Ciena Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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June 5, 2025

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Earnings Conference Call
Ciena Q2 2025
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Operator

Good day, and welcome to Sienna's Fiscal Second Quarter twenty twenty five Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Greg Lamp, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Gregg Lampf
Gregg Lampf
Vice President, Investor Relations at Ciena

Thank you, Michael. Good morning, and welcome to Ciena's twenty twenty five fiscal second quarter conference call. On the call today is Gary Smith, President and CEO and Jim Moylan, CFO. Scott McFeely, Executive Advisor is also with us for Q and A. In addition to this call and the press release, we posted to the Investors section of our website an accompanying investor presentation that reflects this discussion as well as certain highlighted items from the quarter.

Gregg Lampf
Gregg Lampf
Vice President, Investor Relations at Ciena

Our comments today speak to our recent performance, our view on current market dynamics and drivers of our business as well as a discussion of our financial outlook. Today's discussion includes certain adjusted or non GAAP measures of Centimeters's results of operations. A reconciliation of these non GAAP measures to our GAAP results is included in today's press release. Before turning the call over to Gary, I'll remind you that during this call, we'll be making certain forward looking statements. Such statements, including our guidance, commentary on market dynamics and discussion of our opportunities and strategy are based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions regarding the company and its markets, which include risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the statements discussed today.

Gregg Lampf
Gregg Lampf
Vice President, Investor Relations at Ciena

Assumptions relating to our outlook, whether mentioned on this call or included in the investor presentation that we'll post shortly after, are an important part of such forward looking statements, and we encourage you to consider them. Our forward looking statements should also be viewed in the context of the risk factors detailed in our most recent 10 ks and 10 Q, which we expect to file with the SEC by June 12. Ciena assumes no obligation to update the information discussed in this conference call, whether as a result of the new information, future events or otherwise. As always, we'll allow for as much Q and A as possible today, though ask that you limit yourselves to one question and follow-up. With that, I'll turn the call over to Gary.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Thanks, Greg. And today, we delivered strong fiscal second quarter results, including revenue of $1,130,000,000 which is at the high end of our guidance and demonstrates the strength both of our strategy and our execution. This performance reflects continued strong demand across all customer segments, geographic regions and our diversified portfolio. Notably, revenue from cloud providers stood out as a key driver in Q2. Specifically, we achieved record direct cloud provider revenue in Q2 that comprised 38% of total revenue, growing 85% year over year and reaching more than $400,000,000 in a single quarter for the first time, really highlighting the accelerating investments in AI infrastructure and our leadership in addressing this demand.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Indeed, three of our top five customers this quarter were cloud providers, underscoring their sustained investments in AI infrastructure and network expansion. Over the past quarter, market dynamics have not only validated our previous assumptions about customer network infrastructure spend, but have also reflected an accelerating demand environment that continues to ramp and exceed our expectations. And we believe this strength is differentiated for us as the market continues to evolve in our direction. Accordingly, orders in the quarter were again significantly greater than revenue. And notably, we are on track for cloud provider orders to double in fiscal twenty twenty five over last year, as we benefit from the breadth and depth of our customer base in this critical segment.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

And I think this outstanding performance showcases our substantial market penetration in the AI driven networking space, where we remain a very trusted partner for a wide range of network operators who are investing to scale their infrastructure for high speed data center and cloud connectivity, including for emerging applications and use cases. To address this growing demand, we are deploying the entirety of our portfolio, including optical systems and interconnects, routing and switching solutions, software and services. And as the global leader in high speed connectivity, our WaveLogic technology remains a cornerstone of our competitive advantage. Specifically, our WaveLogic six Extreme 1.6T WAN technology maintains at least an eighteen to twenty four month competitive lead in the market. As our photonic line systems continue to be the de facto industry standard, demand for our reconfigurable line system RLS continues to increase.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

And our interconnects business is also ramping with tremendous activity and demand, including new awards with three additional major cloud providers this quarter alone. This momentum reflects the growing adoption of and our demand for our 400ZR and 800ZR coherent pluggable solutions as well as our 1.6T coherent light solution, which we will be sampling by the end of calendar twenty twenty five with commercial availability in the first half of calendar twenty twenty six. As cloud providers expand their data center architectures with scale up and scale out AI related deployments, we are broadening and deepening our relationships with them. In fact, we're addressing new data center related applications, a strategy that we've spoken publicly about over the last few months and where we recently secured two wins. The first is a very strategic win and it's for an application involving the connection of regional GPU clusters, which is something the industry has been talking about for some time.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

For context, to support the massive scale and power requirements of AI training and inference traffic, data centers must become more distributed. And historically, these traffic flows were primarily inside the data center, but they are now across multiple data centers over greater distances that require high capacity, low latency links. With that, we are excited to report that our coherent 800 gig pluggables and RLS photonics have been selected by a global cloud provider who is investing in geographically distributed regional GPU clusters. We will start to recognize revenue from this incremental opportunity later this fiscal year and ramping into 2026. And as one of the first vendors to address this application and with our coherent optical technology ideally suited for this type of connectivity, we expect to see more of these types of opportunities emerge as cloud providers evolve their data center network architectures to support their AI strategies.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

