Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Lumentum Holdings first quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Please also note today's event is being recorded for replay purposes. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Kathy Ta, Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Ta, please go ahead. Thank you, and welcome to Lumentum's fiscal first quarter 2024 earnings call. This is Kathy Ta, Lumentum's Vice President of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Alan Lowe, President and Chief Executive Officer, Wajid Ali, Chief Financial Officer, and Chris Coldren, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer. Today's call will include forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our expectations and beliefs regarding recent acquisitions, including CloudLight and NeoPhotonics, financial and operating results, macroeconomic trends, trends and expectations for our products and technology, our end markets, market opportunities and customers, and our expected financial performance, including our guidance, as well as statements regarding our future revenues, financial model, and margin targets. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations, particularly the risk factors described in our SEC filings. We encourage you to review our most recent filings with the SEC, particularly the risk factors described in the 10-K for the fiscal year ended July 1, 2023, and our 10-Q that will be filed soon. The forward-looking statements provided during this call are based on Lumentum's reasonable beliefs and expectations as of today. Lumentum undertakes no obligation to update these statements except as required by applicable law. Please also note that unless otherwise stated, all financial results and projections discussed in this call are non-GAAP. Non-GAAP financials are not to be considered as a substitute for or superior to financials prepared in accordance with GAAP. Lumentum's press release with the fiscal first quarter results and accompanying supplemental slides are available on our website at www.lumentum.com under the Investors section. With that, I'll turn the call over to Alan. Thank you, Kathy, and good morning, everyone. We are thrilled to welcome the CloudLight team to Lumentum. The addition of CloudLight's products to our portfolio positions Lumentum as a leader in providing photonics to cloud operators at a time when artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating growth in the data center market. We believe Lumentum's served opportunity within data centers has expanded more than 5-fold as a result of the CloudLight acquisition. For years, CloudLight has been supplying differentiated high-speed products to leading hyperscale customers, both custom products to address unique customer needs, as well as standard products to address a broad range of hyperscale customer requirements. In the last 12 months, over 90% of CloudLight's revenue was derived from 400G and higher speed products. In the most recent quarter, over half of CloudLight's optical transceiver revenue was derived from 800G transceivers. In calendar 2024, we anticipate strong growth in cloud and networking revenue, driven by accelerating AI compute requirements and a resumption of shipping more in line with end market demand. Also in calendar 2024, we expect cloud applications to drive over 30% of Lumentum's cloud and networking revenue. Our cloud customers are responding very positively to this transaction. This combination results in a broader portfolio of differentiated products and technology. It also enhances the security of supply for our customers, giving our broader, combined global manufacturing footprint and high levels of vertical integration. Lumentum is well equipped to address future cloud technology roadmaps as AI models drive an exponential increase in compute and networking requirements. I would also like to highlight that starting with this fiscal year, we are updating our financial segment reporting to better reflect the rapidly changing market opportunities ahead. Our financial reporting is now focused on two large and growing end market segments. One, cloud and networking, and two, industrial tech. Within cloud and networking, the cloudification of the network is blurring the lines between our historical served markets of Telecom and Datacom. Cloud data center and traditional Telecom operators are increasingly purchasing the same types of data transmission products. We anticipate the emergence of new applications for optical switching technology, not only to serve the growing complexity of long-haul and metro networks, but also to support the high optical link density required for AI training models in the data center. Our customer mix is changing as well. The addition of Cloud Light brings much more direct sales to cloud operators and infrastructure providers. We are also increasingly serving cloud and networking operators directly for their data center interconnect and edge networking applications.... To better align our reporting with these market trends, the telecom product lines and the datacom product lines are now included in the cloud and networking segment. Turning to the industrial tech segment, our portfolio of imaging, sensing, and laser products aligns with Industry 4.0 and 5.0 trends. Industrial sensing applications require high accuracy in determining distance, speed, and displacement, and are increasingly turning to laser-based approaches. Leading-edge semiconductor, solar cell, and electronic component manufacturing require the beam precision and short pulse duration of ultra-fast lasers to produce precise cuts and features. To