JDS Uniphase Comments on Strength in Optical Components

JDS Uniphase (JDSU) CEO Kevin Kennedy gives some color regarding strengths and weaknesses in the business in yesterday's quarterly conference call with analysts:

Cobb Sadler, Deutsche Bank
Guidance looks about flat quarter over quarter, maybe a little bit up if you take the midpoint. And you’re talking about test and measurement being relatively weak versus the overall guidance. Bagging out the optical business, it looks like it’s relatively strong. Things are at least growing quarter over quarter. Could you tell us what is particularly weak within optical, is it your components in the legacy Sonet, is it your components into Sonet overall, how is Metro WDM doing, can you break out like that?

Kevin Kennedy, Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I’ll probably rephrase your question into the following. You’re sort of asking me a general sense of how are the various pieces of the business doing and I’ll try to give you more color. I’d say out optical components business is strong. Obviously our book-to-bill is greater than 1; we did grow. The fact that we moved the guidance window from what was around 302 or 304 to 322 to 312 on the low side as we believe the market is favorable. So that’s a good message. The most favorable right now is the optical components piece. So, you should not mistake our guidance range with the sense that we think business is strong. Within that, metro has been strong for many quarters. We’ve called that a long time ago. Long haul had very sound strength this quarter. I would say metro and long haul became comparable in terms of fortifying our optical components growth. And as I mentioned in the prepared comments our Agile optical products in generally have very good growth, and you’re right things like metro Sonnet there is less energy in that market. So, DWDM in general is strong.

Cobb Sadler, Deutsche Bank

Okay, great. Just one quick followup, the book-to-bill corporate is greater than 1, is it is materially above 1 in optical components?

Kevin Kennedy, Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I tried to say several times, optical components are the strongest piece of it. I think our test and measurement piece is the piece that we have the least visibility into, as the piece that would soonest be impacted by carrier consolidations, deployments that are slowed down, and that kind of thing.