The second win is for a focused application inside the data center for out of band network management. These networks operate separately from the main data traffic network and provide remote access to monitor and manage data center systems. We recently worked with a global cloud provider to co develop a solution based on our existing technologies and this is designed to significantly reduce the complexities of these networks and streamline the management of its large scale data center operations. Now turning to service providers. It's now been several quarters of an improving trend line with service providers.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

As their network investments in high speed infrastructure become more durable and sustainable following a long period of underinvestment. We are seeing growth and strength across the board with service providers in core optical transport, routing and switching, software and services to address the connectivity needs of their own customer base and to support cloud providers growing bandwidth demands. As a result, our business with Tier one North American service providers gained momentum in Q2. And we also had several new customer wins in both The Americas and international regions, including Europe. This momentum is driven in part by new fiber builds as well as MOFIN.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

In fact, all the record performance of direct DCI in the quarter, we also achieved an all time record for MOFIN activity in the first half of fiscal twenty twenty five, which further demonstrates really how we're supporting the strong nexus between service providers and cloud providers. I also want to touch on the momentum of our software business. I'll start with the Navigator Network Control Suite, which is our multilayer domain controller. And this provides a comprehensive set of capabilities to help network operators plan, provision, monitor and troubleshoot their networks. Orders for Navigator increased significantly in the first half of fiscal twenty twenty five by more than 30% year over year, driven by increased investment in the unique capabilities of this microservices based and differentiated platform.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Similarly, Blue Planet had a record performance in Q2, achieving its highest ever quarterly revenue at just under $30,000,000 This milestone reflects the success of our deliberate transformation efforts over the past couple of years, positioning Blue Planet to better serve our customers' digital transformation needs and journey. Today, Blue Planet is at the leading edge of several large provider projects, particularly as the industry incorporates AgenTeq AI and data driven intelligence to drive transformation. Before I turn the call over to Jim, I'd summarize by saying that we are very encouraged by the strong activity across all segments of our business. In the context of favorable market dynamics and an accelerating demand environment, we have strong momentum that we are confident will drive continued growth. In particular, we are very pleased with the validation from customers that we can strategically expand our market opportunity inside and around the data center, where high speed connectivity is absolutely critical.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

In the short term, and as we've been talking about for some time, we are now seeing more AI traffic come out of the data center for training, as I mentioned earlier, and general monetization that's driving cloud traffic. And our set of technologies is ideally positioned to address these connectivity needs at scale. With that, Jim, can you please provide us with updates on our financial performance in Q2 as well as our outlook?

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Thank you, Gary. Good morning, everyone. As Gary noted, we delivered strong fiscal second quarter results. Total revenue in Q2 was $1,130,000,000 This included 210% plus customers, one cloud provider and one service provider. Adjusted gross margin was 41%, in line with our guidance, driven by product mix and to a lesser extent, the cost of tariffs.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

During the quarter, we navigated a new and in the early days, a rapidly changing U. S. Tariff environment. We responded in real time with mitigation strategies to minimize the impact both on our customers and our P and L. However, as a result of the dynamic conditions, as well as the need to adjust our billing systems and our customers' systems, we absorbed a net impact to our bottom line in the mid single digit millions of dollars in the quarter.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Adjusted operating expense in Q2 was $369,000,000 This was higher than expected, driven entirely by higher incentive compensation associated with very strong order performance in the quarter and our overall financial performance in the first half of the year, both trends which are expected to continue. Absent this higher incentive comp, OpEx is on our plan and our guide. With regard to profitability measures in Q2, we delivered adjusted operating margin of 8.2%, adjusted net income of $61,000,000 and adjusted EPS of zero four two dollars In addition, we generated $157,000,000 in cash from operations. Adjusted EBITDA was $117,000,000 Finally, we ended the quarter with approximately $1,350,000,000 in cash and investments. During the quarter, we repurchased approximately 1,200,000.0 shares for $84,000,000 We are on track for the repurchase of approximately $330,000,000 total in this fiscal year.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Some additional highlights from the quarter. We had an excellent quarter in optical. As Gary mentioned, our WaveLogic technology remains a strong competitive advantage. We added 24 new WaveLogic six Extreme customers in Q2, bringing the total to 49 within just two quarters of general availability. WaveLogic five Extreme and nano also performed well with continued adoption among cloud customers and service providers.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

We added 10 new WaveLogic five Extreme customers in Q2, for a total of three forty four customers overall. WaveLogic five nano pluggables continued ramping, now shipping to 178 customers, including both cloud providers and service providers. Overall, our momentum with coherent pluggable optics was strong in Q2, and we remain on target to double our year over year revenue to at least $150,000,000 in fiscal twenty twenty five. Pluggables are proving to be a great complement to our optical systems business. I also want to highlight the performance of our routing and switching business.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

