Sonos Returns to Growth and Pitches Its Speakers as a Home for Rival AI Agents

For the full fiscal year, revenue rose 7% to $1.547 billion and GAAP net income came to $90 million, or 73 cents a diluted share, an improvement of $151 million, the company said in its earnings release. Adjusted EBITDA rose 39% to $184 million and free cash flow rose 14% to $123 million. "We said Fiscal 2026 would be the year Sonos returned to growth, and we delivered," Conrad said in the release.

The fourth quarter itself produced a GAAP net loss of $5 million, $33 million narrower than a year earlier, and non-GAAP net income of $5 million, or 4 cents a share. According to consensus figures compiled by Investing.com, analysts had expected an adjusted loss of 18 cents a share on revenue of about $340.3 million. The shares rose 1.89% to $17.21 in after-hours trading.

The headline numbers were helped by refunds of tariffs levied under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. GAAP results for the quarter include an $18.0 million refund, and the full year includes $41.2 million, the company said. Sonos strips those refunds out of its non-GAAP figures and describes them as non-recurring.

The bigger question for the company is whether it can turn the rise of AI assistants to its advantage. Under its Sonos 27 software release, the company has opened an early-access interface called 27mcp that lets third-party agents, such as Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, find and control a Sonos system. It is also preparing its own voice assistant, 27voice, which was due to enter early access this month. "We want the AI you choose, whoever it comes from, to work better on Sonos than it works anywhere else," Conrad said on the earnings call. He described Sonos 27 as "the start of an annual release cadence" for the company's software.

Sonos brought five products to market in fiscal 2026: Sonos Play, Era 100 SL, Amp Multi, Beam Ultra and Ace Ultra. The company did not name the products planned for next year. It has not said how it will make money from third-party AI assistants running on its hardware.

The AI boom is also hurting Sonos's costs. Chief financial officer Saori Casey said in the release that the company grew adjusted EBITDA "all while absorbing $56 million of higher memory costs" during the year. The release lists rising semiconductor demand from the buildout of AI technologies and data centres as a risk to component supply.

That pressure shows up in the outlook. For the first quarter of fiscal 2027, which covers the holiday season, Sonos forecast revenue of $570 million to $630 million, up 4% to 15% from a year earlier. It expects GAAP gross margin of 36% to 37%, down from 46.1% in the quarter just reported, and adjusted EBITDA of $73 million to $111 million. Executives said memory and component costs would weigh on gross margin by about 1,200 basis points year over year, and a stronger dollar by close to another 100 basis points.

Sonos spent $130 million buying back 8.2 million of its shares in fiscal 2026, finishing its previous $150 million programme in the fourth quarter. Its board has approved a new repurchase programme of up to $150 million. The company ended the year with $178 million in cash and cash equivalents and $49 million in marketable securities.