better reflect the growing importance of precision photonics across this broad application space, the industrial and consumer and commercial lasers product lines are now included within the industrial tech segment. Now I will summarize our fiscal first quarter results. As we reported last week, first quarter revenue and EPS were above the midpoints of our guidance ranges. Through cost controls and efficient operations, we are managing the factors that are in our control. While we continue to see very strong growth in the demand for our data center chips, as well as our newly acquired intra-data center transceivers, this strength is being offset by the telecom and industrial inventory drawdown activities. Due to this inventory correction, we believe we continue to ship below end market demand. As we navigate this transition period, we are delivering as planned on our product roadmaps and synergy attainment with respect to our NeoPhotonics acquisition. Of course, we are also excited about the new opportunities that Cloud Light brings, starting in the current quarter, as we leverage their leading transceiver technology to deliver the fastest speed products to cloud customers. Now let me provide more detail on our segment-level results in Q1. Cloud and networking revenue was down 20% sequentially and down 36% year-on-year, with broad-based softness across most of our networking product lines, partially offset by sequential growth in intra-data center lasers and tunable access module. This is as we have expected, given the inventory correction underway at our networking customers. Robust cloud data center demand is currently the strongest growth driver for our cloud networking business. As data centers are designed to support the high bandwidth requirements of AI workloads, 800 gig transceivers can provide that bandwidth while also reducing latency. For our transceiver customers, their new 800 gig transceivers utilize eight different wavelengths at 100 gig per lane, triggering orders for our chip-level photonics and driving growth for our EML product line. We are also seeing an increase in deployments of 800G transceivers that are supplied by our CloudLight business, and we are working with our new team to enable them to ramp even more rapidly. Over time, we also expect to supply custom-designed, high-power CW laser arrays for leading AI hardware architectures to provide the high bandwidth, low latency optical interconnects essential for training and inference applications. In calendar 2024, our 200 gig per lane EMLs will enable the next generation of transceivers with capacity of up to 1.6T. We are shipping qualification samples of our 200 gig EMLs now and expect to ramp production in calendar 2024, with customer qualifications of 800 gig and 1.6T transceiver designs well underway. We expect that 200 gig per lane optics will be the workhorse of hyperscale data centers for years to come once these qualifications are completed. Through Cloud Light, Lumentum is now a leader in high-speed active optical cables, or AOCs, as well as VCSEL-based transceivers to cloud customers to fulfill their short-reach connectivity requirements for new AI and machine learning cluster architectures. In addition, we've been developing high-speed, 100G per second VCSELs and VCSEL arrays for these short-reach optical links, and we expect to ramp these shipments meaningfully in calendar 2024. Moving on to our high-speed transmission product developments. We are receiving positive customer feedback on our next generation of 130GBd and 200 GBd data rate coherent technologies. These high-speed products will be available in both discrete and integrated form factors to enable enhanced performance in metro and long-haul applications. In addition, at the ECOC conference last month, we received positive customer feedback on our coherent 800G ZR product. We believe we are the first to market with this capability, which will provide high-speed connectivity with extended reach for data center interconnect within metropolitan areas. Turning to industrial tech, fiscal Q1 was up 4% sequentially from Q4, driven by the expected uptick in our 3D sensing business, with a new smartphone product ramp partially offset by softness in fiber lasers as our leading fiber laser customer works to bring down inventory. Industrial tech is down 40% year-over-year, as expected, primarily due to more intense competition for market share on a certain 3D sensing socket and market demand and pricing, as discussed previously. Based on our latest customer forecasts, we continue to expect industrial lasers demand to be soft into calendar 2024 due to customer inventory digestion and macro factors impacting end markets. However, we expect the rapid growth in new applications for ultra-fast lasers to partially offset these near-term headwinds, given growth in new solar cell manufacturing applications. To summarize, our market outlook is currently a tale of two dynamics. On the other hand, outside of the data center customers, we are facing continued headwinds from networking and industrial customer inventory digestion. In all of our end markets, we are committed to our long-term R&D roadmaps, and we are positioning the company for the robust growth of photonics opportunities that we see ahead. Before turning it over to Wajid, I would like to again welcome our new employees from Cloud Light, and thank all of our employees and our customers around the world for their focus and dedication as they continue to collaborate and partner with Lumentum. With that, Wajid? Thank you, Alan. Net revenue for the first quarter was $317.6 million, which was down 14% sequentially and down 37% year-on-year. During