This is being driven by AI momentum and an improving service provider environment. In Q2, we secured a significant win with a Tier one service provider in India, where we displaced a major competitor in the access domain. We also added eight new broadband customers in Q2. Additionally, we introduced the first eight hundred gig router to our coherent routing portfolio, and we expanded our flagship WAV router family with WaveLogic six Extreme capabilities, making it the industry's first generally available 1.6 terabit coherent router. All of this performance confirms that we have the right portfolio with best in class technology for our customers, who demand the highest performing connectivity for today's dynamic demand environment.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

With that, let's turn to guidance. Given recent developments, it appears that the tariff environment will continue to be dynamic. For purposes of our guidance, however, we are assuming that the current tariff structure does not change. Under this current tariff structure, we expect the total cost of tariffs to be approximately $10,000,000 per quarter. We expect to mitigate most of the quarterly impact as compared to Q2.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Therefore, we believe the net effect to our bottom line in future quarters will be immaterial. So for the fiscal third quarter, we expect to deliver revenue in a range of $1,130,000,000 to $1,210,000,000 We expect Q3 adjusted gross margin to be roughly in line with Q2. And we expect adjusted operating expense to be approximately $370,000,000 to $375,000,000 Again, this includes higher incentive comp. Base OpEx is on our plan and on our guide. While the geopolitical environment has fluctuated quite a bit during the past few months, strong demand dynamics continue to drive momentum in our business.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

As a result, we have increased visibility and are in a position to update all three elements of our annual guide. We now expect to deliver revenue growth of approximately 14% for fiscal twenty twenty five. At the same time, given the mix of products, including a higher proportion of newly introduced solutions and the RLS, all of which are still ramping, we expect annual gross margins at the lower end of our previously assumed range of 42% to 44% for fiscal twenty twenty five. And with respect to OpEx, we expect to be on plan and guide for our base OpEx for the fiscal year. However, given our strong financial performance, particularly on orders and revenue, we expect an increase in incentive compensation of approximately $10,000,000 per quarter.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

With that, we now expect operating expense to average $360,000,000 to $370,000,000 per quarter for the year. Michael, we'll now take questions from the sell side analysts.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Michael, before we do that, I'd just like to take a moment to acknowledge and recognize Jim's upcoming retirement, given today will be his last earnings call with us all. And as you know, for the past eighteen years and an incredible 70 earnings calls, Jim has been an incredible partner and member of our executive team with a lengthy list of significant contributions to the growth and the performance of our business. We will certainly miss Jim's leadership and his wealth of knowledge, but importantly as well, and I think I speak for all of you who know him on the call as well, we'll miss his wit, his warmth and his humor that makes working with him such a joy. So while we'll be sad to see him go later this summer, we all wish him the very best in his well deserved retirement. With that, we really will open up for calls from the sell side analysts, please. Thank you, Michael.

Operator

Certainly. We will now begin the question and answer session. And the first question comes from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Samik Chatterjee
Samik Chatterjee
Managing Director, Equity Research Analyst at JP Morgan

Hi, thank you. Thanks for taking my question. I guess, Gary, if I sort of go back and from the last earnings call, you already had indicated that you were seeing strong start in terms of orders to this quarter. But when I listened to the commentary this morning, it just sounds more like you've seen probably more acceleration through the quarter with the cloud customers. But just maybe if you can talk about the linearity of the orders with the cloud to the quarter because overall, it sounded more sort of optimistic than what we heard from you ninety days ago.

Samik Chatterjee
Samik Chatterjee
Managing Director, Equity Research Analyst at JP Morgan

In terms of visibility, how do you think about visibility beyond FY 2025? You're talking about doubling of orders and how do you think about sustainability of that, so kind of growth or investment from them into fiscal twenty twenty six? And then I a quick follow-up. Thank you.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

That was a pretty comprehensive question. Thank you, Sumeet. So I think in direct answer to the first part of that, I think we saw strong order flows in Q1 that continued in Q2 and probably accelerated in Q2 and the activity. And I'd say sort of two things about it. One, service providers nice steady increases underpinned all of that and I think that's very sustainable and durable.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

And then the cloud, I think we're seeing a step function here in demand. We're seeing cloud growth in terms of traffic flows and then we're seeing these incremental opportunities as well that are emerging. This regional GPU cluster one that I talked about specifically today is really incremental to our thought process for the year. And I would also say that, that momentum both on service providers and on the cloud players is continuing into Q3. So and this exceeds our expectations for the year.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

I think given this notion around traffic coming out of the data center to both do training and for monetization, we are beginning to see that for sure in addition to these other applications. So I think at this stage, obviously, it's early to predict next year and the three year piece, I think it's reasonable to assume that given the step function in demand, I think we will revise the three year guidance when we get to the end of this year. Obviously, not appropriate to do that now. But I think what's behind your question there, Samik, is this a long term trend? And I think the answer to that is absolutely yes.

