Nokia Oyj (NOKIA) Earnings Call Transcript

Hi, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you for joining us both in person here in London and those joining us virtually on the webcast today. I'm Dave Mulholland, Head of Investor Relations, and I'm delighted to have today with me a lot of members of our network infrastructure leadership team, who are here for the progress update today. We'll be diving into our strategy, technology and the journey we see for the business, as I'm sure you've come to know from these events. Before we get started, a quick disclaimer. During this event, we will be making forward-looking statements regarding our future business and financial performance, and these statements are predictions that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may, therefore, differ materially from the results we currently expect. Factors that could cause such differences can be both external as well as internal operating factors. We have identified such risks in the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 20-F, which is available on our Investor Relations website. In terms of the structure for today's event, I'll shortly hand over to Federico and the unit leaders for their presentations, and then we'll have a Q&A session at the end. When that's over, those of you that are with us in person are welcome to join us for a Q&A session or for a drinks reception at the end. With that, let me welcome Federico to the stage.

Thank you, David, and welcome, everybody, and thank you for joining us. Today, we are going to talk about growth. We're going to talk about the opportunities to grow. And more important, how are we prepared with our portfolio to grow better than competition in the different markets and in the different areas that we address. Now we are confident that we can outperform the market because we have shown that the past decisions that we made in the last years have brought us where we are today, which is a position in which we significantly increase the business in all the 4 business divisions, the business being in the top line and also the bottom line. Along with divisions leader, I'm going to show you how and why are we getting ready for the future, whatever the future brings. Now if you look at the stories that are around, there are many stories and one single outcome, which is things are going in the direction in which traffic is going to grow. If you remember, at the times of the Internet, nobody knew what was that going to be. Remember in '95? what was the Internet? We didn't have an idea. So it grew much more than what we thought. And the thing is that things are only accelerating. If you look 6 months back, nobody was talking about generative AI. And today, you cannot escape of a conversation even with your kids about ChatGPT. And the same happened with the metaverse not so long ago. Everybody is talking about the metaverse. But nobody knows what it really is or will be. I mean there are several alternatives, several things that could become the metaverse, but nobody know today what it is. What it will be, it will depend on the capacity that the network is able to provide. And that's why we're getting ready for that. Every time we do a projection on traffic, we are wrong on the low side. There's always more traffic needed than the capacity that is generated. So we want to be able to generate that. And by the way, this is something that we did very well during COVID. Imagine the pandemic without the networks that we had at the time. We had networks that were able to cope with a tremendous traffic increase, and we're able to deliver to all of us the services that at the time were needed. We intend to keep on doing that, which is providing networks that are able to cope with whatever comes to us. So in the -- and that's the important thing. The important thing is the long term. The long term projects a traffic growth. And yes, there are a lot of headwinds in the short term. So we have to dissociate the trend, the long-term trend, from the hiccups that the external factors may bring in the short term. For example, the invasion of Ukraine or the crisis of the chips last year or the last 2 years and things like that. The inflation, for example. There are things that are out of our control that will impact that. But in the long term, what we see is growth. Now according to the consulting arm of Nokia, Bell Labs, in the next years, the global aggregated fixed and mobile traffic is going to grow more or less at 28% CAGR, which means that by 2030, the total traffic is going to be around 54 zettabytes, which is huge. If you look only at the Internet traffic, it will increase by 2032. These are the type of figures that we will have to address in the coming years. Now this data traffic growth is going to drive the infrastructure expansion between continents, between cities, inside the cities, from the street to the home. All that traffic has to be managed. It will need more powerful data centers because in the end, all the traffic will need data centers that are capable of connecting to the different services and users that are going to require that traffic. It will bring more complexity, and complexity normally brings more cost. So we have to be prepared not just to