the quarter, we had three >10% customers, two of which are in networking and one 10% customer in the industrial tech market. GAAP gross margin for the first quarter was 24.1%, GAAP operating loss was 25.4%, and GAAP diluted net loss per share was $2. First quarter non-GAAP gross margin was 34.9%, which was down sequentially and down year-on-year, primarily driven by product mix, factory underutilization, and lower revenue. First quarter non-GAAP operating margin was 3.3%, which decreased sequentially and year-on-year. First quarter non-GAAP operating income was $10.6 million, and adjusted EBITDA was $34.6 million. First quarter non-GAAP operating expenses totaled $100.1 million or 31.5% of revenue, down $2.3 million from Q4 and down $6.6 million from the year ago quarter due to tight expense controls. Q1 non-GAAP SG&A expense was $39.1 million. Non-GAAP R&D expense was $61 million. Interest and other income was $16.8 million on a non-GAAP basis due to higher interest rates on our cash and investments. First quarter non-GAAP net income was $23.4 million, and non-GAAP diluted net income per share was $0.35. Our fully diluted share count for the first quarter was 67 million shares on a non-GAAP basis. Turning to the balance sheet, our cash position decreased during the quarter due to a few key items. We used $30 million in cash to purchase our wafer fab and campus in the U.K. This purchase reflects our confidence in the longevity of indium phosphide technology to address the ever-growing need for higher and higher performance telecom transmission components. In order to capture our COGS synergies from the NeoPhotonics acquisition, we are pre-building nearly $30 million of inventory to help facilitate the factory consolidation happening over the next few months. We had an annual Japan tax payment of approximately $17 million, as well as expenses related to the Cloud Light acquisition. As a result, cash and short-term investments decreased $69 million sequentially to $1.94 billion. To streamline operations and achieve synergies, we will be consolidating NeoPhotonics back-end manufacturing facilities, and therefore, we expect an under absorption of capacity relating to these moves during Q2 and Q3. By the end of Q4, as we ramp up production of NeoPhotonics products within Lumentum's manufacturing footprint, we expect to ship buffer inventory, enabling these manufacturing costs to align with the rest of our production. In addition, as we continue to focus on cash generation, we expect our internal inventories to decline throughout the balance of the fiscal year. Turning to segment details. For the benefit of our investors, we have expanded our earnings press release to include tables of historical financial data that are reformatted into our new segment categories. First quarter cloud and networking segment revenue at $229.7 million decreased 19.8% sequentially and was down 36.2% year-on-year. Cloud and networking segment non-GAAP reporting profit at 10.4% decreased sequentially and year-on-year. Our first quarter industrial tech segment revenue at $87.9 million was up 4.3% sequentially and down 40.1% year-on-year. First quarter industrial tech non-GAAP reporting profit of 17.4% was up sequentially, but down year-on-year. Now let me move to our guidance for the second quarter of fiscal 2024, which is on a non-GAAP basis and is based on our assumptions as of today. We expect net revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2024 to be in the range of $350 million-$380 million. Within this Q2 revenue forecast, we anticipate industrial tech to be down sequentially, with cloud and networking to be up sequentially, with the addition of a partial quarter of CloudLight revenue. Based on this, we project second quarter non-GAAP operating margin to be in the range of 2%-4% and diluted net income per share to be in the range of $0.25-$0.35. Our non-GAAP EPS guidance for the second quarter is based on a non-GAAP annual effective tax rate of 14.5%. These projections also assume an approximate share count of 67.4 million shares. In terms of expectations beyond Q2, as Alan mentioned, we do expect a return to growth in cloud and networking shipments in calendar 2024 compared to calendar 2023, as customer inventory levels are reduced and our shipment rate is more in sync with end market demand. With that, I'll turn the call back to Kathy to start the Q&A session. Kathy? Thank you, Wajid. Before we start the Q&A session, I would like to ask everyone to keep to one question and one follow-up. This should help us get to as many participants as possible before the end of our allotted time. Now, let's begin the Q&A session. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by the number 1 on your touchtone phone. You will hear a 3-tone prompt acknowledging your request. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press star followed by the number 2. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift your handset before pressing any keys. We have our first question coming from the line of Simon Leopold from Raymond James. Please go ahead. Great, thanks for taking the question. I'll start off with a very easy one. Just want to get an understanding of what your assumption is for the contribution from Cloud Light into the guidance for the December quarter. And 'cause that's so easy, I'll give you my second question now. I'm wondering if you could maybe unpack a bit what you see going on in the ZR market now, in that I know we've had a period of inventory absorption, and during the ECOC trade show, it sounded like there was maybe some visibility to that market improving. If you could maybe unpack what you're seeing in that segment, both from a laser perspective as well as your own ZR devices. Thank you. Thanks, Simon. The CloudLight revenue is the revenue that they're going to ship from when we announced it closing, which was yesterday, so about seven and a half weeks of revenue. You know, we talked about trailing over $200 million, so you can extrapolate what you think the two months will be, and we're not going to actually break that out in any further detail. As far as the ZR market visibility is concerned, I think with all of what's going on inside the data centers with AI and machine learning, we've seen a pickup in ZR demand, in fact, probably earlier than we would have expected otherwise. So I'd say that that has some healthy tailwind to it for data center interconnect, and we've seen some of that come through some of our hyperscale customers in new demand for the ZR modules. Chris, you have anything else to add on either of those? Nope. I think those are great. Thank you. Thank you, Simon. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Samik Chatterjee from JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning, guys. This is, Joe Cardoso in for Samik Chatterjee. Yeah, first question from me. Can you just give us some granularity relative to the underlying trends you're seeing in telecom? I think one of your peers in this space suggested it's seeing a bottom in the September quarter itself and expects it to begin to recover in subsequent quarters, and while another suggested it's more of a mid-2024 phenomenon. Just curious where you are landing on that spectrum and what's driving your confidence there. And then I have a follow-up. Sure. I'd say we're kind of in between in that, you know, we still are shipping under market demand, and I'd say that we've seen, you know, some end market demand softening, frankly. And so that's why we continue to see muted demand for our telecom products. That said, I do think that we'll see inventories being reduced. ... you know, in this time period as well as December. But I'd say there's probably still some inventory consumption going on, even into early parts of calendar 2024. No, got it. Thanks. Appreciate the color, Alan. And then just relative to the non-CloudLight Datacom business, you know, you had been talking about ramping capacity there, including some rehiring of headcount. I believe you were moving to a larger wafer size, et cetera, so a bunch of moving pieces. I guess, can you just give us an update on how that is tracking? And then just whether with CloudLight on the books now, does that help you accelerate some of these initiatives relative to what you were doing in terms of ramping capacity for the legacy piece of the Datacom business? Thanks for all the questions. Sure. The Datacom EML market is very robust, and we are on allocation again, unfortunately, but our capacity is coming online as we had projected and as we had discussed on prior calls. But the demand, again, is even more robust, given that, you know, the hyperscalers really want to go to 800 gig, and if you go with an EML solution, most of those solutions have eight chips as opposed to four chips to get to 400 gigs. So, you know, a doubling of the chips per transceiver means more and more Datacom chips. So we've seen extreme growth in that business, and we are still on track to go to increased wafer size in calendar 2024. So all that work is going on in the fab, while at the same time, we are growing our capacity from the capital additions we made earlier this year that are coming online, as well as, as you said, bringing back employees and hiring to be able to meet the demands, although we're still on allocation today on EMLs, because they did come back much faster than we had actually expected. So our backlog is strong through the balance of the fiscal year, and we expect that to continue to grow into fiscal 2025, especially as we bring on 200 gig per lane EMLs, and I think, you know, we're gonna be in a very strong leadership position there as well. And CloudLight's designs are today both multi-mode or VCSEL-based. And so we're expecting to use our VCSEL designs to do product end feeds and drive costs down and margins up, as well as silicon photonics-based. And so we're working with CloudLight's team today on how do we get our CW laser more prevalent in their designs as we move forward. So it doesn't impact our EML capacity per se, but it does give us opportunities for margin improvement over time. Understood. Very clear. Thanks, Alan. Great. Thanks. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Meta Marshall from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Great, thanks. Maybe first question, just on, you know, whether you have kind of ironed out more of what CapEx investment you think, Cloud Light, will take during the year. And then maybe as a second question, kind of building off of, Simon's question, you mentioned kind of the 800 ZR, getting positive reception at ECOC. Just when would you expect that to kind of ramp into production? Thanks. So, as you can imagine, the Cloud Light ramp has been very steep, and one of the things that we worked with them on is to make sure that they continued to invest pre-acquisition, and they have. So they've been continuing to grow their capacity. As far as future CapEx requirements, I'd say it's a little early in that, you know, we have been getting very positive feedback from hyperscalers customers, and we expect that the acceleration of growth will be even stronger than expected. So I think it's a little bit early to really determine, are we going to further accelerate or stay on the path that they were on? I would say we're probably gonna have to accelerate CapEx, as we've gotten feedback, again, from not only existing customers, but new customers that they don't have much footprint in, as they view this really as an extreme positive of a, you know, diversification of a U.S.