Samik Chatterjee
Samik Chatterjee
Managing Director, Equity Research Analyst at JP Morgan

Got Got it. And for my follow-up on the gross margin side, and I know mix is sort of impacting this year, but one of the concerns that we hear from investors is as you ramp on pluggables and this year, you also have the coherent light products ramping next year. Is that a headwind in terms of mix to the overall margin, long term margins for the company? Can you just address that concern if there is a change in terms of the longer term thinking for gross margins for the company, just given where the expansion opportunities that you're pursuing? And before I pass it over to you, Jim, thank you for your help all of these days. Thank you.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Thanks for the questions, Mig. We've always said that mix is the single most important element of our gross margin number in any given quarter. And that certainly affected us in Q2 and likely will affect us in Q3. As we look out though, we really are not backing off our view that mid-40s percentage is the right gross margin for us at least as a target and we think we can get there in a couple of years. What's happened in this quarter is that we have exceedingly high demand for pluggables and our new reconfigurable line system.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Both of those are at lower than corporate average margins for slightly different reasons. The RLS, the reconfigurable line system is always been based on a razor razor blade type pricing model. And so when we sell a lot of RLS without a lot of capacity adds, we are going to enjoy lower margins than our mid-40s. That's just a fact. It's becoming the industry standard.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

It's a good thing for future margins because we will sell the capacity, at least most of the capacity to go into those line systems. So that by its very nature will improve over time. On the pluggable side, what I'd say there is that we are in the very early stage of ramping our pluggables business. It's going to be, we said at least $150,000,000 this year. It's we're 20% of the market.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

It's going to grow. That share is going to grow. And our cost points are not as good as we'd like them to be. They will those cost points will decline over time and our margins will improve. We're also going to generate going to introduce the next generation of plugs, the 800 gig plug, an 800 ZR, ZR plus all of that generation will come out.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

And those should be higher performance and better gross margin. So there is a path to getting to gross margins. It's not going to happen in Q3. And I think it will definitely start to happen in next year.

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

The other dimension on mix is WaveLogic six Extreme, part of our system business. Gary talked about the momentum that we had in that in his prepared remarks. That's in the early stages of ramp as well. So it has the same dynamic as the pluggables, lots of levers to pull on operational supply chain efficiencies and design cost reduction that you do over the life cycle of a product and that will naturally lift the margins in those parts of the portfolio.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

The other thing I would just add to all of that is, Samik, we're given what we're seeing around the dynamics of demand and how sustainable that is, given what Jim and Scott have talked around the gross margin mix being a bit of a headwind in the short term for us, We're confident we'll get through that. We've done that before. That makes us even more confident in our operating margin targets for getting into those mid teens as we get to '27. And I think we'll see continued improvement both in the second half of this year and also in '26 on the journey.

Samik Chatterjee
Samik Chatterjee
Managing Director, Equity Research Analyst at JP Morgan

Great. Thank you. Thanks for all the color.

Operator

And your next question comes from Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Simon Leopold
Simon Leopold
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

Thanks for taking the question. And Jim, thank you as well for all the service and certainly appreciate getting a full year's heads up on your retirement. So a nice glide path without a shock to the system. So grateful for that as well. So I wanted to see if maybe we could unpack the top customers a bit.

Simon Leopold
Simon Leopold
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

And then you mentioned three of the five were cloud and the 210% customers, one being service provider, one cloud. I guess what I'm trying to get a better sense of is what were the more specific percentage contributions from the two over 10%? And how much of overall revenue is coming from the top five customers in the quarter? Thank you.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Yes. The largest customer was a cloud customer. It was 13 to 14%. I don't have the precise number right here. So 13.4%.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

And the second one was our service provider AT and T at 10.4%. The top five I'd have to quickly calculate, but it would I'll do that and get back to you, Summer.

Simon Leopold
Simon Leopold
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

Okay. And then just I'll ask the follow-up while you're looking at those numbers. In terms of some of the trends from these cloud customers, so comfortable that visibility has improved. It sounds like a good trend. I know we're not ready to provide guidance for fiscal twenty twenty six, but I guess folks are trying to look for what sort of the sustainability of this.

Simon Leopold
Simon Leopold
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

Do you get a better sense that you'll see a broadening base of contributions from cloud both direct and indirect that it should continue to grow next year? How should we think about the longer term trend beyond the end of fiscal twenty twenty five?

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

As I'm sure you can appreciate, obviously, don't want to get ahead of ourselves into giving sort of detailed guide for 2026. But clearly, the kind of dynamics that we're seeing, Simon, I think about it, you've got a broadening application base. I talked about the GPU clusters earlier and the inside the data center focused application there. And you've also got a broadening amount of cloud providers. We've had significant new wins over the first half of the year.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

More and more of these cloud providers, not just the large four, are now really leaning into the network. And so I think you've got a broadening set of players and you've got a deepening set of applications, which obviously gives us confidence in the sustainability and durability of it. And given the magnitude of the scale out, we've got very good visibility with a number of them about their long term plans. And we're also co creating with them as well. So that gives us increased visibility and confidence as well as we go forward.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

The two big wins that Gary spoke about earlier, both of which have applicability outside of the of the original customers. The regional GPU clusters in particular is something that the industry has been talking about for years. And now, the demands for data flows inside the data center has brought that phenomenon about. So, is a big trend for us. We think it will be at least considered if not adopted by other cloud providers.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

And the inside the data center connectivity is being looked at by other cloud customers as well. So, both of those have applicability outside of the original customers. And the answer to your question, Simon, the top five customers were 45% of revenue.

