Optical networking market continues to bounce back with 7 percent growth

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: The global optical networking (ON) market is continuing to bounce back and reached revenues of $3.5 billion in the first quarter of 2011, up 7 percent on the same period in 2010, according to Ovum.

In a new market analysis, the independent telecoms analyst states that Alcatel-Lucent was the top-performing vendor in the first quarter of 2011 and hit revenues of $645 million. This was an increase of 17 percent compared to quarter one 2010 and saw it achieve a market share of 18.4 percent. It was the first quarter in two years that Alcatel-Lucent has posted number-one market revenues.

Importantly, Ovum found that annualised spending in the optical networking market appears to have crawled out of the red and into the black in the first quarter of 2011, albeit barely, with growth of 1 per cent to reach more than $14.6 billion. The annualised share figures tend to give the best indicator of longer-term market trends.

Dana Cooperson, Ovum network infrastructure practice leader and author of the market report, commented: “The optical networking market continued to improve as we turned the page on a new year. Although spending was seasonally down on the previous quarter, the growth compared to the same quarter last year is very encouraging.

“Even more important is the small increase in annualised spending, which has been driven by strong growth in dense wavelength division multiplexing market and a shift to optical products more fully optimised for continued strong growth in IP-based traffic.

“The market growth has also been propelled by the Americas and annualised spending has continued to improve sequentially and year-on-year in both North America and South and Central America.

“In contrast, in Asia-Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa spending continued to stagnate when compared to the same period last year. Asia-Pacific trends were particularly bleak in the first quarter of 2011.”

Of the top 10 vendors, Ciena posted the most gain in annualised share, over the period from the second quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2011, while Huawei lost the most.

Other vendors that improved their annualised share position, in decreasing order of gains, were Ericsson, Fujitsu, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, and NEC. Rounding out the top 10, Tellabs and NSN lost share and ZTE neither gained nor lost.