-headquartered company, and manufacturing footprint that is more global than current existing CloudLight. So, you know, I think we'll have to wait on that and give you an update on our CapEx plans for CloudLight on the next call or some future meeting. As far as the 800G ZR ramp, you know, I think we're still at the demonstration stage today, and again, positive feedback at ECOC. We've got to get to, from where we are today to, beta samples and qualification samples, and then it takes a couple thousand hours of testing to get to production. So I'd say that's really more of a early fiscal 2025 and late calendar 2024 type of, initial ramp. But again, I think we're positioned quite well with, what we think will be first to market on, on that product. So very, very happy with progress there. Great. Thanks. Thank you, Meta. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of David Vogt from UBS. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks, guys, for all the color. I'm just gonna try maybe triangulating again on this Cloud Light transaction. So I think, Alan, in your prepared remarks, you suggested that the business should accelerate to about 30% growth in calendar year 2024. If I just do some really quick math, does that assume your legacy business returns to growth in 2024, based on sort of the disclosure that Cloud Light has about $200 million of revenue growing, you know, obviously relatively rapidly? And then in conjunction with that, from a margin perspective, I know you talked about it on the last call as it being sort of a slightly accretive transaction with regards to the first 12 months post-closing, but, can you kind of maybe share with us sort of the margin profile of this business relative to the existing sort of cloud and networking part of the business pre the transaction? Thanks. Yeah, let me take the first question, and then I'll have Wajid talk about Cloud Light margins. So I think you're right about the growth rate, and again, as I said to Meta's earlier question, you know, feedback has been very positive, and when we turn that feedback into orders, we could grow faster. But again, I think that's a little early. But the impact on... I don't think Cloud Light has any impact on the legacy business, except that we're very much closer to the cloud customers. And we're not gonna guide more than one quarter at a time, and we're actually not gonna split up legacy versus Cloud Light in the future. But I'd say that, as we talked about, we do believe we're under shipping end market demand and inventories are reducing. So we do anticipate that, you know, in the first half of 2024, that there's probably a pickup, you know, more matching our shipments within customer consumption, probably in Q4. So I would expect that we would see a pickup in Q4 from today's levels. But Q3 is a little bit hard to call right now. Wajid? Yeah, David. So on the margin profile, we certainly see a lot of opportunity with Cloud Light. You know, with the rapid growth that we're expecting in the business, there's some natural leverage that we should see at Cloud Light. And there's also a lot of opportunity with our existing manufacturing footprint to help that part of the business grow while utilizing some of the manufacturing capacity that we've also got. And then probably the most important thing, which our R&D teams are gonna be working with their R&D teams over the next few weeks, is really our plans around vertical integration. And those plans around vertical integration can provide quite a bit of upside from an in-feed standpoint on their own raw materials. So having said that, what we've communicated previously is that the Cloud Light business is currently operating in the low teens from an operating margin standpoint and in the high teens from an EBITDA standpoint. Our expectation that we've communicated is that, you know, through the opportunities that we see, that we can certainly get that business into the high teens from an operating margin standpoint over the next 24 months. As the teams dig in more with their R&D teams, we'll be able to update our thinking around that in future quarters, but that's currently where our thinking is in terms of the business. Great. Thank you, guys. Thank you, David. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Vivek Arya from Bank of America Securities. Please go ahead. Thank you for taking my question. First question, I know you gave a 30%, you know, growth potential for Cloud Light, but that's more like a 3- to 5-year. Is it fair to say that they're growing faster than that? You know, when I look at a lot of the compute deployments, you know, they are growing, you know, like a 40-50 type of CAGR. So is it, is it fair to assume that at least in the near to medium term, Cloud Light could be growing more at a 40-50% rather than a 30% rate? Yeah, I think that's fair. Given the introduction and rapid growth at 800 gig, we expect that CloudLight should be able to grow faster than that 30% CAGR. That is a multi-year number. As 800 gig has been introduced, we've highlighted that CloudLight's revenue in the most recent quarter was more than 50% 800 gigs. So we'll be highly levered to the growth of that as customers at the leading edge of AI deployments, you know, continue to shift to the 800 gig speed. Thank you. For my follow-up, I just wanted to kind of double-check the accretion math or the potential accretion math. First of all, you know, when you say