A few days ago, optical communication equipment manufacturer Ciena announced its financial report for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2022. In this quarter, Ciena’s sales reached US$971 million, down 6.8% compared with US$1.042 billion in the same period last year; gross profit margin was 44.7%, down 1.1% year-on-year; net profit fell by 31% year-on-year. 4%, just $90.9 million.
Divided by business, Ciena's network platform sales revenue in the fourth quarter was approximately US$753 million, a year-on-year decrease of 9.18%, of which sales of routing and switching products increased from US$74.2 million to US$102.8 million; platform software and services Sales revenue was approximately US$71.6 million, a year-on-year increase of 8.32%; global service sales revenue was approximately US$126 million, a decrease of 1.05% compared with US$127 million in the same period last year.
In addition, the amount of Ciena's undelivered orders reached 4.2 billion US dollars, and the main deferred orders appeared in optical transmission equipment. Regarding the future performance development of the company, Ciena said that the company expects the revenue in the first quarter of fiscal year 2023 to remain between US$910 million and US$990 million; the gross profit margin is expected to be less than 40%; the annual revenue in fiscal year 2023 It will increase by 16%-18%.
Ciena is a global telecommunications system supplier established in 1992. Its main business includes telecommunications equipment, telecommunications software, services, etc. The company's products widely serve telecommunications providers, cable operators, governments and enterprises.
It is worth noting that after experiencing a severe decline in performance in the third quarter, Ciena set the company's forecasted sales in the fourth quarter at between 800 million and 880 million US dollars. Therefore, although Ciena's performance in the fourth quarter declined year-on-year, sales still exceeded the company's expected.
According to Ciena's third-quarter financial report, the company's third-quarter revenue was US$868 million, a year-on-year decrease of 12%; net profit was US$10.5 million, a year-on-year decrease of 95%.
For this rare plunge in performance, the company’s CEO Gary Smith said, “Due to the delay in the delivery of specific components from a small number of suppliers, it has seriously affected the company’s delivery to customers and has had a disproportionate impact on performance.” The pot was dumped to the supplier.
At the same time, Ciena also stated that in addition to suppliers, the company’s practice of pushing up product costs in order to find alternative products has also caused a decline in profits to a certain extent, which will also make it impossible for Ciena to achieve its previous performance this fiscal year. expected.
Compared with the declining performance, Ciena products and services have achieved good market feedback in recent years.
In 2021, Ciena announced a partnership with CityFibre, the UK's largest independent all-fiber platform, to successfully deploy the first 800Gb/s backbone wavelength network. The project is expected to cover approximately 8 million UK fixed locations and establishments by the end of 2025 through an FTTP-based broadband ISP network.
In 2022, Ciena, through its GeoMesh Extreme solution, will assist African telecom operator EASSy in upgrading its submarine cable network to 36Tb/s.
The network is managed by a Management, Control and Planning (MCP) domain controller provided by Ciena. By adopting a software-driven approach to automation, EASSy achieves maximum operational proficiency and service agility while reducing operating costs, Ciena said. At the same time, the network capacity of the entire network system is doubled from 18Tbps to 36Tbps, which improves the efficiency of the optical fiber system and reduces the transportation cost per bit.
In terms of WDM business, Ciena's market performance is also very good.
In July 2022, the international research organization Omdia released the 100G+ coherent optical equipment port report for the first quarter of this year. According to the report, although the current 400G market deployment is still far lower than 100G and 200G, with the steady growth of 400G port shipments from 2021, it is expected that the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 400G port shipments in the WDM market in the next five years will ) will reach 31.5%, and 400G ports will become the mainstream choice in the market.
According to the report data, in the first quarter of this year, the global 400G port shipments grew rapidly. Among them, Ciena’s 400G WDM market share reached 28%, second only to Huawei’s 35%. 18% and 9%.
