Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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David Vogt: Great. And I apologize if I’m going to belabor the point about backlog and orders. And so maybe, Gary, just for the comments on the call. It certainly sounds like based on the backlog draw that maybe book-to-bill was less than 0.9 in the quarter. Is that correct? And if we extrapolate that trend going forward for the full year, does that mean backlog comes down in the mid-teens based on sort of your expectations? And then maybe if I roll that forward, is my second question into the three-year model. Can you kind of square your comments about share gains in optical if the optical industry is growing sort of mid-single digits? Because if I just take the midpoint of your guide, I would assume that in the back half of your three-year plan, ’24 and ’25, Ciena revenue would only be growing around 6%. So I just would love to get some clarity on that.

Gary Smith: Okay. Sure, David. First of all, on the backlog, no, that isn’t the right assumption. It was more than 0.9 for Q1. It was about that. Backlog for the year end, as we’ve said, I think everybody needs to get their head around the fact that we’re not going to have 25% order growth year-on-year and the specific dynamics that have built up for that. And we expect to go into ’24 with a bigger backlog than we would normally take into any fiscal year. So that backlog is still going to be very strong. The focus right now is to ship the backlog that we have and to reduce our lead times. If you look at the — we gave a three-year guide, a CAGR over that we only gave it last quarter. So we’re 36 months out into that. And I don’t know as many companies that give that specificity.

So we’re very confident around a 10% to 12% growth in that CAGR. Obviously, we’re having an outsized year this year as we ship the backlog. But if you look through all of that and the dynamics around various quarters and even various years, that’s very strong, 10% to 12% in a market that’s growing at about 5%. And that has typically been what Ciena has done for the last decade or so. And given the leading technology that we have, given the investment profile and scale of the customers that we have, that we think is a very, very strong performance. And so I think I don’t know many companies of our size in our space that are talking about a midpoint of the range of 21% for the year.

James Moylan: And just to be clear, our future has not changed. We still feel great about our position in the market and our ability to grow. We did give a range, David. And so to jump quickly to a mathematical equation there is probably not the right idea in this time of turbulence and change. We feel great about our ability to grow faster than market.

Operator: Next question comes from Amit Daryanani from Evercore ISI.

Amit Daryanani: I guess, Gary, maybe towards end of what you were talking about on the backlog dynamic, is there a way to think about where do you think your backlog exits this year? And I think historically, you’ve talked about if memory serves me a backlog number in a normalized range should be in the $750 million to maybe $1 billion range. How long does it take you to get to that normalized backlog? Is it a 24 process or much beyond that as well?

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