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"We have great confidence in 30-35%. We are giving a very, very considered guidance.
Going into this year we said 21%, we blew that away growing 48% [my comment: well in excess of double the initial guidance for 2000]; for this Q we said 30-35%, we will grow by 40%+.
We continue to give you numbers that we know we can meet or beat."
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So it would appear that NT has a habit of lowballing its numbers. All the same 30-35% as initial guidance for 2001 is substantially above the 21% initial guidance for 2000.
i.e. (30-9)/21 = a little better than a 40% increase in forecasted growth rate. and (35-21)/21 is a 66% increase in the first forecast of growth rate.
Absolutely stunning!
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I agree their guidance is conservative. In fact, I've been so upset over the market's reaction to NT's report, I just listened to the CC again. (That's 3 times, if you count listening to last Q's, too. :))
One other item also stood out, said in response to the inventory issue:
A: We have shipped product to our customers and they inventoried it because they didn’t want to be short. We have come out of supply constraint and they’ve worked their product down. Not to do with product we’ve shipped. A lot of customers do own installation. We also install. We can’t get enough engineers for the ramping growth. When customers feel they on allocation, they don’t want to be short of parts. When we restore lead-time, they bleed back into normal ordering. Sequential growth in the 20% if you go back from 2Q, i.e., seq. from 2nd to 3rd, to 4th, it will be 20% from second which is at a high rate. We are close to being sold out for optical business for 3Q. Momentum by far is still there.
I believe they're saying 4Q's growth in optics will be up 20% from 2Q's numbers. This is more positive than most realize.
Here's another place I feel they were giving positive guidance, again relating to fiber optics:
All year long we’ve looked at shipping more than $10billion. Orders were there for that and more. We’ve gotten production rates up. Now the issue is in the field. Abiity to ship is no longer the pacing item. But the ability to get it engineered and installed. That is next challenge. We’re making good progress. We were positve in order bookings. $11billion orders on hand [at end of]last year. Added $4billion as of Sept. We don’t ship a lot of product in July-August time frame. Had a lot in Sept, but it’s not collectable. We’re on track for 80 days.
So, as they started the year they had $11 billion in orders and by the end of Sept they added another $4 billion. They didn't ship a lot in July-August, but they did in September, and their DSOs are tracking to meet their goal of 80 days. If they ship to customers within 80 days, the $11 billion should have already been shipped and it seems to me they're hinting they could possibly ship another $4 billion by the end of Dec. Since they're only guiding for $10 billion, they must be under-guiding simply to increase their chances of giving Wall Street a blow-out end-of-year number. Either that or I don't understand the meaning of booking orders and DSOs.
Welcome all comments.
Pat |