do more features, but also to reduce the cost of the network. So the business case of our customers keep on making sense. It will drive enterprises and webscales to invest in more infrastructure to grab that traffic growth. And of course, it will force the service provider, the traditional service providers, to exploit the value of their existing networks by modernizing them and increasing the capacity that they have. All that dependencies, all that growth will make another need in the network, which is the security. Security is becoming something really important that, as you know, is also affecting the way that business is done lately and that we are managing. And all that surrounded, of course, by the climate change. We have to keep on doing products that not only reduce the absolute cost -- sorry, power per bit. But also in general terms, we have to cope with decreasing power with increasing traffic. Now as I said, our approach to this is we have to be ready to outperform the market. And this is our one single goal, outperform the market whatever comes, as we have done in the last couple of years, by the way. So we have to deliver growth ahead of the market in all the divisions at the same time despite the uncertainty on the macroeconomics. And for that, we are getting ready in all the 4 business divisions. In IP Networks, we are focusing on webscales and enterprise where we are having very good traction and keep on growing. On Optical Networks, we have now delivered this year a new set of products that is allowing us to leapfrog on competition. We used to be kind of lagging a little bit behind 3 years ago. We were able to ship 2 generations of chips in the last 2 years, and now we are even ahead of competition. In Fixed Networks, we are leading, and we keep on growing on OLT. On devices like ONTs, we are more selective, and we are not trading margin for revenues. That's a crowded space with a lot of smaller players. Where we focus is on the OLT where we lead. And in the ONT, we kind of, well, follow the flow but without trading margin for revenues. And then in Submarine Networks, we keep on with the pace of the market, which is growing. And at the same time, we are diversifying with ESG solutions. So all that improving our operating margin that, as you know, in the last 2 years, our trajectory has been we had a tremendous growth in network infrastructure since 2020, growing from less than EUR 7 billion to EUR 9 billion in 2 years. And we grew the margins to double in these 2 years. Now we are there and what we are doing is preserving the margin, so we can keep on investing in R&D so we can maintain our technological lead in all the 4 business divisions. We still see some opportunities in terms of margin improvement, especially in Submarine Networks and in Optical Networks and both are being taken care of, and both are going in the right direction. So all that growth is based on 3 pillars that I shared with you last year in '22, in March '22, when we had this same session. At the time, it was by video. I'm so happy to be here in person today. And this is based on customers, innovation and sustainability. And it turned out to be the right approach as the results are showing. So we keep on helping our customers to shape the future. And this is the important thing. We are together in this industry, shaping the future of what will come. So -- and these are the results. So individual quarters, I have to say, have to be taken a little bit with a pinch of salt because, of course, in a trajectory like the one that you see in the right-hand side and the top line is the revenue 4-quarter rolling, you see that in the left-hand side, you have per division the quarter year-on-year results. And you can have cases, for example, in Fixed Network in Q1 where you see that there is a decrease. But of course, it's because of the comparison with a tremendous quarter that we had in Q1 last year. On the other hand, Optical Networks in Q1 had a tremendous growth in this year Q1 because the comparison with last year was against a normal quarter. What I try to imply here is that it doesn't matter. We have the portfolio balance to allow us to compensate one with another and keep up with the trend of growth, whatever it is, as I said, and keep on winning against competition in all the 4 business divisions. Now this is a solid base coming from the service provider, the traditional service provider and the enterprise, and we will intensify the focus on our customers, our innovations and on sustainability. And before handing over to the business divisions, I want to have a look at these 3 areas in network infrastructure. In the last 12 months, they were very exciting for NI. And this chart shows the innovations that I was referring to and the ones -- the chips that are in the core of our technology that are allowing us to take the position we're having today. In Fixed Networks, we launched the Lightspan MF-14, which is the most advanced fiber broadband platform, and Sandy will give you a lot of details later. That is capable of providing multi-gig PON technology from today, GPON, XGS-PON and 25G PON and from tomorrow, 50G and 100G PON. We have the best platform in the marketplace today, and our market share evolution in OLT is showing