Simon Leopold
Simon Leopold
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

Thank you.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Thank you, Simon.

Operator

And your next question comes from Amit Daryanani with Evercore. Please go ahead.

Amit Daryanani
Senior Managing Director - Equity Research at Evercore

Thanks a lot. I guess I have two as well. Maybe just to start with, when I think about the 14% growth outlook for the year, can you just talk about what are you sort of assuming from a growth basis in cloud versus telco for the year? And then really, if I kind of look at what you're implying for October specifically, I think you're implying it's going be up low single digit sequentially around 1,200,000,000.0 So would that imply that a lot of the auto momentum you're seeing right now is more likely to convert to revenues in fiscal twenty twenty six versus the back half of this year?

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Yes. Quick answer to that, I mean, is yes. I mean, given the scaling demand, we're not going to be able to and a lot of it is scheduled out further because of the size and scale of it. So we're certainly, I think, going to be going into 2026 with an increased backlog. I think that's where you're going with this and that's absolutely a reasonable assumption.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

We are ramping our supply chain pretty strongly and we started that last year and we're continuing to increase that. So we can address that because we do think it's very sustainable and we've got good visibility to it. So we are going to go into 2026 even with the increase to sort of 14% growth in the year, we're still going to be leaving the year with a larger back log than when we entered it. That's for sure.

Amit Daryanani
Senior Managing Director - Equity Research at Evercore

Super helpful. Then, Gary, if you could spend a little bit of time on this, the pluggable opportunity. I know you talked about you're deploying your pluggable optics with one of these distributed GPU clusters. Can you just talk about what distance are these pluggables being used for right now? And if I think longer term beyond the $150,000,000 number you talked about, how big do you think this market can be?

Amit Daryanani
Senior Managing Director - Equity Research at Evercore

And where do you think your market share would eventually get in that space? Thank you.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Okay. Let me take the second part of that and then I'll pass Scott to give you some more on the sort of architectural side. I would say that we've been engaged with multiple players over this kind of architecture where because of power and space constraints, they cannot get all of the GPUs in a single data center. So this is the first one that we've seen and we believe one of the first deployments like that. And it's just a couple of the regions and it is hundreds of millions of dollars of both 800 gig pluggables and line system.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

So in terms of sizing, it's pretty material. And this is one player just beginning to roll this piece out. So this is a very sizable and substantial opportunity for us.

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

Yes. In terms of the overall pluggable piece, need to differentiate sort of our pluggable participation and sort of the classic metro campus DCI, which is the 80 kilometers plus kind of domain with this regional GPU clustering application that we're talking about. In the latter case, what we're really talking about here is simple way to think about it is an express overlay network between GPU clusters that has massive capacity, reaches 100 to 150 kilometer type range, requires resilience, latency, requires WDM and is right in the sweet spot of coherent technologies. So it's what we've been talking about for a long time, which is as power becomes a bigger constraint, they need to distribute these GPU clusters, capacity goes up, that's going to create more opportunities for Coherent.

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

And this is an instantiation of that. It's coming across as pluggable opportunities at 800 gig, it's coming across as line systems, all incremental to the use cases that we've been pursuing in the past.

Amit Daryanani
Senior Managing Director - Equity Research at Evercore

Great. Thank you very much, and best of luck, Jim.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Thanks, Evan.

Operator

And your next question comes from Ruben Roy with Stifel. Please go ahead.

Ruben Roy
Ruben Roy
Managing Director - Equity Research at Stifel Financial Corp

Thank you, Scott. You probably just answered this question, just so I understand on the GPU cluster opportunity, it seems to me, you know, from the prepared remarks and what you just said, you know, you're uniquely positioned given that you have both the line systems and the pluggables. And that's part of this new architecture that some of the folks are thinking about. Is that the right way to think about it?

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

Yes, I think over time the opportunity we believe is big enough that there'll be multiple vendors at play, but with our leadership in Coherent and as we said, RLS being sort of the de facto standard for line systems, we are certainly going to get our unfair share or the bulk of the early move on this piece. So we're quite excited about it. We've been working on it with the lead customer for some time around looking at the feasibility and super focused on delivering to it.

