Re: Another Interview....
posted on
Jun 14, 2022 07:04PM
ITTR: "in the Craig-Hallum report there is a stated expectation of near future engagements for standard products (not applications engineered specifically for the customer), with Accelink, Eoptolink, and Molex named as likely candidates. Any one of those companies would move a lot of POET-powered product and be another validation of the tech. I know Mika recently mentioned starting up talks again with Accelink."
Precisely what TM referred to in his latest video. The talk of 400G/800G/1.6T, CPO & AI is great, something the company will develop and hopefully fully commercialize over the next 1-2 years. However, I don't know that there's a panic to get these into mass production immediately. The low hanging fruit is the disruption of the incumbent 100G/200G transceiver market, facilitated by those companies identified above (amongst many others).
The ongoing importance of these "lower" speed transceivers is illustrated quite nicely on slide 15 of the company's most recent corporate presentation. In 2021, 100 & 200G made up 95% of optical transceiver market and by 2026 is still expected to command roughly 70% of all optical transceiver units sold annually. IMO, a sound strategy is to start with volume disruption of this market segment to get established, which will then set the tone for future engagements and expansion into higher speeds and other verticals.
We have heard from the company on several occasions, due to intense competition current margins on 100G/200G products are neglible, manufacturers are barely making money on these things. Imagine for a moment when POET enters the scene and is able to offer substantial cost and energy savings at scale over the incumbent devices. A possible scenario: if you don't have POET inside, you will not be able to compete. The choices: adopt, give up market share, or just get out of the 100G/200G business entirely.
Of course, they are not working in a vacuum and others are trying to implement wafer scale manufacturing in much the same way. Hopefully POET has a leg up on the competition in readiness, capability and cost for these (imminent?) products.