that. On there, on top sales that XGS-PON last year overtook GPON investment in 2022, so last year, and this is good news for us. The world is evolving into a place in which -- XGS-PON is 10G symmetrical. It's overtaking GPON, which is the traditional 2.5, 1.25 that we have been deploying since 2007. I think it was the first deployment, which means that the hundreds of millions of OLTs that are already deployed today in the field will have to evolve into XGS-PON. The good news is that we are today delivering technology that is multi-PON, so it's GPON, XGS-PON and 25G PON, so it's ready for the future. And eventually, you could be able to also increase the capacity by 50 or 100G PON. The portfolio of Fixed Network is, of course, surrounded by or rounded up with fixed wireless access, which is a perfect complement to the portfolio of fiber-to-the-home and with the in-home devices like our latest Wi-Fi 6E gateway. At the start of Q1, the star of our innovations was the central picture, the PSE-6, which is our latest optical coherent network device, which gives you the scale, performance and sustainability that today is leading in the marketplace. It give us a lead time versus competition probably of about 12 months although I cannot tell you for sure because I don't know when competition is going to deliver what they say they're going to deliver. The real -- what we have today is real trials with real customers, for example, GlobalConnect, where we demonstrated a record of 1.2 terabits per second in metro networks in one single wavelength at 118 kilometers or at the same time with this same customer, we demonstrated 800 gigabits per second at 2,000 kilometers in a long-haul network. So that confirms the potential of a 50% TCO reduction using 800G compared to 400 or 100 and 60% power reduction. So this is huge because with this technology, which is PSE-6s, it's a 5-nanometer technology. It allow us to not only increase dramatically the capacity but also the consumption of the network. In IP, the right-hand side chip, what we are showing is the FP5, which is the chip that we launched in 2021. But we now are starting to see -- what we started to see last year, and we have reached already 50 contracts with FP5. The good news is that this technology is compatible -- backward compatible with the previous technologies that we deliver to our customers. And this is something that really customers appreciate when they do business with us. In these 50-plus contracts that we have, we include, for example, DOCOMO or NLES, which is a big European distributor Internet exchange provider. Aside from the built-in power efficiency, FP5 enables 400GE and also 800GE today, which means that we can connect routers with pluggables at 800GE. The implications for the customers are huge because that give them the flexibility to create better networks combined with our optical gear. So if you look at this chart, our industry have to contain the power consumption as the traffic growths, as I was saying before. And if you look at the chart, the chart is a Bell Labs research that shows the 400G and 800G energy savings. So if you look at the line graph, it is energy rising with traffic growth. If you look at the green bar chart, what you have is the 400GE that even out the curve. But if you look at the orange one, it's 800GE. And what we are seeing is that we are able to flatten the power consumption with the traffic increase, which is fantastic. Only FP5 can do this today and customers know it. That's what I mean. We are prepared, customer know it, and they are trusting on us. And that's why I'm confident that we're going to be able to grab the growth, as I said, whatever growth comes. We have a better power efficiency, which means better for the environment but also better for the TCO of our customers. So the cost reduction depends on more than power consumption. It depends on things, for example, like automation. Automation is becoming a key word in this industry because with the growth of complexity of the networks, you need to automate to do things like, for example, new subscriber setup or traffic rerouting for -- to avoid bottlenecks. And our solution on automation is allowing us to have the trust of our customers on a multi-vendor environment and multi-layer between optical and IP. And in the chart, what you see is the result of an analysis of Analysys Mason research with the cost saving coming from automation. On top of automation, as I mentioned before, another key word in the industry lately is security. In security, what we have is we continue seeing the advantage to use solutions like Deepfield, which is in our portfolio of IP Networks, because the traditional security solutions protect the network. But DDoS attacks are becoming more and more difficult to stop because at the end, you have a lot of IoT devices in the network that are very poorly secure, and what you need is a combination of 2 things, which is Deepfield plus the built-in features in the router like in our FP5. And because it is hardware enabled, it is outperforming all the competition software solutions. So we are seeing a lot of momentum in this type of solutions, given the importance of security concerns that there are in our customers. So, so far, I have