The company's been around for a while, sells products in over 130 countries, 16,000 employees, and over 50 million people benefiting from using Cooper products. If I look at a couple of things here, this is always an interesting slide to me.
If you go back to 2015 and you look at our business over the years, you can see the growth rate on a consolidated basis: 8.6% per year for our consolidated business, 16% growth rate for CooperSurgical, 6.4% for CooperVision. You can see the consistency on this slide of the growth over the last 10 years. We operate in two great businesses. I mean, at the end of the day, we have contact lenses, and we'll go through the details of that. But whether it's kids looking at their phones or whatever the reason, right, we're seeing an increase in myopia around the world, and that's resulting in an increase in the degree of myopia in people wearing glasses and contact lenses. So that's a growth industry. There's a number of drivers that are driving the industry forward. We'll touch on those as we go through the presentation.
The other one here that's been a growth driver for us has been our CooperSurgical business. We're the largest medical device fertility company in the world. We've been growing pretty rapidly. I think we're 14 of our last 15 quarters within fertility have been double-digit organic growth, so pretty strong, consistent growth for a long period of time, and you can see the consistency here over the years with the only dip coming back during COVID, and we're certainly expecting this type of growth to continue into the future. If we look at our guidance, we reported earnings at the beginning of December, so just recently our fiscal year-end is October, so we started our new fiscal year here November 1st. Our guidance for this year is 6% to 8% organic growth.
CooperVision, that's 6.5%-8.5% growth, 4%-6% for CooperSurgical, and you can see 10%-13% growth for our earnings per share. If I step back a second and kind of look at the business from a higher-level perspective and look at the corporate strategy, kind of the long-term corporate strategy, we highlight that on this slide with kind of four arrows here: drive sustainable revenue growth. We touched on that a little bit, and I'll go through it more when we break down the details of CooperVision and CooperSurgical, but very consistent, solid growth on an annual basis. As a consolidated business, we're mid-single-digit, maybe a little bit stronger than mid-single-digit grower.
As I mentioned, we anticipate we'll continue to do that, driven a little bit by acquisitions, but much more so by organic growth and our own internal development. Deliver profitability and leverage. This is a hot topic these days. We've been spending more time talking about it. I've been spending time talking about it today. Last year, we gave guidance of 10%-12% constant currency OI growth. We delivered 18%-19%. This year, we've once again given guidance of 10%-12%, obviously looking to perform strongly against that. We started seeing leverage through the business, SG&A leverage, as we've invested heavily over the years, and that the return on that investment activity is playing out. We're starting to see improving gross margins.
So when I look at our business right now for CooperVision and CooperSurgical, but especially CooperVision, I'm expecting improving gross margins as we move into this year. Stewards of Investor Capital, obviously, we're a public company. We're built for the long term. We're driving long-term success. We think long term. Our markets are long-term in nature. They trend up and to the right over time, so we need to invest and support that. And then foster culture and community. Cooper's got a great culture. We have a great team. The management team has been around a long time. I've been with the company 20 years. Our Kim from IR and Brian and Dan, the whole group, Jerry who runs CooperVision and Holly, a long-term management team. We've got a great culture. People love working for Cooper. It's part of the reason we're so successful.
If I break out the pieces here, we look at the contact lens market. The contact lens market globally is a little bit over $10 billion. It's almost $11 billion. As a matter of fact, my guess when we get the year-end numbers will probably be $11 billion. You can look at the market by competitor here. That's in revenue dollars. We're way up 26%, a good strong 26% market share of that market. The one thing I'd highlight out of here is this is market share in terms of revenue dollars. If you look at wearers, CooperVision is the number one contact lens company in the world. We have about 43 million wearers wearing our product, which is more than any other company. So I should probably update this slide and change it to where we're number one.
But since this is investors and everybody's talking about dollars, this is probably appropriate. If you look at categories, a big portion of the market is traditional spheres, the regular vision correction that everyone needs. Toric and multifocals continue to grow as a percentage of the market. I remember when not long ago, we always said toric are 25%, multifocals 10%, and we're just continuing to see those trend up. Technologies have gotten better and better. The amount of options out there is better in terms of daily toric and daily multifocals. Products like the one I'm wearing right now, like the multifocals, are just fantastic.
