This week, Corning, Calix and ADTRAN announced their business performance in third quarter, and each supplier claimed strong demand for their optical fiber products. But strong demand does not necessarily mean everything.
According to the records of Seeking Alpha, Wendell Weeks, CEO of optical fiber giant Corning, said: “The industry will continue to experience the multi-year growth wave of passive optical networks, and we will continue to expand production to support this growth. However, due to the timing of customer projects, we expect the sales in the fourth quarter to decline month on month.”

According to some analysts, the decline in Corning’s fourth quarter results may be partly due to AT&T, one of the company’s major customers.
Raymond James, an analyst, wrote in a recent report on Corning’s earnings to investors: “Although AT&T continues to deploy a large number of optical fiber infrastructure, we expect that due to the timing of the project, its capital expenditure will fall sharply quarter on quarter (QoQ).”
In fact, Evercore financial analysts reported that AT&T’s financial guidance for the rest of 2022 implied that the operator’s capital expenditure (CAPEX) would slow significantly. Specifically, they expected AT&T to cut its total capital expenditure to about $4.4 billion in the fourth quarter, lower than the average level of about $6.5 billion in the first three quarters of 2022.
As far as AT&T is concerned, it has not changed its long-term optical fiber construction goal.
When asked about Corning’s expectations for optical fiber in the fourth quarter, Weeks said: “The macro demand for optical fiber is very strong. But as you know, what we do is to make sure that we are supporting customers who will become long-term big players. The essence of telecommunications is that this is a fairly centralized industry. Therefore, when some of our big customers finally change their project time, our income will be unstable.”
Overall, he added, “overwhelming evidence suggests that demand for optical fiber is very strong.”
Corning’s performance is basically consistent with the third quarter data and forecast of the other two large optical fiber equipment suppliers, ADTRAN and Calix. Calix reported that its revenue grew 37% year on year and 17% month on month. At the same time, ADTRAN said that it currently expects the third quarter revenue to be about 340 million dollars, higher than the previously expected 330 million dollars.
Interestingly, ADTRAN announced its third quarter results in advance, and analysts think they know why.
The financial analyst of Rosenblatt Securities speculated: “Competitor Calix has announced strong performance and performance guidance. We believe that ADTRAN wants to show that the rise of Calix in the third quarter of 2022 is not due to ADTRAN’s share loss.”
They said that ADTRAN may also want to reassure investors about its progress in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.