Robert,there are lots of companies in this business, I own one of them HLIT,a great small company. Lucent is the largest U.S. company and has all the same products as CIEN. HLIT has a great R&D facility in Haifa,Israel it is expanding to double it size by the summer,it also tripled its mamufacturing capacity in the U.S. this summer. Read Lucents thread first, there is a real good article about this DWDM and erbium doped fibers there. They are all using EDFA fibers to get 1550 nm wavelengths. I have a great article on what all this means but it gave me a headache to read it it is very long and very intense,I need to go back to college to understand everything but here it is, internettelephony.com
The point is this I guess,why is CIEN better than LU? Why is CIEN better than HLIT? I don't think any of these companies are losing right now and all of the HFC,EDFA,DWDM companies will do extremely well. HLIT has contracts with all the major cable companies,but they are too stupid to take advantage of this,so HLIT changed its philosophy and is going after the RBOC's. They have a 48V power supply fully compatable with the TELCO's and expended their sales force to the East Coast. HLIT has doubled revenues every year since its inception about 5 years ago. U.S. revenues expanded over 90% last year,they have taken the approach of going after a sustainable growth path,not expanding too rapidly. They have a p/book of 3.5,p/sales of 2.5,p.e. on future revenues of around 25. These new start-ups will focus people's attention on how great a future these companies have but be careful with over-hyped start-ups. Tim |