And if you're wearing reading glasses like I was for a while, right, when you get into contact lenses, your ability to look down and read and look up and toss those glasses is a game changer from what it was a few years ago. So I couldn't recommend those enough for anyone in the room. I'll send you some free ones if you want to try them. High barriers to entry for the market. We spend a lot on capital. Right now, we're spending more than normal. We're kind of doubling up on a lot of our investment activity for capacity manufacturing on MyDay. For anyone to enter this market would be brutally difficult. I mean, our CapEx this year will be over $400 million. It was over $400 million last year.
It's just an expensive marketplace to be in in terms of being able to produce enough product to get it in the marketplace when the market's growing as fast as it is. Technology know-how. Obviously, it's FDA-based and different regulatory agencies around the world, global medical device company, and a long history of product innovation. And I would add in there it's not only product innovation, it's manufacturing innovation. Our ability to produce billions of contact lenses, which is what we'll produce this year, billions and billions of contact lenses, is something that will be incredibly difficult for anyone to replicate outside of the existing industry participants. Favorable industry characteristics. Strong fundamentals for growth. It's still, when people ask me this question, "What should I do about my child? My child has myopia. They're going to get worse." First thing I say is go outside, right?
Go outside, spend time outside, look in the distance. But we all know that's not happening. I have a 17-year-old daughter who spends all her time staring at her phone. As much as I hate it, that's a good thing for our industry. It's continuing to drive growth in our industry. We're seeing more wearers come in because of that. So wearer growth, it's a recession-resistant business. That's a plus-minus. When times are bad, 2009, the contact lens industry grew 3%. We grew 5%. That's kind of as bad as it gets. And when you go to the other side, we'll grow 8-9%. Some years, industry will grow 6-7%. So it's kind of a tight band, but a very consistent growth on an annual basis.
If I jump into our products here, many of these, for those who follow us, will know these, and hopefully some of you are wearing them. MyDay is our premium daily silicone hydrogel lens, fantastic product. The only struggle we have on that product right now that we continue to see is that demand is greater than our capacity. So we're continuing to order and start up new lines to be able to hit demand. So that's a good problem, but it's still a challenge as we continue to ramp up. Biofinity is just a fantastic product. It's a monthly contact lens, unlike MyDay and Clariti, right? Wear it once, throw it out at the end of the day. Biofinity is a full range.
Essentially, any person in the entire world who wants to wear contact lenses, regardless of what their script is, we can make you a Biofinity contact lens. We have that ability, including all custom ability, to produce anything that anyone could want. Clariti is our other daily silicone hydrogel lens, great product. MiSight, we'll touch on. MiSight is our myopia control product to reduce the progression of myopia in children. Contact lens, macro growth trends, right? I've touched on a few of these already. You look at the growing global wearer base that's coming literally around the world. We see opportunities for growth. New fits and trade-up. Right now, when a new patient goes in, you're a 15-year-old, you're a 16-year-old, and you're heading your way into the optometrist's office, you are being fit in a daily silicone hydrogel lens.
That's a difference from years gone by where people were fitting in monthly lenses. You could still do monthly lenses, or you could do a two-week or a seven-day replacement type lens and use solutions. But in today's world, you still need to. You can use daily lenses, and we're continuing to see that very slow shift as new wearers come into the market or coming in as daily wearers. Growth in toric and multifocals. I mentioned multifocals, but toric is another one. A significant number of people have an astigmatism. Not everyone needs a lens to fix, if you will, or address that astigmatism. But a significant number of people do. We're seeing optometrists look for and treat astigmatisms much better. And that's one of the reasons we're getting so much growth in our toric franchise. And we are the number one toric contact lens company in the world.
So as we continue to see that trend happen, that's a positive for our business. And then taking price. I mean, we took price again this year. As an industry, we've seen the entire industry taking price the last several years. That's been a positive, right? I mean, I think you're getting a market that pre-COVID had more participants. If you move forward to today, you've got—I mean, you've got a high percentage of the market. 90% of the market is three players right now. So it's certainly an oligopoly if you roll all four players in. You're very strong, 90-something% of the market. Worldwide prevalence of myopia, just to touch on this very quickly, right? You can see the increasing myopia as we go to 2050.