Ruben Roy
Ruben Roy
Managing Director - Equity Research at Stifel Financial Corp

Great, thank you. And as a quick follow-up for Gary, I wanted to talk about Blue Planet. It's shown quite a bit of momentum over the last several quarters and you talked a little bit, Gary, about AgenTic AI and some of the things that some of your customers are thinking about. I'm wondering if you could just kind of delve into that a little bit, AI opportunities longer term and any detail on use cases that you're talking to your customers about and how you look how you're thinking about that in terms of growth going forward? Thank you.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Yes. If you think about the sort of software assets that we've got that are strategically embedded on the service provider side, you've Navigator around the sort of the main piece with a complete sort of micro services based architecture. And then as you know, we had a kind of a lot of learning around Blue Planet being a micro services software platform for OSS. And I think we're seeing a lot of momentum now on the Blue Planet side. We're very focused on things like the inventory, confederation of inventory.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

And you think about that strategically, you basically get to have the data set within the service providers of what is out there. And really without that, it's very difficult to have AgenTeq AI if you haven't understood what the whole inventory of your network is. So we're sort of, we believe uniquely placed to be able to leverage that into the future and that's what we're focused on developing and engaging with a number of very large service provider customers on. We've got a great position in a number of those large service providers and we've got the right architecture that will scale up for that. It's early days, but basically, we're in a tremendous position from a relationship and a trusted partner point of view and from an architecture point of view, Ruben, to really leverage that into something where we become the de facto data management for allows and facilitates Adjentic AI.

Ruben Roy
Ruben Roy
Managing Director - Equity Research at Stifel Financial Corp

Great. Thank you.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Thank you.

Operator

And your next question comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Meta Marshall
Meta Marshall
Managing Director at Morgan Stanley

Great. Thanks. Maybe just a second kind of on the routing wins that you guys were talking about. Just wanted to get a sense, you guys had invested a lot in that business over the past few years. Was kind of one of the service provider wins kind of one of the finally kind of seeing some of the benefit of that investment?

Meta Marshall
Meta Marshall
Managing Director at Morgan Stanley

And then maybe just secondly, get the question in ahead of time, just on installation capacity, are you guys seeing kind of more requests for installation capacity just as kind of your increase in revenue would point to kind of an increased need for capacity increases?

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Yes. So I think on routing and switching side, Meta, I think it's once completely aligned with the service provider journey. And I think my own view of what's happened with service providers over the last few years, they've really underinvested in a lot of their core infrastructure because they've been very focused on, first of all, COVID then supply chain whiplash and challenges around that and then five gs, where they've had to invest enormous amounts of money and capital and focus on five gs. And that's largely not worked out from a profit generating point of view. So I think we're at a point now where they're returning to I think a very sustainable sort of scalable investment thesis and that includes routing and switching.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

And I think the two go hand in hand. And I think with the service provider up tick that we're seeing, we're seeing now investment in new routing and switching applications and a number of new wins. So that's encouraging for us. And I think that will absolutely continue. To your point about EF and I, which I think is a very important point for a couple of reasons.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

One, the increased shipments, we've got really good visibility to what's happening with those shipments. And we are the EF and I partner for a lot of our large customers, including the cloud customers. So we have good visibility to what's happening. And I will say to you that that's in balance and the need for EF and I is going to go up exponentially similar to the ramping of our supply chain and demand. And we're seeing a lot of activity across the board for EF and I both in service providers and in the cloud obviously to help install this massive amount of investment over the next few years.

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

Amit, just to continue on the routing and switching piece, I mean, we've been very encouraged by the number of logo wins that we've had over the last number of quarters. Logo wins obviously are precursor to orders or precursor to revenue. In line with the sort of service provider dynamics, the order book on routing and switching for the last number of quarters has quite a bit in excess of the revenue piece. To put a dimension to that, orders in the first half of the year in routing and switching were greater than 75% of the total orders last year for routing and switching. So there's momentum there and we would expect that to flow through to revenue with a strong second half.

Meta Marshall
Meta Marshall
Managing Director at Morgan Stanley

Great. Thank you.

Operator

And your next question comes from Atif Malik with Citi. Please go ahead.

Adrienne Colby
Adrienne Colby
Assistant Vice President at Citi

Hi, it's Adrienne Colby for Atif. Thank you for the question. I was hoping we could go back to gross margin. I think last quarter you had been expecting gross margin to trend up from the Q2 levels into the second half and the back half of the year. So I just wanted to understand better what's changed.

Adrienne Colby
Adrienne Colby
Assistant Vice President at Citi

Perhaps the production scaling of the 400 CR is trending differently from expectations. We've talked about the product mix impact. So I think that's well understood. But just trying to understand what shifted in that outlook.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Yes. You'll recall that our original guide for the year on gross margins was 42% to 44%. We're now saying that it's going to be at the low end of that range. And it is essentially that demand for two products in particular have greatly exceeded our expectations, the RLS systems and our plugs. And as I've discussed, both of those are currently below corporate average gross margins.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

We do have a path to improvement, And you should see improvement in gross margins certainly next year. Q3 is probably going to look more like Q2 and probably a little improvement in Q4. But again, as Gary said earlier, we're committed to improving those gross margins and to getting our operating margin back to the 15% to 16% level by the end of the three year period.