shown you how customer innovation and sustainability is creating the foundation to the growth of our group. And let me just finalize talking a little bit about customers. So in Q1, we grew Nokia overall. We grew 62% year-on-year on the enterprise sales segment. In that category, we doubled the sales in the webscale segment. In network infrastructure, even if we don't break the figures per segment, I can share with you that we have a higher proportion that Nokia in that segment and that we grew higher than what we grew at Nokia level, which means that it gives me the diversification that I need in the IP Network and Optical Network space. So what we believe is that the enterprise and, in particular, the webscale segment is a segment in which we're going to start seeing more and more growth in Nokia. For example, with the data center business that we are in the third year, and we have already 200 customers that are using our solution, that they love our security, the speed and the connectivity that we provide with customers like OpenColo using the 800GE DCI. Another focus of IP Networks, of course, is mission-critical segment. And building on the wins that we have had in North America and Europe, we are expanding the footprint with security solutions, and that is a competitive advantage. We're boosting also our switching portfolio in order to extend to the rural and suburban areas. And the last thing that I will mention is the government-funded projects that are more and more important in some countries, including the states where we have a particularly important position given our relation with the Tier 2s and Tier 3s in North America. And we are looking forward to leverage on that in order to have another area of diversification and growth in the coming years. But I will now pass the floor to the division heads. And now that I mentioned the Fixed Network opportunity, let me give the floor to Sandy Motley, who is running our Fixed Networks business. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Federico, and hello to everyone. So the Fixed Networks business is strong. In 2022, our revenue grew about 15% at constant currency to a level of EUR 3 billion. But our strong story isn't just about the numbers, it's also about our innovation and what we've been able to achieve. And we are #1 in the market in this segment and part of that is due to our cutting-edge technology, which has really revolutionized the industry. We have been the first to market in nearly every technology introduction for decades. Demand for broadband services over the past 2 years has been increasing and has been at great levels. And with the supply chain crunch, that has created a situation where we have a very large backlog at the end of 2022, where customers were providing to us orders that were 12, 18, even 24 months in advance of their needs to ensure that they had their needs in the pipeline. But now some customers who have built up some inventories are changing their behavior. And this is something I want to share in terms of what Federico had presented, which is we had a slight decline in Fixed Networks in Q1 of 2023. So we are back to shorter lead times. The supply chain crisis is certainly at a much better position compared to 2022. And in addition, we're seeing also other micro economic factors with fear of inflation and such. But despite all of that, we are continuing to gain market share. And Dell'Oro just sent out their Q1 report for 2023, and they showed us, again, increasing our market share by 1%. So our OLT business sits at 45% market share, excluding China, and about 40%, including China. And we also see that there continues to be considerable areas for us to grow. And we are continuing to focus, as a priority, on fiber build-out and fiber networks. So let's talk a little bit about some of the market dynamics. You've already seen that these dynamics are indeed -- have been a benefit to us. We're in a good position based on these factors. But these opportunities aren't just for traditional customers. New customers, many new customers are entering the market, whether they be infrastructure builders, investors, multiple system operators or governments, as Federico had mentioned. The potential for fiber growth really remains strong. And in addition, we're seeing this growth in regions where we have the strongest relationships. I'll talk a bit about North America and what's happening there, but also Europe, Latin America. Even Asia Pac, outside of China, we're seeing really significant growth. As you know, China is already at a very high fiber penetration level, well above 90%. And we've also made some very strategic decisions, and we've got a strong portfolio to support this growth and to support these needs. We're a market leader in XGS-PON, and 25G PON continues to gain momentum as well, where we're seeing the supplier ecosystem continuing to expand. And we have over 80 25G PON deployments and have shipped about 1.5 million Quillion ports. And the fiber broadband market continues to evolve. As we deploy fiber on every street and past every building, it is becoming ubiquitous and not just for homes but also for businesses, for schools, for hospitals, even for farms. And with this, we're able to support those needs through