On a percentage basis, right now, you're talking about a third, a little bit over a third of the world is myopic. Studies show half of people, 50% of people worldwide, are going to be myopic by the year 2050. That underlies all of our growth, right? New wearers coming into the market underlies all of our growth, and that's what's happening. If you go specifically to CooperVision, as I mentioned, a long history of success. You can go back to 2014, 10 years ago, and see our 6% revenue CAGR. Our market share has gone from 19%-26%. I think we've taken market share since 2006 every single year in the contact lens industry. We're well positioned to continue to do that. We're very heavily focused on driving success in this business.
As I mentioned, number one contact lens company in the world, roughly 34% of wearers, 43 million people wearing CooperVision contact lenses. Innovation. Everyone talks about innovation. There's only one contact lens on the market. There's only one product on the market to treat myopia progression in children. That's an FDA-approved product. That's MiSight that CooperVision, we created, we invested in, and we created that product. So the idea behind that is to take any child who's myopic and their myopia is going to continue to get worse, they wear this contact lens, it eliminates or reduces the progression of myopia in the child. So we've seen a lot of success on that. Frankly, not as much as I thought we were going to see.
Where we've seen the big success is where a parent or both parents are high myopes, and they know the impact of that, right? I mean, if you have vision and you're a minus 5 or a minus 6, you know that you want your child to have some visual correction if they can get it to reduce that progression so that your child ends up being a minus 2 or something along those lines. So we've seen a lot of improvement and a lot of uptake on high myopes. It's been slower than we were expected in some of the lower myopes. But I think as we move forward, and we talk about spectacle lenses here with SightGlass, that's a joint venture we have with EssilorLuxottica. We're optimistic that we're going to get FDA approval on SightGlass as we finish this year.
Once we can get myopia-controlled glasses into the market and truly become standard of care, which it should be, every child that walks into an optometry office should be fit in a myopia-controlled product. The easiest is obviously glasses. Contact lenses for an eight, nine, 10, 11-year-old is a harder sell. But we have to get every child that we can into this. It will become standard of care. If SightGlass gets approved, I think that's just going to be a very successful product. Right now, that is selling. We launched it as MiSight spectacles, MiSight glasses in Spain and some other markets. We have it in China right now. It's just doing absolutely fantastic. It's growing like crazy. It's a great product. I'm super excited about that. Ortho-K would be another myopia management product that we have that we're continuing to sell.
I jumped into CooperVision summary. I'm not going to read all this, but at the end of the day, it comes down to fantastic products, great customer support, and relationships. We're the only company, really the only company that's doing customer brands. So if you go buy Kirkland contact lenses as an example, you're buying CooperVision lenses. That would be true Specsavers, GrandVision, some different big retailers around the world. So we have a lot of those key accounts. It creates complexity for us in terms of our logistics, our distribution system for packaging and labeling and so forth, but it's a pretty significant advantage for us. And then I won't read the long list here. Jump into CooperSurgical, the other part of our business. We spend a lot of time on vision and maybe don't spend enough time here.
But about 40% of this business is fertility. It's a really exciting business for us. And then the office surgical is 60%. I like this quote down here. "Roughly every 30 seconds, somewhere around the world, a baby is born using CooperSurgical products." I just think that's a cool quote. But it came up. I found it kind of hard to believe, honestly. But when you think about it, that's how prevalent we are throughout the OB-GYN community. History of success, durable sales. This includes acquisitions, but you can see a 10-year revenue growth CAGR, 15%, over 600 products, 130 countries, 40 acquisitions is how we built this business over the years. That number will end up tailing off here where we are right now, but business is built from acquisitions over the years.
If we look at the fertility business, combined products and services, we have the broadest portfolio out there selling to fertility clinics, be it capital equipment, consumables, the genetic testing that we have that's market-leading, donor egg and sperm activity that we have, and the cryo solutions that we offer. So we have the full gamut, right? Coming from the point if somebody wants to go through the fertility process, if you need donor eggs or you need donor sperm to the point of media and so forth, of creating the embryo to the genetic testing of that embryo, looking for genetic abnormalities, or ranking those.
