Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Scott McFeely: Yes, Samik. So first of all, just starting with what we’re seeing in the environment today and a little bit in the rearview mirror. Things are getting better gradually. People are delivering more reliably to their commitments, and they are delivering more components to us period-over-period. You saw that in our Q4 results, and you’re seeing that in our Q1 guide. Looking forward, in terms of their commitments to us, they are committing more components to us going forward as well, and that’s factored into our guide. In addition to that, we talked in the past about a bunch of mitigation activities that we have control of, redesigning products to open up the aperture in terms of alternative design sources, building up a manufacturing capacity such that we can turn finished components and finished goods faster for our customers.

All those things will benefit us in €˜23. And we’ve taken that into account as well as the learnings of the variability that we’ve seen to try to give you a balanced view of where we think we’re going to land from a supply and therefore, a revenue perspective in €˜23.

Jim Moylan: Specifically, we assume that supply chain dynamics do not worsen. Specifically, we believe that component suppliers will largely deliver on their current supply commitments. And we do not expect to encounter any substantial new decommits that we cannot mitigate, given all the work we’ve done in our R&D group.

Gary Smith: Thanks, Samik. We appreciate the questions. Ready for the next question, Katherine.

Operator: Our next question comes from Alex Henderson with Needham & Company.

Alex Henderson: Great. Thanks. First question is on the mix assumptions for €˜23. Can you talk a little bit about the €“ you’ve talked about $4.2 billion in backlog, but underneath the surface of that is also your service business, which doesn’t show up in backlog but is related to additional shipments. So can you talk about the growth assumed in service versus product in the guide?

Jim Moylan: Well, services are in our backlog, Alex, just to be clear. When we get orders, we get orders for the product and related services. So it is in our backlog. The $4.2 billion includes a meaningful amount of services. I believe if you look at the various pieces of our services business, which we have maintenance, we have deployment, and then we have advanced services, we expect to see strong growth, stronger than average on the advanced services. We do probably €“ we will probably see higher-than-average demand on implementation because we did a lot of motives in the past year, and we expect that we will have more line systems, which comes in many cases, with implementation. So those are the parts of the services portfolio that we think will grow faster than average. The maintenance, we think will grow, but probably in line with our product.

Alex Henderson: So would your services then be a double-digit growth rate or a single-digit growth rate? I’m just trying to gauge the mix for the year.

Jim Moylan: I don’t think overall, we would be double digit €“ I’m sorry, yes, we will probably be double digits. Yes.

Alex Henderson: Right around 10% is probably the right answer. The second question I have for you is relative to the backlog. $4.2 billion in backlog is an enormous number. If I take 17% growth, that’s $617 million off of your €˜22 base. So how much do you think the backlog will work down? And if the backlog is still, say, I don’t know, $3 billion next year at the end of the year, doesn’t that imply continued outsized backlog going into €˜24 and €˜25 even?