Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

And we think that once we get through all of this dynamic of supply chain and everything else that happened over the last few years, their desires will advance themselves in substitution of Huawei. We’re seeing it in some places already, in the Nordics, in particular, in some places in Southern Europe. But we think it’s going to continue.

Unidentified Analyst: Great, great. Appreciate it. For my follow-up, we are getting — there’s been a lot of noise buzz rather around the intra data center opportunity for Coherent technology. Maybe you can just help us understand like how that could be cost effective or when it will be cost effective and what you think about the timing there and the sizing of that opportunity for you guys? Thank you.

James E. Moylan, Jr.: Yes. A way to think about it is as the flow rates between GPUs increase and as the distances increased as they’re forced to because of constraints like power, a lot of the techniques that were used in the WAN part of the network that brought Coherent to the forefront, will replay themselves inside the data center. And some of the leaders in Coherent — we being the market leader there are going to have opportunities to use our technology in sort of that adjacent market. From a timing perspective, I think you’re looking at sort of the next generation, which is probably 2025 and beyond, to get in there. The consumption models will be quite different than the system business on the WAN. But the key fundamental technologies are the same things that we’ve been working in, in the Coherent space over multiple generations.

Unidentified Analyst: Great, yes. I think Coherent has put out a forecast for Datacom Transceivers could be like $15 billion by 2028. Is there a percentage that you would put that could be Coherent?

James E. Moylan, Jr.: Yes. At this point, I think it’s a little early to try to size how that slices off. There’s obviously — if you’re coming at it from the existing generation of technology, you’re trying to extend the life of that technology, as long as you possibly can. And then the substitute of technology, we’re talking about here is obviously trying to intercept where that saws off, I think, is still a bit of a crystal ball.

Gary B. Smith: Just to be clear, we do have a development track to develop those kinds of products in our R&D road map. And we are talking with major data center providers. So we’re going to stay right on top of it. And when and if the shift occurs, we’re going to be a part of it, we hope.

Unidentified Analyst: That’s all, thanks guys.

Operator: The next question comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Meta Marshall: Great, thanks for taking the question. Wanted to dig into Europe a little bit. I know in the past, maybe some of that European Telco spend was actually kind of indirect cloud spend, as they kind of helped with data center builds for some of those customers. And so I just wanted to get a sense of kind of, if any of the weakness you’re seeing is kind of on the indirect part, and if any of that’s just due to kind of power constraints that we’re hearing about and kind of building out data centers or just any commentary there on kind of the indirect portion? And then maybe just as a follow-up question. Just as Jim, on how much you plan to kind of work down inventory levels, across the year would be helpful? Thanks.

James E. Moylan, Jr.: Hi Meta, there has been a shift over a few years where particularly the cloud providers used wholesale type capacity in Europe. Increasingly, in the last sort of couple of years, they’ve been going direct and taking dark fiber. And I think that has impacted some of the service providers, particularly the wholesalers. And obviously, they come direct to us as opposed through the carrier. So I think you have seen that dynamic, particularly in Europe. That’s not the case in most other international jurisdictions where you’ve got regulatory issues and the rest of it. So it’s much more of a hybrid in other countries such as India. But I do think that has impacted somewhat some of the wholesale capacity in Europe is now direct into the hyperscalers.

Gary B. Smith: On the inventory question, Meta, we said that we were going to improve and reduce our inventory level this year, and we will. As you saw, we reduced our inventory by $66 million in Q1. And we’ve slowed the rate of material into our system to match our demand forecast, so we are confident we’re going to take our inventory down this year. Because Q2 is going to be a bit lower than we expect and the rest of the year, a bit lower as well, we’re probably not going to get down as low on inventory as we said we would. I think we said we were going to get it down by $300 million or something like that. And I think we’ll get it down by a couple of hundred million, I would think. But I think on the other hand, it might grow in Q2 because the situation is a little bit late breaking for us, and we can’t react to it quickly enough. But we will drive inventory down for the year by at least a couple of hundred million.

Meta Marshall: Great, thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from George Notter with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

George Notter: Hi guys, thanks very much. I guess I’m curious about where your product lead times are right now. I’m wondering if product lead times are quite short, and that’s leading to some of the excess inventory taking longer to bleed off, can you just talk a little bit about that dynamic, lead times versus buffer stocks at customers?

James E. Moylan, Jr.: Hi George, lead times, we have a very broad portfolio. So lead times vary. But if you wanted a single number on it, we sort of have published 12-week lead times to our customers. The reality is, as we’ve executed through Q1, we are executing at a much better rate than that in terms of lead times. We’re approaching getting back to sort of pre-pandemic lead times, not quite there yet, but approaching getting back to that. And I think that does have an impact in terms of our customer order behavior patterns as they — if they don’t need to place it with 52-week lead time, they’re not going to place them with 52-week time.