HAL Investments, owner of Pearle and GrandVision and major shareholder of Safilo, has decided to merge its optical chains Pearle and GrandVision. The headoffice of the new optical giant will be located at Schiphol Airport near to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. GrandVision and Pearle together own about 4.000 optical stores worldwide and realised sales of more as 2.5 billion euro in 2009. The stores are partly owned and partly franchised and operate under many different names like Pearle and Eyewish Groeneveld in the Netherlands. As usually at HAL, the investment company doesn’t give a lot of additional information. For the time being the merger looks like a cost saving and efficiency operation with no direct effect on the “frontside” of the stores.