higher bandwidths, lower latency and power consumption that continues to be lowered. And in addition to that, we're finding that software-defined networking has matured, and it's giving us new ways to manage networks, whether it's through slicing or other new features that we're able to introduce into the market. And these trends have led to a new way of thinking. And this trend, we are calling fiber for everything. And fiber for everything is about existing PON networks that are able to connect homes and businesses, but also to serve Industry 4.0, smart cities, backhaul for 5G mobile traffic and also public Wi-Fi. And this is all on the same infrastructure at the same time. It's an exciting new route for our service providers and our customers, and it's starting to be both explored as well as deployed in early stages. So where are we with fiber deployment? And how does this business look going forward? Despite the growth over the past 2 years, we can see that there is still a long way to go. If we look at the chart on the left, it shows both homes passed as well as homes connected to fiber. And as you could see, if I use Europe as an example, we have a lot of opportunity ahead where we've got 72% homes passed, but only 36% of homes connected. And we see similar opportunity in North America, in EMEA, Latin America, really around the globe. And it's really interesting to see that this strong potential is not only in the penetration area. But also, if we look on the right side of the chart, we see that there's an increased demand for bandwidth, for capacity, for other features. And here, you could see that most of today's deployments are GPON and XGS-PON, where we are a true leader. There's also upgrades that are happening with 25G. And the GPON curve, just as a comment, that also captures our multi-PON network solutions as well. And for example, in the U.S., we're seeing that XGS-PON has passed the delivery of GPON, and that was actually last year. So there's really a lot of advantage happening across both of these spaces, and we've provided capabilities going forward also with our new MF-14 platform, which supports not only 10G, 25G, but also 50G and 100G for the future. So the last chart I'm going to show is doing a bit of a deep dive in North America and in the U.S., in particular, and some of the great opportunities that we see and that we're capturing in this market. The federal and state governments in the U.S. have committed over $97 billion in funding to build networks where there is no coverage or where there is low connectivity. This is a commitment for 100 megabits per second down and 20 megabits up. And this is a standard that the government has defined for all American homes to reach this by 2027. That's 100% of the households. That's the commitment the government has made. And we dominate this U.S. fiber market where we connect 7 out of 10 of the homes with Nokia equipment. So we really feel we're well positioned to be able to benefit from this expansion that's going on with government funding in the U.S. But in addition to that, we've also partnered with a group that has developed Broadband.money platform, and that provides resources to help the communities access this funding and to be able to plan and develop what's needed in order to capture it and be approved for it. We've also launched Fiber Techzone, which is a free resource for newcomer broadband builders, so that -- to help them to plan, build and operate as well as monetize fiber broadband networks. And the BEAD funding, which is $42 billion, is becoming available June 30. So that's the end of this month. And we're currently in discussions with the U.S. Commerce Department to reach an agreement that will allow Nokia to demonstrate Buy America compliance for several products and components that we offer in this region. So I would just like to summarize here, I'm going to stop here and say that the takeaways that I would like for you to walk away with are that our business is robust. We have a large customer base. There is substantial untapped opportunities going forward, and we have the strategy and the portfolio to support them. And our expertise in fiber and our unique advantages help to capture this, particularly in the U.S. market, but also globally. So thank you for your time. And with that, I will introduce James Watt.

Thanks, Sandy. Optical Networks is seeing a strong increase in momentum over the last couple of years really aligned with the formation of network infrastructure. We're well over 1,000 customers now. Those customers are of different types. They're in different regions. They tackle different problems in their optical networks, from metro access on the one hand to long haul and SLTE on the other hand. And despite that variety, the core concerns remain the same. Cost per bit, power per bit, and aggregate capacity and how to drive those to the best value as possible. We introduced the PSE-V 2 years ago, it's an -- and already have over 100 customers. It's an optimized 400G solution for long haul and metro. And we've complemented that more recently with the PSE-6s, as Federico mentioned, and I'll talk about that in a second. However, with the push of the 5s, revenues over the last 12 months grew 7% as compared to the