something is accretive, are you talking on an EBITDA level? Are you talking on an operating income level, at an EPS level? If you could define what accretion means, and let's say if we define accretion on an EPS level, then is it immediately accretive, or will it be accretive sometime in the fiscal year when we put in all the puts and takes of the financial, you know, income, right, that is being lost and other fab consolidation activities and so forth? When is it actually potentially accretive on an EPS perspective, in your opinion? ... So, so Vivek, we've communicated this earlier. We believe it's immediately accretive to earnings per share. And the way we do the math on the earnings per share is the operating income we expect to generate, from CloudLight on a standalone basis, without synergies, and compare that to what we're earning, in our short-term overnight money market rates. And so we just take a look at those two, to determine accretion. And based on that, the transaction is immediately accretive, and that accretion only improves, as we go through some of the synergy actions I spoke about earlier. Understood. Thank you. Thanks, Vivek. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of George Notter from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Hi, guys. Thanks very much. I'm just curious if you guys have gotten any other feedback on the Cloud Light acquisition from your other Datacom customers. I think obviously you're competing with some of those folks increasingly. I'm just wondering if in the last week or two you've had any more feedback. Is this something that it becomes problematic for the rest of the Datacom business or non-issue? Thanks. Yeah. Thanks, George. As you can imagine, I've had many discussions with our very important transceiver customers, to assure them that they—our partnership is still very solid and they're very, very important to us, and I think there's plenty of demand to go around. And we've acted like strong partners with them over time. So I'd say that, you know, that the alternative is that they buy from another competitor, or they buy from someone that they've trusted for years. And so I don't see any negative implication with respect to, our transceiver customers and their demand on us for EMLs, VCSELs, and DMLs for that matter. So I think so far, so good. The feedback has been positive and, you know, we have not seen any demand shifts as a result of the announcement from a week or two ago. Got it. Thank you very much. Thanks, George. Thank you, George. Our next question comes from the line of Christopher Rolland from Susquehanna. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thanks for the question. One of your competitors spoke of a strong ramp in 800G starting in March. I was wondering if you could kinda describe the shape of your 800G ramp here, you know, over the next 12-18 months. And they were going to see, kind of as a result of this strong growth, sequential growth each quarter of next year. I was wondering if you would see something similar on your horizon. Hey, Chris. Yes, I would say we would see very similar commentary that both from the chip standpoint, that we are shipping a lot of EMLs and have very strong demand that we expect continues over the next four-plus quarters as 800 gig continues to ramp. And then from the Cloud Light acquisition, their revenue is, as we've highlighted on the call, increasingly focused on 800 gig, and that is in its very early days. That market is just emerging and will continue to ramp off into the future. So yes, we believe the 800 gig portion of our cloud business will continue to grow into the foreseeable future. Okay. I don't know if you had a take on sequential growth in each quarter of next year, calendar year, but for my second question, I wanted to talk about kind of custom engagements for laser designs by both, you know, system vendors, holistic system vendors, but also hyperscalers out there. And I don't know if it's possible to kind of break out cloud networking demand, so 51, you know, terabit switches versus AI, but how do you think this mixes out for next year as well? Thank you. Yeah. So a couple pieces. So on the last bit, with regards to sort of where our products are landing, if you will, AI versus non-AI, we don't have 100% visibility to that. But our belief is that, you know, for the next year, at least, most of the growth or the primary growth in the market is driven by AI-driven applications. And then going back to custom laser designs or, if you will, yes, we are engaged with both, as you said, system providers, if you will, as well as cloud operators directly, hyperscalers. On custom laser solutions as well as now with Cloud Light, custom transceiver solutions, as AI continues to push the performance envelope, and stress from power consumption, latency, and other requirements that are really critical to AI workloads. You know, that's one of the benefits of this combination, that we're bringing together unique manufacturing capabilities from Cloud Light, bringing together our unique chip manufacturing, so that when we partner with customers, we have the full tool chest, if you will, to address the challenges of next generation roadmaps that they're looking to implement sooner than later. Thanks, Chris. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ananda Baruah from Loop Capital. Please go ahead. Yeah, good morning, guys, and thanks for taking the question. Yeah, I'll just stick with transceivers as well. Do you guys see, and this would probably be for Chris or Alan, any latency points or sticking points getting Cloud Light, now that you've closed the deal, getting Cloud Light volumes to kinda what you call run rate? And I have a quick follow-up. Could you clarify what you mean, Ananda? Yeah. So do you, I mean, I guess, is everything in place? Is it as simple as just taking the orders in and shipping them out? Or, you know, sort of given that they're newly absorbed into the organization, given that, you know, your balance sheet and your kind of street cred, so to speak, may open up new opportunities for them, you know, given the manufacturing capability they have in place, you know, are there things that could be required that could, in the near term, cause some latency, you know, to getting those orders out the door as they come in? So, just wondering, you know, is the mechanism just set up to work smoothly and elegantly right now, taking the orders in and sending them out, or is there something that needs to be put into place or accomplished near term to get the orders to run rate revenue? Yeah, I mean, the CloudLight team is not lacking orders, if that's what you mean. So I think as I said earlier, you know, capacity plans and CapEx plans have continued to be able to ramp to the kind of volumes that they had visibility to prior to the acquisition. That said, I do think we will see further demand acceleration, and that could take additional capacity in the factory, as well as additional factory footprint. And I think that would be then, you know, accelerated with the acquisition in that we have factory footprints that we could expand into today. You know, given that we're all of 24 hours into the close and we have a team there now, we're sorting all that out, frankly, and we hope not to screw it up, frankly. So they've been doing very well. We're trying to keep letting them do their stuff and not distract them as they're going up a very, very steep ramp. But that said, we're here to help them, and I think the combination is really a winner from my discussions with those cloud customers. Yeah, that's super helpful. That's super helpful. And I guess just in that regard, sort of the follow-up would be, you know, given you, you made two acquisitions, you know, in the, sort of in the pluggable space, you know, in the last 12 months or so, 12, you know, sort of 12, 4-6 quarters, could you stay active in this area? You know, it's obviously an area of interest. Do you have everything you need, or, or do you think, you know, does it make sense that you could keep looking from a tech perspective? Yeah, I mean, we're always looking. I think our focus is making sure we finish the acquisition Synergies of NeoPhotonics, and Wajid talked about that. The back-end factory consolidation is happening now, and we'll get the benefit of those synergies at the end of this fiscal year, and that's meaningful. So we gotta, we have to finish that, and we have to make sure that the CloudLight acquisition goes up the ramp, effectively, to meet the demands of what's going on in the hyperscalers and AI, ML stuff. So, I think we have our hands full today for the next several quarters. But that said, we're always looking and always interested in what we might be able to tuck in to give us another competitive advantage over our competition. That's super helpful. Chris, anything to add? Chris, do you have anything else to add? I was just gonna say that to reiterate that I think Ananda's hitting a key point, that we have had a deliberate strategy to build out both technology manufacturing on the component capabilities over the last 10 number of years, and then that's translated into now getting more pluggable transceiver capabilities. And as Alan highlighted, as that all has come together now, we've got time to put all those pieces together and fully realize the benefits of those acquisitions and the post-acquisition organic work we are performing to you know really unlock the value and the multiplier effect between all of these acquisitions. But we are continuing to look. We are not done, if you will, building out our technology and product portfolios, but for the time being, we've got a lot of work to do to realize the maximum potential of what we've already taken on. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Ananda. Your next question comes from the line of Mike Genovese from Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead. Great. Thank you. First, can you guys talk more about the optical switch opportunity for AI? You know, how more about that technology and sort of how far away revenues are, and is that a MEMS-based product? I'm curious. Yeah. Hey, Mike. So in today's data centers, obviously, there's a lot of bandwidth going around, and as we've seen in, you know, core telecom networks for years, being able to reconfigure the network optically and electronically brings a lot of value. And hyperscale network operators or cloud operators rather are beginning to realize that being able to reconfigure bandwidth optically within data centers is a key capability. There's a range of technology that can be applied. In our case, it certainly will involve MEMS. I would say in terms of, you know, time to market, little premature to talk about an exact timeframe, but I think over the next year, you're gonna hear a lot more about it as prototypes begin to ship. Great. Thanks, Chris. And, I guess something maybe more immediate than your competitor yesterday spoke about some near-term opportunity where they expected sequential growth because of some transport opportunities in China, WSS, ROADMs, and A mps. Are you seeing anything similar to that? Yeah. I mean, we've seen the, the China Mobile tender is happening, and it's really, you know, it's kind of nice to get a customer to expedite, WSSs and, and the components that go