Telecom Lead India: Global optical networking (ON)
revenues declined 9 percent in Q1 2012 from the year-ago quarter.
Primary reasons for the decrease in revenue are the
continued macroeconomic and political challenges in Europe.
According to Ovum, sales in China and Europe fell
sequentially. Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent posted their worst global quarterly
revenues since 3Q07 and 2005, respectively.
Sale in North America was down 8 percent. Revenue from
EMEA was down 15 percent.
Ovum forecasts 4 percent growth this year to $16.2
billion.
Preliminary results for 1Q12 indicate more a cause for
concern than a cause for panic. While 1Q sales are typically lower than 4Q
sales, actual spending last year overshot our $14.9 billion forecast when
results in Asia-Pacific and Europe were less negative than we predicted,” said
Dana Cooperson, practice leader of Ovum’s Network Infrastructure practice.
4Q/1Q market seasonality is becoming more pronounced as
spending and spending growth shifts to Asia-Pacific and South & Central
America (SCA), in which case sales should rebound more than is typical in
2Q12,” Cooperson added.
NEC benefited in 1Q12 from strong sales in its home
market, rising 0.4 share points. Its quarterly WDM sales were the strongest
ever seen.
Cisco pointed to strong year-over-year revenue growth in
North America, Asia-Pacific (specifically Japan), and SCA.
While Huawei’s revenues may have tumbled sequentially,
its y-o-y results beat the quarterly market average globally and in EMEA, and
thus it picked up share.
In the network core, more vendors than in the past
included data center interconnect as a key driver of growth for their business
and for use of 100G, control plane, and encryption features.
However, mobile backhaul remains a ubiquitous growth
driver at the network edge, with vendors noting the increasing speed of
evolution from SONET/SDH to Ethernet/MPLS for aggregation and transport. As
100G deployments grow, 40G deployments are holding steady.