previous period, surpassing the EUR 2 billion threshold. And according to Dell'Oro, we took #2 spot in the optical market in Q1 with that. The core of the momentum, the core of the progress is a maniacal focus on customer-led innovation. Our customers are stuck between -- caught between 2 really strong opposing forces. On one hand, there's an undeniable need to add capacity to their optical networks. On the other hand, they have to do so in a way that results in economics they can afford. Our focus is twofold: one, drive scale for them; and then the other, make that simple. On the scale side, primary agenda items for us are coherent transponders. I'll come back to that in a second. The line systems, which again is a key measure to drive aggregate capacity and one where we have a leading portfolio, and OTN switching. On the simplify part, we leverage our expertise in software systems, taking machine learning and AI and drive automation. As Federico mentioned earlier, it's a great way to take cost out of the planning, building and operating networks. And in some cases also, we can allow our customers to further monetize the assets they have. Network architectures is another place where we invest a lot. Coherent routing is our name for the work we do between my organization and Vach's on the IP side to allow our customers to plan, build and operate combined IP optical networks and not have to worry about how they choose to deploy transponders to manage as a network, regardless of which technology goes where. And the final key differentiator for us is our professional services. This is us using our expertise, blueprints, automated tooling to take on those parts of the network design and build activity, which is a crushing job, that our customers need us to and further simplify our lives. We do all this. We start with a set of Nokia-owned assets, technology assets, photonics, silicon and software, and we package them into the right platforms to meet the needs of the customers, which are, as I said earlier, quite varied. It's this focus on the customers and what they need that's allowed us to make progress. The most recent entry, if you will, on the scale column is the PSE-6s, following on the heels of the OTN increases. Headline numbers for the PSE-6s, 2.4 terabits per second per line card, up to 1.2 terabits per second per wavelength. Significant increase in scale versus what can be done today. Even more importantly, we set out to make sure that we could deliver 800 gigabit per second capacity at the reach required to build real-world networks. And as Federico mentioned, with the GlobalConnect trial, we've shown we can do that, extending 800 gigabits over 2,000 kilometers. And for sure, for DCI metro applications, we can bring that capacity up to 1 or 1.2 terabits per second per wavelength. We have a unique cooperative processing that can go on between these optical engines, so we can take two of them and allow flexible use of the bandwidth on the line side with a mix of 400 and 800 gigabit services. So maximize the provider's use of the bandwidth they can achieve given the fiber plan they start with. But equally importantly is the effort we put into making it sustainable. We've been able to take out at least 60% of the power on a network-wide basis. And all this with line cards that are deployed in the existing platforms that are in the network today, whether data center form factor, telco form factor, or the PSI sub, the SLTE products of Alain and my colleagues in ASN. With the combination of capacity, performance and sustainability, we believe this gives us an advantage over the competition and something we can use to propel our market share forward. We see opportunities for share growth in multiple segments. In our traditional CSP segment, there are a large set of opportunities, whether upgrades away from 10G in the access, whether upgrades to 800 gigabits per second in the long haul, opportunities we can pursue with our platforms with capacity. We also see opportunities in webscale. These can be varied in scope and scale, but they all have a focus on capacity, high-end performance and unit cost, the same key things we need to deliver for our CSP customers. It's early days for us in this segment, but we've made good progress so far. And as we've seen with enterprise in the past, we can and will grow into new segments. Speaking of enterprise, there are an increasing number of verticals who have needs for higher capacity, highly available bandwidth that we can serve. Their needs and capacity are not the same necessarily as CSPs and webscale, hence, my comments on packaging earlier, but they have the same extreme needs for availability and for automation given their smaller engineering focus. So again, another area where we have a good footprint in the classic mission-critical verticals and good opportunities to grow. Across all these segments, the recipe is the same, combining our leading-edge technology with our global presence and proven track record of execution to deliver what the customers need. This has what's allowed us to grow and what we believe will continue to allow us to take share going forward. And with that and the mention of IP, I hand you over to Vach Kompella, who heads up the IP division.