We now have, through our AI platform, because we've done most of this genetic testing, our AI platform is built around looking at these embryos and saying, "What embryo is going to give you the highest probability of a successful child?" That's a clear game changer and very unique to us. I mean, at the end of the day, you go to the extreme and you could say, "Why would anybody have a baby without going through IVF when you can do genetic testing and say, 'I can eliminate all genetic abnormalities'?" CRISPR presented behind us. They could even add on to that if they wanted to.
But the AI platform that we have right now, when you're going through the fertility process and you have five embryos to choose from, and historically you didn't know which one to choose from, we now rank those and say, "Hey, this embryo has the best chance of success." That's a game changer in the fertility space. It's a big deal for us. And it's part of the reason that we've been growing this business as successful as we have for as long as we have. Take genetic testing all the way through the process to the embryo transfer catheter and so forth. So we're offering the full gamut of products and services to the fertility clinics. Fertility, for those who don't know, on a marketplace for where we participate, the market's a little bit over $2 billion, growing 5%-10%.
We're pretty consistently growing in the upper single digits. And as I mentioned, we have many, many quarters where we reach into the double digits. A couple of facts here that are interesting. One in six people experience fertility at some stage of their life. So a pretty significant number. It touches a lot of people. That used to be a quiet fact where people didn't want to talk about it. It's not anymore. People are much more willing to discuss their fertility challenges. Over a million babies are born annually from assisted reproductive technologies. That's a pretty big number. And if you look at the cause for it, it's not a women-based challenge. This is a third of the time it's women, a third of the time it's the man, and a third of the time it's a combination of the two of them.
Just some interesting statistics and numbers in there. This is a long-term growth market. I believe we're going to look at this market in 10 years from now. We'll be looking back saying, "Wow, that fertility market continued to grow mid-upper single digits on an annual basis." Growth trends here on the right-hand side and continual drivers, women delaying childbirth. The longer that a woman waits in order to have a child, the harder it is to get pregnant. And that's one of the biggest factors that's been driving fertility growth around the world. Improving access to treatment. There's more clinics that are going up in different spots around the world. Patient awareness, people understanding what's out there and the availability of this and how it works, and that there's a greater likelihood of success than maybe there was historically.
All of that, technology improvements and so forth, are all helping to drive the success of the fertility industry. When we look at markets in Japan and a number of other markets where the birth rates are not high enough to replenish that population on a consistent basis, we are seeing a lot of those countries starting to offer insurance reimbursement and other types of coverage. So that's another positive that's pushing the industry forward. Office and surgical, another part of our business here that's focused on the OB-GYN. You got labor and delivery and operating room, a variety of our different products that are offered here. We have a number of premium market-leading, if you will, products within the obstetrics space that's been built over the years. So if you're in that world, you would certainly know our products or the names of our products.
Then we have Paragard, which is a non-hormonal IUD, fairly flat product, but high margin. CBR, which is cord blood storage, similar, fairly low-growth, high-margin product that we have. There's some facts along the right-hand side. I'll skip over there. You look at the two pieces here and break this up a different way, right? You have the medical device side, which is your traditional OB-GYN medical devices. We've actually broadened that just a little bit to go out of your OB-GYN when we're finding some really successful products. So that's been a nice business for us. It's kind of low to mid-single-digit growth and decent margins at more traditional med device businesses that you will. Stem cell storage, I've mentioned. That's cord blood storage for those of you who possibly use CBR and have your baby's cord blood stored with us. ESG highlights.
You look at ESG for us, at least. This has been part of the fabric of Cooper for a long time. This was way before people were running around talking to ESG, and it's something that we needed to do as a company. We manufacture a significant amount of our contact lenses, as an example, in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has an unstable power grid. We built a micro power plant in Puerto Rico. So we have that with all the turbines in there. We finished production of that a couple of years ago. We're actually starting to see the leverage from that investment activity. That was a long-term project, right? We're starting to see the upside from all of that work its way into our P&L. So I mean, that type of thing is what we do as a company.