Adrienne Colby
Adrienne Colby
Assistant Vice President at Citi

Thank you for that clarification. And then I was just hoping we could talk about the MOFEN opportunities. Maybe talk a little bit more about your pipeline. I know you've said that this is one of your strongest quarters in terms of orders there. Interested if you're seeing some expansion beyond India.

Adrienne Colby
Adrienne Colby
Assistant Vice President at Citi

I know that's been an area where you've had significant traction.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Yes. We're seeing a lot of MOFN activity in India. It's not translated to a massive amount of revenues yet, but we've taken the orders and it will. We're seeing MOFN activity throughout the globe. And I think it's just really it goes hand in hand with the whole cloud build out.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

They can't build everywhere with their own network and so it's augmented by these MOFN opportunities. We're seeing that in North America as well. There's been some as you know large announcements around some of the larger carriers partnering there with Lumen and Zayo etcetera. We're seeing that reflected in pretty much all parts of the globe. Asia, outside of India, we're beginning to see that on in Europe.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

We're seeing activity it's the largest amount of activity that we've seen and it really just goes hand in hand with the overall strategic plans for these cloud providers.

Adrienne Colby
Adrienne Colby
Assistant Vice President at Citi

Thank you.

Operator

And your next question comes from Tim Savageaux with Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Tim Savageaux
MD & Senior Research Analyst at Northland Capital Markets

Hey, good morning and congrats on the results and increased outlook. I had a question on the cloud front. And Gary, I think you mentioned a step function. I think you were referring to demand. It looks like we saw another major change in the quarter and that's diversification of your cloud business among several providers.

Tim Savageaux
MD & Senior Research Analyst at Northland Capital Markets

Seems like your top customers, smallest percentage of that total bucket that it's been in a while or at least in recent history. And I wonder if you could talk about that trend of customer diversification within cloud and whether you expect to see that continue? I know it can be kind of lumpy, but I'd be interested in your thoughts overall on that.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Yes. That's a good point, Tim. I mean, I'd say overall, we're seeing let me start with the sort of four known the hyperscale as they were. We're seeing increases in all four, step function increases in all four cloud players directly with us and also through things, as I was talking just with MoFin as well. So it's all consistent with that.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

And then we're seeing them really and I think it's a sort of hierarchical flow is how I think about it. They've been very focused obviously on power and GPUs and scaling all of that. Now it's about scaling it out. And it's now about the network. And they're very focused, all of them, on making sure that the network does justice to all this massive investment that's going on in compute.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

So I think this is the phase that we're entering now and that's why we're seeing it across all of the hyperscalers. As you say, it's lumpy, are leaning in more than others, but they're all I think showing a step function increase in the importance of the network. And then you've got a whole other set of players as well, that has expanded out from a cloud point of view that are now leaning in on the network. And so you've got a broadening out. It's not just the large four anymore.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

It's a much larger group of players that are now recognizing that if they're going to monetize and to optimize their GPU investments, it's all about the network. And that's why we think it's very diversified, durable and sustainable. And it's all about high speed connectivity. That's really what it's about.

Tim Savageaux
MD & Senior Research Analyst at Northland Capital Markets

Great. Thanks very much. And Jim, congratulations. It's been great working with you.

Operator

And your next question comes from Ryan Koonce with Needham and Company. Go ahead.

Ryan Koontz
Senior Analyst at Needham & Company

Great, thanks. I wanted to follow-up on your comments around tariff mitigation and your different levers there around supply customer surcharges? And if you can kind of broadly characterize how negotiations are going with your customers there in terms of passing some of those costs along, 10,000,000 hit from tariff. It doesn't sound like that much relative to big, the big, scheme. Thanks.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Yeah. Any discussion of tariffs is gonna have to be caveated by the fact that we only know what the regime in place is now, And it could very well change soon. But under the regime in place now and given all of the exemptions that are in the current regime, we are likely to experience a cost of about $10,000,000 per quarter. Now, if other schemes come in place and the potential for tariffs go up, we do have a range of things that we could do. We could move manufacturing operations.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

We could change some flows in our supply chain. We can do a number of things like that, which would reduce it. With respect to passing on to customers, it's going to be a complicated situation because not in all cases are we going to actually pass a tariff along to them. Some cases it might result in some price increases, general price increases, etcetera. So all of those things, that's about as far as we're willing to go today.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

But we think that the net cost to our bottom line is going to be immaterial going forward.

Ryan Koontz
Senior Analyst at Needham & Company

Got it. Thanks Jim and congrats. And Gary, if I could follow-up on your momentum in Pluggables or maybe for Scott on ZR. Is this still dominantly driven by cloud operators or are seeing much service provider traction? Where are we in the service provider adoption cycle for your pluggable ZR products? Thanks.

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

Yeah. From a ZR perspective in terms of that application, Ryan, it is dominated by the cloud in terms of the volume. Pluggables have existed forever in terms of service provider deployments for different reasons, for modularity, and we do ship our plugs into service providers, but the volume for ZR is dominated by the cloud.

