Ciena Corp (NYSE:CIEN) stock rose 3.11% (As on March 6, 11:17:19 AM UTC-4, Source: Google Finance) after the company reported first-quarter fiscal 2026 results that exceeded Wall Street expectations. The company’s Optical Networking segment generated $1.02 billion in revenue, representing 71.7% of total revenue and up from $728 million in the year-ago quarter. Three customers accounted for more than 10% of revenue each, totaling 47.4% of sales. Average days’ sales outstanding (DSOs) were 72. Inventory turns were 3.2. Non-telco represented 53% of total revenue. Direct Cloud Provider revenue grew 76% YoY and represented 42% of total revenue. EMEA revenue grew 27% YoY. Global Services revenue grew 26% YoY.
Moreover, the company continued strong uptake of WaveLogic 6 Extreme, the industry’s only 1.6 Tb/s coherent solution, adding 18 new customers in Q1 to reach 90 total. The company grew both revenue and shipments of RLS more than 80% YoY fueled by ongoing AI-driven Cloud expansion. The company has increased neoscaler momentum through clear technology differentiation, with multiple direct and MOFN-related design wins. Further, the company unveiled Vesta 200 6.4T CPX, the industry’s highest-density, lowest-power pluggable CPO solution. Designed to reduce power consumption by up to 70%, the solution helps hyperscalers, cloud providers, and data center operators evolve their architectures to reliably address AI workloads in both scale-out networks as well as next generation scale-up networks.
CIEN in the first-quarter fiscal 2026 has reported the adjusted earnings per share of $1.35, beating the analysts’ estimates for the adjusted earnings per share of $1.16. The company had reported the adjusted revenue growth of 33 percent to $1.43 billion in the first-quarter fiscal 2026, beating the analysts’ estimates for revenue of $1.40 billion. The company attributed the strong quarter to broad-based demand driven by AI investments. The company reported adjusted operating margin of 17.9%, up from 12.3% in the prior-year period.
Ciena repurchased approximately 0.4 million shares for $80.5 million during the quarter under its $1 billion share repurchase program.
Ciena’s fiscal 2026 revenue guidance is $5.9 billion to $6.3 billion. The analyst consensus is $5.96 billion. For the second quarter, the company expects revenue of $1.5 billion, plus or minus $50 million. For the second quarter, Ciena expects adjusted gross margin between 43.5% and 44.5% and adjusted operating margin between 17.5% and 18.5%. The company expects quarterly variability in gross margins due to product mix and certain pricing and cost impacts of the demand/supply imbalance.