Oh To Be in Denver, Now That Opticals Are Here:
SiliconStreet.com
By Adam Lashinsky
Silicon Valley Columnist
8/30/00 7:00 AM ET
URL: thestreet.com
Wonk Alert
"Denver's the place to be this week for market pros seriously interested in optical networking, those newfangled networks that run on light impulses rather than electrons. The event is the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference, the annual meeting of a bunch of folks who must be tickled silly that the rest of world suddenly is interested in them.
Tom Astle, a Merrill Lynch analyst who watches the optics world from Canada (home to Nortel (NT:NYSE) and the part of JDS Uniphase (JDSU:Nasdaq) that isn't in Silicon Valley), reports to clients that the major themes he's been watching have been confirmed in Denver: It's tough for optical companies to get parts (that's good for component makers); the industry still is in its early stages (that's good for momentum investors); and Nortel is getting bigger and bigger (that's good for Nortel).
Indeed, Astle notes that California market research firm Dell'Oro Group used the Denver conference, which runs through Thursday, to announce that Nortel's market share for global optical systems has risen to 43% this year from 29% a year ago. "Nortel's the play," he says of the old Canadian phone-equipment company whose shares, at $80, are up sixfold over the last year..." |