Ryan Koontz
Senior Analyst at Needham & Company

Got it. Thanks so much, guys.

Operator

And your next question comes from Karl Ackerman with BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Karl Ackerman
Managing Director - Equity Research at BNP Paribas

Yes. Good morning, gentlemen. I have two and I'll just ask them at the same time if I may. You indicated that mix of pluggables and line systems are the biggest driver of margins. First, does the increased backlog exiting 2026 assume a higher mix of transponder blades?

Karl Ackerman
Managing Director - Equity Research at BNP Paribas

Second, on pluggables, clearly volume plays a larger role here, but you did speak about a several hundred million dollar opportunity from your initial player. So could you discuss where you are on having a fully integrated coherent transceiver giving your IP across DSPs, SerDes, and Electro optics? Thank you.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

The short answer to your first question is yes. We will be selling more capacity next year. That's one of the reasons why we can have the confidence that our margin will go up next year, gross margin and operating margin for that matter.

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

Yeah. And on the second one, you know, from a from a capability perspective, all the major seminal ingredients we own our own IPR on and as we ramp it over time, a greater proportion of the mix will be on our components and that is part of the cost improvement plan.

Karl Ackerman
Managing Director - Equity Research at BNP Paribas

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from David Voigt with UBS. Please go ahead.

David Vogt
David Vogt
Managing Director at UBS Group

Great. Thanks guys for taking my question. And Jim, congratulations and good luck. Maybe I wanted to start with you, Jim. So obviously, you've spent some time talking about sort of the dynamic with RLS and pluggables.

David Vogt
David Vogt
Managing Director at UBS Group

Can you kind of remind us again, should we expect something similar to what we saw maybe in fiscal twenty eighteen, '20 '19 and 2020 from a systems and transponder capacity perspective, recognizing that obviously COVID was a little bit different, but is that the kind of way we should think about the trajectory of capacity additions and the impact on gross margins going forward? And then I have a follow-up more specifically on margin.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

You'll recall we had an exceptionally high margin in 2020. That was because COVID did sort of reduce the level of activity with respect to new networks. And so in order to get the capacity that they needed, all of our customers turned to adding capacity to existing line systems. And so we generated, I think, a 48 something percent gross margin in one or two quarters of twenty twenty. I don't we don't foresee that kind of move in the next three years.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

We do see though a move back to the mid-40s just based on the fact that all of the things we've talked about, WaveLogic six, the fact that we're coming out with a new generation of pluggables, will be higher performance and better gross margin. And our cost position on the basic 400 ZR will improve. So for all those reasons, we do have confidence that gross margins will improve as we move through the next year or two.

David Vogt
David Vogt
Managing Director at UBS Group

Got it. And that's helpful. And as a follow-up, so if I just maybe take your commentary that the gross margin guide is going be at the low end, but you're taking the revenue guide to the high end or above the high end, excuse me, to 14%. That's largely, it sounds like, driven by RLS systems and pluggables. Just quick math, it looks like sort of the incremental profitability is I know it's below corporate average, but it seems like it's pretty materially lower in the low double digit range.

David Vogt
David Vogt
Managing Director at UBS Group

Can you kind of help us understand what's going on there? Obviously, you're talking about and even that's adjusting for the mitigation strategies from tariffs and the impact of the quarter. Just trying to understand the magnitude of how the pluggables and the RLS revenue is impacting the gross margin for the balance of this year. Thanks.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Well, you've done some math, I'm not going to confirm it. But what I will say is this, we think that given the mix of products in Q3, it's going to be maybe a little higher than gross margin in Q2, but probably in the same range. We do see improvement in Q4.

David Vogt
David Vogt
Managing Director at UBS Group

Great. Thanks a lot guys.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Thank you.

Gregg Lampf
Gregg Lampf
Vice President, Investor Relations at Ciena

Thank you everyone for listening. Jim?

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

Okay. This is Jim. I'll be retiring from CN at the August and this is therefore my last call, as Gary said, as CFO. I've greatly enjoyed getting to know all of you, and I wish you well in all of your future endeavors. I also look forward to seeing many of you at the end of this month in New York and Boston.

James Moylan
James Moylan
SVP & CFO at Ciena

That will be fun, and I'm looking forward to it. For those of you who are in the enviable position of having recommended Sienna for purchase, I believe you've made a good call. A great call, actually. For those of you who are not yet in that position, there is still time to get in on what I believe is a very bright future for this company. Good luck to all.

Gregg Lampf
Gregg Lampf
Vice President, Investor Relations at Ciena

Thank you, Jim. Thank you, everyone. We look forward to connecting with you over the next few weeks.

Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Executives
    • Gregg Lampf
      Gregg Lampf
      Vice President, Investor Relations
    • Gary Smith
      Gary Smith
      President and CEO
    • James Moylan
      James Moylan
      SVP & CFO
    • Scott McFeely
      Scott McFeely
      Executive Advisor
Analysts
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