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Nokia to acquire Infinera | | | | Friday, 26th June 2024 |
David Mulholland: Thanks, Sandeep. We’ll take our next question from Sammy Sarcomes[?] from Danske Bank. Sammy, please go ahead.
Sammy Sarcomes (Danske Bank): I would actually like to continue on the previous topic. So maybe if you can discuss a bit the integration plan from process and timeline perspective, why do you think it will be relatively straightforward to combine forces from product offering and R&D roadmap perspectives? I think we are all mindful of the previous challenges with Alcatel-Lucent acquisition where there was overlap in terms of products?
Federico Guillén: Well, yeah. But the Alcatel-Lucent acquisition, of course, there were overlaps on products on the mobile side. In this case, we’re talking about optical and we feel very confident that because of what I just said, we feel very confident that the converging the roadmaps in this particular technology stage is going to be much easier than in the mobile world. On top of that, as, as you know, in optical and in other technologies within NI, we don’t do swaps, for example, which is also very important. We cap and grow on our technology.
So the key thing, and David and I agree 100%, and James, on this is make decisions as fast as possible during the integration process. We have a very detailed plan on when do we have to make each decision during the first 100 days and then execute. Execute is something that we know how to do. And decisions is something that we’ll do fast in the process, once, of course, the deal is approved.
David Heard: Yeah. I might add if it helps, Federico. The networks are open, more open now than ever. Last year, Infinera’s sale of transponders onto open line systems was over 50%. And that really eases the integration value going forward in the integration ease. Secondarily, we did another optical integration at scale back in 2018 and 2019, and we met our integration goals. In fact, we exceeded those goals in the time period that we laid out publicly. And these goals are very conservative in lines to that.
David Mulholland: Thanks, David. Sammy, did you have a follow up?
Sammy Sarcomes: Maybe just curious on the market outlook you now talk about 5% CAGR, going forward, I think in the December progress update, it was only 1% CAGR. So can you please explain why there is such a big difference in the market outlook now?
David Mulholland: Maybe I can just take that one quickly. Sammy, the commentary that we gave you in December, we gave figures for the growth rates we expected by business group. Yes, we said the market opportunity, we saw a CAGR of 1% then, but that was quite specific to some of the exposures we had in our optical business. Part of the benefit of what this will mean to our future optical business is strengthening our position in Webscale and in North America, that improves the potential opportunity for our optical business to grow going forward. And we’re also now giving a comment specific to the optical networks growth outlook rather than the overall market. But, Federico, maybe you want to –
Federico Guillén: I want to add something. Normally the optical business until now it grew driven by two factors, the growth of traffic from the mobile access network and the growth of traffic by the fixed access network. But we are seeing lately is that this growth has a third dimension, which is data centre. Data centre. Artificial intelligence is driving already starting to drive a lot of traffic into the network. And therefore, I am not surprised that Omdia and other analysts are increasing the CAGR projected into the future, plus the recovery of fibre to the home across the world.
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