Fabri

In 2018, I worked on the $VIAV ONT and benchmarked it against a solution that my former employer offered that was easily at 1/3 of the price point. I won that deal for manufacturing, and it still remains one of my proudest achievements as I had to work with the team to build a whole new product from scratch in a short period to complete the test matrix. I still think optical transceiver companies can't scale manufacturing with $VIAV products. Yes, Viavi will sell their products like hot cake in this market and under these favorable circumstances, every optical transceiver module manufacturer or R&D test lab will use their systems + a combination of a either a $TDY scope to a $KEYS scope (real time or sampling scope) + the expensive software licensing + you need a separate clock recovery unit (CRU) to capture the PAM4 signal at 100G per lambda data rates and above, which is another win for Keysight as their sampling scope + CRU only work together - like a Catholic marriage, no external party poopers allowed). The real money being made in this area of test and measurement will be in mass manufacturing of optical transceivers for all these test and measurement firms, so unless Viavi slashes prices for bulk orders and offers very advantageous terms, same for Keysight $KEYS, I don't see it my dudes. That is just my honest take.

$AAOI's 1.6T pluggable optics line at OFC 26 is running on $VIAV ONE-1600 test equipment. This is the unsexy chokepoint of the optical transition. Nobody ships a 1.6T module without validating 224G SERDES, and $AAOI runs the largest US-based 1.6T transceiver production. “The demand for optical connectivity in data centers has exceeded our expectations,” said Dr. Thompson Lin, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of AOI. “We are focused on ensuring every critical function from supply chain and manufacturing capacity to quality, reliability, and customer support is positioned to scale rapidly to meet this demand. With the acquisition of these properties, we will have the footprint to expand our capacity to produce up to 700,000 units of 800G and 1.6T transceivers per month in the Houston area, while also expanding our laser fabrication capacity by around 350% by the end of 2027.” $AAOI guided 650,000 units per month by end of 2026 and 930,000 by end of 2027. That is one customer. $COHR , $LITE , $CIEN, and even $CRDO are running parallel 1.6T programs that need the same class of test capacity. As 1.6T volumes go from essentially zero to nine figures of annual shipments, the test floor scales with them. I do not know what share $VIAV holds versus $KEYS in production test. But the ONE-1600 sitting on $AAOI's OFC booth is interesting... $VIAV reports earnings Wednesday. I am watching it closely. $VIAV $AAOI $COHR $LITE $CIEN $KEYS

Futebol de verdade … 👏🏾👏🏾

The quarterly results from $EQR.AX are already out! Quarterly production was a bit on the low side, partly due to weather conditions. Nevertheless, due to skyrising tungsten prices revenue was up QoQ. I hope to elaborate more on the quarterly results later today. $EQR.AX traded slightly up last night with 1.72%.

In the end, WSB was right again. I really didn’t expect POET to actually be a supplier to Marvell…