All right. So let's talk about IP. Let me jump right into my ambitions for IP Networks: grow the CSP market at faster than the current growth rate there; expand significantly on the enterprise side, and that's where we will not only continue to invest in the enterprises that we have been successful at for the past 15 years but also grow into new enterprise verticals that we have identified and had some initial success already; and then finally, on the webscale side, we're fairly new into this space, but we expect a fairly dramatic growth over the next 3 years as we have invested in the right products and the right software. And I'll explain that all about these 3 areas in the next couple of slides. So first, let's talk a little bit about IP Networks. We've had an amazing 20-year journey where we started from 0 literally. We had no market share. We just started with new products back in 2003 when we were acquired by Alcatel. And over the course of these 20 years, we've grown to #1 in IP edge routing, overtaking the likes of Cisco, the 800-pound gorilla, Juniper, the technology leader, and Huawei, the low-rice leader. We've -- on the way, we have accumulated over 1,400 service provider customers, 1,100 enterprise customers. We've become the leader in certain segments of the market, notably mobile backhaul, residential services and business edge services. Shipped over 1.7 million routers to date. And we have a portfolio that is built of both merchant silicon, where we need to have enough of a breadth of portfolio, but also our flagship FP series of network processors, where our latest one, as Federico mentioned, is FP5, and we already have over 50 customers with FP5, which is further ahead at this time compared to when we launched FP4 several years ago. So all this has come at, obviously, the expense of market share of other -- of our competitors. And we expect that over the next 3 years, we're going to be able to continue to expand into new spaces in the same way. Let me first talk about the service provider market. So just sort of pictorially, in the service provider space, the IP Networks comprise of access, aggregation, edge, core and Internet exchange routers. The edge is defined as the edge -- provider edge, the aggregation and access. And that's the space in which we have dominated and really taken the #1 spot. And the opportunities in front of us are actually in these 3 spaces. So let's take mobile services, for example. 5G is continuing to grow. The second tier of countries and operators are now really starting to deploy 5G. So that's an opportunity for us to grow there. Fixed wireless access has become quite an exciting area, and fixed wireless access is actually taking up so much bandwidth that the mobile backhaul capacities have to increase. And that's an opportunity in which we're participating. You've heard both Federico and Sandy talk about how there's a lot more fiber being put in the ground. As that fiber is put in there for better reach on the residential side, eventually, the aggregation networks and the broadband gateways have to be updated, refreshed with higher capacities. And we're seeing a lot of that happening. And so that's an opportunity for us for growth over the next few years. And finally, a lot of enterprises are digitizing their operations. And as they require more business services from the service providers, we're seeing a growth in that space, and our routers are very capable of handling these multiservice edge opportunities. So that's our reason for confidence in growth in the CSP space. It's also based on our portfolio, which we believe is the best in the industry at this point. We have extremely robust software, and that runs on hardware that is not -- that's far ahead of everyone else in the market, the fastest line cards in the industry at 19.2 terabits per second, the lowest consumption of power in the industry, and finally, security that's built from the chip all the way through the software so that the networks that we deliver really have the kind of security that service providers are looking for. And so we believe that we have actually the best products in the industry, and we are taking away share from many of the competitors here in these 3 verticals here. Okay. Let me talk a little bit about the enterprise side and why we believe we will have significant growth there. So we started in enterprises about 15 years ago. Looking at particular verticals, what we call mission-critical verticals, utilities with their needing to manage electric grids, transportation signaling networks, mining, public safety. And in these networks, we went deep into their domains, identified what was needed in these domains, and purpose-built hardware was what we targeted, with features like teleprotection, support for legacy interfaces. But then we looked at where these networks would need to grow in the future and really focused on how we could carry these enterprises into the future with new architectures using IP/MPLS. And this is, as you can see in the graph over there, an 18% CAGR over a sustained period of 10 years. Really, we hit the sweet spot in these verticals. And we're continuing to grow our footprint. There are lots and lots of networks out there that are in utilities and all that are using old technology that need to migrate. And so we are replicating the success, tremendous success that we've had in North America and Europe, into other geographies and really getting a lot of success out of there. But then taking the cue from how we approached those mission-critical networks, we're now going after what we call society-critical networks, research and education networks, for example, and business-critical networks, like health care and financial sectors. And in the society critical, we see very importantly how much data they move and how they need it to be secure. And the fact that we can do 800G with encryption is very key to our ability to win in some of these networks. There's very large ones in, for example, ESnet in the U.S., CANARIE in Canada and a soon to be mentioned but not yet large pan-European education network that we just won. So the approach that we have taken is really showing how we can be successful because we're building the right products after we understand really what these industries, these specific verticals need. And we've done the same in the business-critical space, and you can see a few examples of the products that we've built so that we can enter the space. And let me talk about finally our ambitions in webscale. Now I said we were fairly new to the space, but we've engaged with some hyperscalers really trying to understand what their software needs are, what their hardware needs are, building the right products. And we already have a number of wins and the potential to really grow this in this space. So what we have seen, as we've previously announced, Microsoft and Apple and so on. But the recognition that we're building the right products, GigaOm has said that we're not just a leader but an outperformer in this space. I think that the products that we have with SR Linux, an open and extensible network operating system, and the hardware that we back the software up with are really key to our being able to be successful in the webscale space. So that's our ambition. And just as a final note, you'll be seeing some exciting announcements, both in the hardware and software space and customers in the second half of this year. So stay tuned. And with that, let me hand it over to Alain.

