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

Simon Leopold: Thanks. And then in terms of my more substantive question, I wanted to see if you could elaborate on your thoughts on India as a market. I recall, I think it was 2018, it was I think, just over 9% of revenue and slowed down subsequently. It seems very evident that India has changed for the mobile infrastructure suppliers. I know you have got some operations there. If you could elaborate what you expect over the next 1 year to 2 years from that region. Thank you.

Gary Smith: India has been a big market for us. It’s gone through some cycles, for sure. And I think €“ I guess what’s behind your question as well is it’s now with the whole sort of 5G commitments that everybody has made going through a very bullish cycle for the next couple of years. And we have number one market share in India, and we are very well positioned to take advantage of that growth. You are beginning to see that show up in the numbers. India, I think off a fairly low number relative to where it’s been. We are up about 30% year-on-year when a quarter change. And year-on-year in total is about 10% to 12% growth. So, you are beginning to see that come back. I would expect that to be an outsized growth driver for Ciena for the next 1 year to 3 years, absolutely.

Simon Leopold: And does it have a negative impact on your margin, because the RAN vendors all talk about great revenue, but then dilutive to gross margin, neutral to operating margin. You are in a different business. I just want to make sure folks understand what it means to you from a profitability perspective as well.

Gary Smith: Generally speaking, the way they do their project builds, yes, they put line systems out, which is generally lower margin. And we will see a little bit of that, but they tend to build out quite quickly in terms of capacity. So, generally speaking, it’s not dilutive to our overall margins. It may sort of ebb and flow quarter-to-quarter whatever. But generally speaking, I mean it’s consistent with our overall margins there.

Simon Leopold: Great. I really appreciate that. Thank you.

Jim Moylan: While we are waiting for the next question, I got the answer to George’s question about purchasing commitments, it’s $2.6 billion.

Gregg Lampf: Katherine, we are waiting for the next question once you are ready.

Operator: One moment. Our next question comes from Amit Daryanani with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Amit Daryanani: Thanks for taking my question and my congrats. Maybe to start off with as you think about fiscal €˜23 guidance, which is fairly robust, can you just talk about how do you think growth across the different verticals? And obviously we see starts to going versus maybe a little bit slower, what’s that 16% to 18% top line growth?

Gary Smith: I would expect €“ I mean, next year, FY €˜23, our balanced view is it’s really all about supply and not specifically demand. So, with that as a caveat, I would say pretty strong demand across the board. I think GCMs, I would highlight, have been very strong in terms of our revenue guide for the year. So, I expect very strong from the overall web scalers. I think certain geographies, we just talked about one, India, I expect to be strong. I expect to see strong growth in the cable space in North America. Switching to routing, I would also highlight relative to €“ we sort of got 40% growth this year. Some of that was non-organic. But we are seeing a lot of new wins in that space, as we talked about. So, I think there is various different applications and geographies that we think are going to be hot for the next year or so. Those are the ones that would come top of mind.