We look at ways that are positive for the environment, but that are also positive for us from a business perspective. So we've been doing that for years. We'll continue to do that. I think this might be the last slide. Driving long-term sustainable value. So as I mentioned a couple of times, great businesses that we operate in, just the core business itself is growing. The marketplace itself is growing nicely, and we grow a little bit faster than the overall market. So strong tailwinds will continue to drive forward in contact lenses and fertility, especially. Brand leadership. If you're out in the marketplace, you would know our brands. We're one of the top companies out there. You might not necessarily recognize CooperVision, but you're definitely going to know Biofinity as an example.
And it'd be the same within the fertility space and some of the other areas within the OB-GYN space. Leverage investments and drive continuous improvements. I'll touch on this in a minute. Robbie will ask me about it. This is the investment side for us. As we've shifted within CooperVision and moved more to dailies and want to grow our daily share and continue to increase our overall share, we have invested very heavily the last several years in manufacturing facilities, in manufacturing lines, in distribution centers, in the IT associated with that, in the IT that comes along with that. So we've done that very heavily in CooperVision. We've done that within CooperSurgical. We went live with a brand new ERP at CooperSurgical this past February. Yes, we had our disruptions on that, but we're running smooth right now on that.
We're starting to see that investment activity come through the P&L, right? We're starting to see that leverage work its way through, and that's improving our operating margins. The only thing that, frankly, has offset that has been currency, a negative against that, but very consistent operating margin growth, and we're really focused on driving that. The other thing that is an important point here is free cash flow, right? So we've seen heavy investment activity. We're seeing the margins because of that activity start to work its way through the P&L. We're going to see more of that this year, especially when we look at gross margins and a heavy focus on free cash flow. We had about $290 million in free cash flow, which is pretty light for us last year. We should be somewhere around $100 million higher than that this year.
And then I think we're going to end up seeing a situation where our big CapEx investment starts to level off, if not come down, and we'll see free cash flow continue to improve in 2026 and 2027. So that's certainly a focus area of ours. Long-term focus and discipline on creating shareholder value. As I mentioned, our industries that we operate in grow mid-single digits consistently. We grow a little bit faster than that. That allows us to kind of have visibility to the future and invest for long-term returns. And a proven track record of delivering strong financial results and revenue growth. I've highlighted that in several of the slides where we've seen very consistent long-term revenue and EPS growth. We anticipate and are working very hard to ensure that continues. That might be it. So I ran through that. Happy to answer any questions. Robbie's here.
I'll do some Q&A.
Sure.
Now, maybe we can start with where we left off on fiscal fourth quarter. Two things I wanted to touch on. First was the contact market growth. I think it originally started off at 5% last year. At this time, went up to 7%. Guidance is for 5% for fiscal 2025. Just wanted to see if you've seen any trend change over the past few months since the earnings call and if 5 is still the right place to be.
Yeah. So since the earnings call, I would definitely say the market's more positive. We had pricing increases go through by all the major companies. Took solid price increases. We took the most this year in terms of price increases, but that activity has done is behind us. So I would say the base floor, if you will, in the industry and the marketplace because pricing is certainly healthy, that's for sure. So I would anticipate a stronger market certainly than 5.
Great. And I know you had always had a lower price point than your competitors. Do you still feel like, one, there's room for positive pricing in the industry overall, and then, two, room for Cooper to continue to close the gap with maybe a little above-market pricing in the future?
Yeah. So I would answer that as yes to both of those. I think that as an industry right now, the industry has moved more towards innovation. And whether that's distribution innovation or whether that's product innovation, you've seen that move. And as you've seen the industry consolidate a little bit, it puts us in a position, I believe, as an industry where we're going to be able to at least take inflation. And for those who are unaware, pre-COVID, you were seeing an industry where you're seeing about 1% a year price increases. Last year, this year, we're somewhere in that 2%-3% net price increasing. I think you'll see that this year on a global basis, and it won't surprise me if you continue to see higher price increases in the future.
One of the other things in fourth quarter was destocking across multiple geographies and different products. Have you been able to understand if that destocking was more financially driven or what was driven behind it? And is that something that we could see restocking at any point in the future?
