A Message from the Cochlear CEO & President: Cochlear Undergoing Capital Raising

Dear hearing health professionals, hearing implant recipients, colleagues and partners,

You may have seen Cochlear is undergoing a capital raising effort. This involves people being able to invest more money into the business. This was announced to investors today, 25th March 2020.

I am writing to reassure you we are taking the measures necessary to ensure Cochlear remains strong during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. I want to reconfirm our commitment to maintaining the same support and offerings to our customers, implant recipients, partners and healthcare professionals.

We recognise that our recipients rely on us for support throughout their lifetime. To this end, we have taken this decision to ensure we continue to support you for the long-term.

This decision also supports our ability to maintain our dedicated workforce and continued investment in key initiatives. We are continuing our research and development programmes and infrastructure builds to help more people around the world access life-changing hearing devices.

As we stated last week, Cochlear is responding to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. I appreciate that many people are rightly focused on their own actions to protect the health and wellbeing of their families and communities around the world. We continue to be grateful for all your efforts to help people during these tough times.

We want to continue to be open and transparent. The priorities that guide our actions continue to be:

• Promoting health for everyone – our customers, employees and communities
• Maintaining our supply chain, so that we keep our customers on-air and can continue to supply implants for surgeries

This capital raising effort is another action to support these priorities, as well as considering current expenses, including a long-term patent dispute. While this is an immediate activity, this focuses on the longer-term outlook of the company.

We understand that this continues to be a challenging time for everyone.

Please be safe and continue to know we are here for you.

Dig Howitt,
CEO & President, Cochlear

About Cochlear Limited (ASX: COH)

Cochlear is the global leader in implantable hearing solutions. The company has a global workforce of more than 4,000 people and invests more than AUD$180 million each year in research and development. Products include cochlear implants, bone conduction implants and acoustic implants, which healthcare professionals use to treat a range of moderate to profound types of hearing loss. Since 1981, Cochlear has provided more than 600,000 implantable devices, helping people of all ages, in more than 180 countries, to hear.