George Soros Bets on $CIEN

Soros Fund Management revealed a brand new investment in Ciena Corp (CIEN) last month. The disclosure showed George Soros had already purchased 5 million shares in CIEN, representing approximately a 5% passive stake. Beside his brand new stock position in CIEN, George Soros also owns about $74 million worth of convertible bonds in Ciena Corp, based on his 13F portfolio. CIEN’s performance was really tragic in the past few months. Before Soros’ investment, the stock has collapsed by more than 60% to its 2-year low. Many bears were betting on a decline in the stock and the sell-side volume was quite large in August, so George Soros was able to enter the position in a very short time. The average price he got was about $11. CIEN rallied 3 days when Soros’ transaction was filed on Sep 12th. Now the stock was trading at $10.15, erasing George Soros’ earlier gains of more than 20%.

CIEN had a total shares outstanding of approximately 100 million. At the end of the second quarter, the stock was owned by eleven hedge funds within United States. Bain Capital’s Brookside Capital had nearly 9 million shares, which accounted for 9% stake of CIEN. Stuart Peterson’s Artis Capital Management had 6.6 million shares, or 6.6% stake. Glenn Russell Dubin’s Highbridge Capital Management owned 5.5 million shares with 5.5% stake.

Eighty-one-year-old George Soros is a famous Hungarian-American hedge fund manager who became known as “the Man Who Broke the Bank of England” after he made $1 billion in 1992. He is the chairman of Soros Fund Management. According to Forbes, he is ranked 35th on the list of the world’s richest people, with an estimated net worth of $14.2 billion. You can click here to see the rest of his profile and his portfolios.

According to Standard&Poor’s NetAdvantage, Ciena Corp was a technology firm which specialized in “transitioning legacy communications networks to converged, next-generation architectures, capable of efficiently delivering a broader mix of high-bandwidth services”. The firm’s revenue mainly comes from three primary business segments: packet-optical transport, carrier Ethernet service delivery, and packet-optical switching. Products are mainly sold to AT&T and some international firms.