Yeah. That's a great question because I think that's hit our stock here recently. We reported earnings at the beginning of December. When we reported earnings, we were continuing to see the underlying market be strong. So we were seeing consumption. We were seeing fitting activity remain consistent and remain strong in terms of dailies and torics and so forth. But we saw a pullback in some of our revenue activity. Now, we still had a strong Q4. We still beat earnings and so forth, but it came in the last couple of weeks a little bit softer than we anticipated. That moved its way into the beginning of November. In the beginning of November, we had a couple of weeks there where it was a little bit softer than it normally was. At the time of the earnings call, it was relatively recent.
I was saying, "Hey, we're seeing things move back to normal," but a little uncertainty around the drivers of that. Standing here today, I would tell you that that was stocking or destocking. That was inventory related. Some of that was definitely tied to the hurricanes. It seems like a little bit of a distant memory now, but remember that hurricanes moving up the East Coast, you had some of that activity, and we saw some distributors and key accounts pull back on some of their just the inventory that they were holding. We see that every now and then kind of channel inventory ebb and flow a little bit. It's not a big dollar amount, so I certainly wouldn't want to make too big of a deal out of it because it's not that big of a deal or big of a dollar amount.
But we have certainly seen the contact lens market, from our perspective, return to normal and normal growth. We saw that in December. We're seeing that through January.
Maybe we could talk on MiSight and SightGlass. MiSight continues to healthy smaller dollars, but very healthy percentage growth and pretty good incremental dollar growth year-over-year. But like you said, SightGlass is really the one that can lead the way because with younger kids, glasses is a lot easier. So just remind us of when we should expect approval in the U.S. and then how to think about the financial contribution. It is a JV. How should we think about the financial contribution of Cooper once it is launched?
Sure. Yeah. So as a reminder, SightGlass is a joint venture, 50/50 joint venture between us and EssilorLuxottica. Essilor recognizes the revenue on that product. We show gain or loss below operating income. So right now, because that's all in launch phase around the world, that's just a loss that comes through our P&L every single quarter. Obviously, we're anticipating that product growing. As I mentioned, we have the only FDA-approved product in the market with MiSight contact lenses for myopia control. We are well on our way with FDA, hopefully to get approval at the end of this year. We have breakthrough designation on that. We're finishing up our latest year here at clinical studies and believe we've got a good chance to get FDA approval at the end of this year. And you're right, Robbie. I look at it, and I still go back. I said this earlier.
Myopia control will be standard of care. And when I talk to optometrists all over the place, they'll say, "Hey, my office isn't really set up for kids," or, "My office isn't this or that." But if children come in here, I have to have a place where I could refer them to somebody to get treatment. This is a treatment. And as we talk to some of our bigger key accounts and so forth that have numerous locations, they're all talking about taking one of those locations or creating a new location where they have a myopia control center where they can just send the kids. Similar to pediatric dentistry, right? You take your kids in, and maybe it's a couple of kids, and they're playing video games or whatever, that kind of stuff, right?
Create a better environment for children and fitting and education of what myopia progression is and so forth. So it's really exciting. I'm still really passionate about it. I do believe that it's going to be a multi-billion-dollar market, and contact lenses will certainly have their place in that.
If you look at three years from now, you think SightGlass or MiSight is a bigger contributor to Cooper?
I think that, well, obviously, from a revenue perspective, we recognize MiSight and not SightGlass. So obviously, from a P&L perspective, for us, it would end up being MiSight. But I think when I look at long-term profits and long-term potential, SightGlass has a very significant and positive runway to it.
Maybe we could touch on the women's health business. I think we've been anticipating a competitor to your anti-pregnancy product for well over a year now, and we just haven't seen it come through. What do you think the status is there? And is there at some point in the near future where just it would be unlikely that we see a competitor, a generic launch?
Yeah, so we have Paragard, which is the only non-hormonal IUD in the market. We do about $180 million of revenue on that. It was in now 2023, I guess, when news was coming out from a competitor that they were going to get FDA approval and launch a competitive product. That product has not been approved. It's not on the marketplace right now. You'd have to talk to them or ask them as to why they don't have approval on that. But we obviously haven't sat still or sat on our hands. During that time or prior to that time, we had started to work on a single-handed inserter to make our IUD insertion the same as like Mirena and Liletta and so forth. We received approval on that, FDA approval on that this year. We've launched that product, which was something that they had that we didn't have.