around them. So we've been in the midst of that, and we're trying to meet that demand for that tender. And I think it's meaningfully large, and, you know, it's a, it's an opportunity, and I think one that will drive calendar 2024, volumes, more meaningful for that specific opportunity. But that's, I think, more of a unique, situation where, the deployments are happening or, or the bidding is happening, and the, and the deployments will happen, early parts of next year. So yeah, that is an opportunity, and we are seeing that, and I've been on the phone with the executives there to help them get what they need when they need it. Great. Perfect. Thanks for the color. Thanks, Alan. Thanks, Mike. Thank you, Mike. Question comes from the line of Ruben Roy from Stifel. Please go ahead. Yeah, thank you. To just follow up there, Alan, you did mention that I think over the last 90 days, it sounded like you're starting to see some areas of telco softness. Was wondering if that was a geography-based comment, or customer, or and market-based comment. Any additional detail there, please? You know, I think it's just echoing what I think you've heard from some of our network equipment manufacturers around, you know, regional softness and inventory at the North American carriers. So I don't think it's anything, you know, new and enlightening. It's kind of more of the same that we've seen that is making us be cautious about, you know, the outlook for the current quarter and, you know, into early calendar 2024. Okay. Got it. Thank you. And then, as a follow-up, probably for Chris, with even more focus on data center optics, I was wondering if you can give us an update on how you're thinking about the coherent DSP project, and, you know, whether or not longer term you think there's spots for that team in what you're, you know, planning on with data center optics? Yeah. So certainly, we continue to make great progress in developing our coherent DSP, which is, you know, one of another puzzle piece, if you will, in our pluggable module strategy. So we expect that we will start evaluating, you know, our latest 400 gig parts in calendar 2024, early calendar 2024. And yeah, I think it's a critical capability both for the data center interconnect opportunity, and over the longer run, in fact, we expect that technology to penetrate further inside of the data center as well, I think you were referencing. And maybe if I could add to that, Ruben, if I could add to that as well. You know, we have been building out not only our DSP team, but other RFIC team to have critically enabling components in-house to address, you know, that margin stacking of the independent AC companies. So those teams have been building out, and we've started to see the benefits of things like TIAs and drivers that, you know, having that in-house is a big benefit for us. Very helpful. Thank you. Sure. Thanks, Ruben. We have our next question coming from the line of Dave Kang from B. Riley. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning. First question is regarding your comments on telecom. So, how much decline are we should we expect in the December quarter? Are we talking, you know, slight decline or still, like, a high single digit or maybe even double digits? Yeah, I don't think we had indicated that there'd be a decline. I think what we're indicating is that we're still shipping below end, end customer consumption. And so it's muted with respect to you know, being back to parity with regard to us building and shipping what our customers are shipping and deploying. And so that's more the comment than it's going the wrong direction, 'cause we're already at a very low level. Got it. And then, regarding your comments about C&N being up in calendar 2024 year-over-year, I assumed that was organic, right? I'm sorry, I missed the beginning of the question. What being up? Cloud and networking. Oh. I think, I believe- Oh. You said it's gonna be up calendar 2024. It's organic, right? I would say both organic and inorganic, we expect it to be up. Yes. Okay. So just to be clear, I mean, it would... even without Cloud Light, CNN will be up next year- Yes. next calendar year. Yeah. Yes. Okay, just wanted to clarify that. Thank you. Okay. Sure. Thank you. Thanks, Dave. There are no further questions at this time. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Alan Lowe for final closing comments. Great, and thank you. I would like to leave you with a few thoughts as we wrap up this call. First, I would like to extend a very warm welcome to the Cloud Light team joining Lumentum. The talented Cloud Light team already excels at delivering the highest speed optical transceivers to cloud data center operators and infrastructure providers. I very much look forward to our R&D teams working together to see what else is possible to deliver even more leading-edge product innovations to our customers. In addition, our business fundamentals are solid for the mid to long term as we serve the exponential growth in data center bandwidth required by the artificial intelligence, machine learning, mobile, carrier, and cloud computing markets. New industrial applications are driving demand for our advanced imaging and sensing products, and our commercial lasers are expanding into high-growth applications beyond our traditional markets. We are committed to investing in innovation to meet customer needs today and in the future. With that, I would like to thank everyone for attending, and we look forward to talking with you again at investor conferences and upcoming meetings in the coming weeks. Thank you. Thank you, Sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines. Have a lovely day.