EUGENE, OR--(Marketwire - Dec 14, 2011) - LightCounting released an update to the optical communications market forecast report titled "Tested by an Earthquake, a Tsunami and a Flood in 2011, the Industry Is Poised to Navigate Well Through Macroeconomic Uncertainty in 2012-2015." The report analyzes business of leading service providers and equipment manufacturers and offers a detailed forecast for sales of optical components and modules for 2012-2015. Twenty-five leading optical component and module vendors provided data for the report.
Global macroeconomic uncertainty dominated headlines in 2011, but there was plenty of positive news for the optical communications industry. To start with, total revenues and capital expenditures (CapEx) of the top 12 service providers increased by 7.5% and 5%, respectively, after two years of stagnation in 2009 and 2010. The popularity of smartphones and mobile broadband services, combined with datacenter upgrades and cloud computing, are driving this growth.
While carriers are seeing improvement in their top lines, they are still being cautious about CapEx given the market uncertainty. However, carriers are increasingly tying their CapEx budget to network infrastructure investments to support growing demand for bandwidth. This results in a steady cash flow for the networking industry supply chain. Sales of networking equipment are up by more than 10% in 2011, and suppliers of optical transceivers are looking at an 8% increase in 2011 sales, after a 36% jump in 2010 and despite all the disruptions caused by the earthquake in Japan and the flood in the central heartland of Thailand.
"We maintain our earlier projections for the total optical transceiver market to grow at 11% CAGR in 2012-2015, but there is a good chance that these projections will prove to be conservative," commented Dr. Vladimir Kozlov, founder and CEO of LightCounting. "A lot of exciting changes in the industry will benefit optical component and module suppliers. Increased bandwidth available to the end users is just starting to make an impact on the rest of the network, and demand for optical technologies will remain robust for years if not decades."
The forecast report presents analysis of business and CapEx of the top 12 service providers, as well as trends in networking equipment market and business of leading equipment manufacturers. The report also offers a detailed forecast for optical components and modules, including historical data from 2008 to 2011 and a detailed market forecast through 2015 for optical components and modules used in Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SONET/SDH, CWDM/DWDM, wireless infrastructure, FTTx, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The sales data for 2008 to 2011 account for more than 30 transceiver vendors, including 25 vendors that shared confidential sales data with LightCounting. The market forecast for 2012-2015 is based on LightCounting's model correlating transceiver sales with network traffic growth and projected subscribers of FTTx systems.
About LightCounting
LightCounting is a market research and consulting company focused on in-depth study of the optical communication markets. Our research, databases and reports covers the complete supply chain including components, modules, systems, and their applications. Our analysis is based on confidential sales data provided exclusively to LightCounting by leading component and module suppliers and in-depth industry experience.
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