So now that competitive advantage is gone. So we're continuing to work very hard to establish our base there. But yeah, I don't have any updates on whether they're going to get approved or not get approved.
You've added a lot in the women's health business, specifically with fertility. This is a high-growth area, and it's been a really nice performer over the past several years, quarters. Is there more to do here, or do you feel like you have a complete product portfolio at this point?
We have a complete product portfolio. We had looked at buying a part of a business, Cook Medical's fertility business, and we went through that process, and at the end of the day, the FTC blocked that transaction. When they blocked that, we started investing more aggressively ourselves in geographic expansion, and that was one of the reasons we were doing that acquisition, was to get their footprint in spots, so we've actually been doing that investment ourselves over the past year. From a technology perspective, we're in a really good spot. We're a leader on the genetic testing side where there are technology advancements, and we do some of that work ourselves. We are doing internal work, R&D work, and so forth to develop new products because the likelihood of an acquisition is, I don't know if it's zero, but it's certainly significantly lower.
When you had the fiscal fourth quarter earnings call, much of the currency moves had already happened. There's been a little bit more, I believe, since the earnings call. Any updates on currency as it stands today?
Yeah. I mean, currency from the time we gave guidance, initial guidance, has moved against us. So it's worse than it was then. You're right. There was a lot of currency movement that had already happened, but there's a little bit more that's transpired since we gave earnings. I would say as a business, our philosophy continues to be if currency is a positive or currency is a negative, we let that flow through the P&L. We hedge below the operating income line, but the core P&L, it flows through. So that's a negative for us. I would just remind people that we gave guidance at 10%-12% constant currency OI growth last year. We worked really hard to outperform that, and we did. We were upper teens.
We gave guidance this year at 10%-12% constant currency OI growth, and we're going to work really hard to outperform that number.
Cooper's been in a very heavy investment cycle. We're now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. You talked about, I believe, it was a $100 million increase in free cash flow in fiscal 2025 over 2024. Where exactly are we in that investment cycle, and how far are we away from another peak in an investment cycle?
I would say that we're going to have high CapEx this year. We'll have higher CapEx sometime into next year. But we should start to see even next year, I think the actual hard CapEx numbers should come down. And certainly, as we move forward, it'll come down, especially as a percentage of revenue or however you want to look at it. I would say from an investment cycle perspective, once we get done with this, we'll continue to add lines, and we'll continue to invest to support the growth of the business. But you're not going to see another investment cycle like we're going through right now anytime in the near future. This more than supports our catch-up mode that we needed to do.
Some of your, or at least one of your competitors here was talking about a different type of material for contact lenses beyond silicone hydrogel. Are you investing in any other future materials beyond silicone hydrogel, and where do you stand on that?
Yeah. So I mean, well, we continue to invest in upgrading technologies and new contact lenses, right, to do everything from improving the fit and the comfort and so forth. Silicone hydrogel itself is a great material, has significant oxygen permeability and more than enough oxygen permeability for what's needed right now. So it's more tweaking and doing that kind of stuff. I mean, when you think about contact lenses for anyone who doesn't wear them, one of the challenges of lenses ends up being the difficulty of putting them in or the difficulty of taking them out, right? And some contact lenses are much easier to take out than other contact lenses, and that has advantages and disadvantages. So trying to really fine-tune that and make that perfect so that the wearer is getting the maximum kind of value out of the lenses, right?
Easier to put in, great lens throughout the day, easy to take out at the end. Frankly, at the end of the day, that's MyDay. When you look at it and say, "Why is MyDay so successful as a product, and why is it more successful than all these other competitive products?", and you did a taste test, so to speak. What you would find is people would say, "Hey, that's the easiest lens to put in, take out, and wear all day." I mean, when I wear mine, it's just a matter of I have to remember to take them out at the end of the day and not sleep in them, so we'll continue to do that kind of advancement. I don't see a scenario where you're talking about a new material.
Okay. Great. Well, we're out of time. Al, thanks for a great discussion. Thanks, everyone, for joining.
Thank you.