Thanks, Vach. Good afternoon. So Submarine Network. So the key driver of this business is Internet traffic. We have to remember that 99% of the Internet traffic is driven through submarine cables. And for that, people expect to see 35% CAGR between '21 and '26. But also today, as you know, the main driver is video. But we see much more things coming like 5G, metaverse, data centers and so on. So people expect that the traffic will be multiplied by 20 by 2030. So clearly, what we see is customers telling us, you need much more capacity through submarine cables. Today, what we can do is between 500 to 700 terabyte per second. They want us to achieve 1 to 5 petabytes by 2030, which is a big extension in terms of capacity. And for that, there is much more and more needs. So we see a lot of opportunities in the pipeline for '23 and '24. We have today projects close to EUR 7 billion coming into, I would say, work by the different companies. This is the new order pipeline that we'll see for the next 2 years. So clearly, what does it mean for ASN? We are a market leader, a clear market leader for submarine cables. But also, we are the only one able to provide the full portfolio, means the wet portfolio, the dry portfolio and the vessels to lay the cable and to do the maintenance. And on top of that, we are not doing only the telecom business for operator and hyperscaler. But also, we have done diversification in oil and gas, and we are doing maintenance and services for the cable industry. This has allow us between 2019 and 2022 to double our sales revenue up to EUR 1 billion that we have achieved in 2022. But also what we have done, we have prepared for the future. We have already done the capacity investment in our factory in Calais and in Greenwich in the U.K. We have rejuvenate our fleet because we have changed 3 vessels. The last one was this week on Tuesday. We have inaugurated the biggest cable vessel that you can find today. You will be able to lay the cable through the entire Pacific in one shot. We have launched new R&D programs. We are doing the new capacity, achieving 1 to 5 petabytes. But also, we are participate to the climate change challenge because we have created a program that is called SMART, and you will be able to measure temperature, pressure, salinity at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean or Pacific Ocean. And of course, all the scientist community will have to access this information that does not exist today. And also, we are working on a convergence program with James, as already mentioned, on the SLTE equipment. We are already leveraging the PSE-5s, and we are planning to use the PSE-6 for our subsea equipment. We are looking, of course, to improve our profitability from a mid-single digit to high-single digit through commercial management. We have introduced a raw material indexation clause terms and conditions. We have reworked, of course, our fleet via rejuvenation to reduce our costs. What you can see here is that we have reached by the end of 2021 more than EUR 2 billion revenue in terms of backlog, and we are now executing for '22, '23, '24 this backlog. I will highlight, I would say, one key project that is called 2Africa. 2Africa is close to 45,000 kilometers which, if you do the math, is bigger than the circumference of the Earth in one project. That will be the biggest project on Earth that would have been done in terms of submarine cable. It will connect 3 billion people across Africa and Middle East and Europe. So this is our stream in terms of revenue until 2025. And what I have mentioned is that what is coming next with the growth that I have already highlighted is that we see all the telecom operators, hyperscaler, pushing for new projects. And the interesting thing is that it's everywhere. There are new project in the Atlantic Ocean, in Pacific, in intra-Asia, Middle East, Mediterranean, and we are reaching EUR 7 billion pipeline for '23 and '24. And on top of that, we see a lot of new projects for the oil and gas either for reservoir monitoring, providing electricity or the DAS equipment, but I will come back on that. And what we see also is we are taking our position as a company for the new standard in term of ESG. And I would like to highlight a few things that we are doing. First, DAS. DAS is distributed acoustic sensing. And as you can imagine, after Nord Stream, there is a big push in terms of how do you monitor, how do you secure the submarine cable. DAS is one of the solution, and there is a big push from the industry to have this equipment, not only for short like 150 kilometers. They're trying to find a technical adaptation that will be able to cover 6,000 kilometer. So we'll be able to monitor threats on the entire cable in a very short future. We're also working on some projects for oil and gas. So clearly, we are providing now electricity under the water for oil and gas companies or even some [ TMTs ], the [ Cominoti ] that are doing neutrinos analysis in the Mediterranean Sea as an example. We're also leveraging those equipment to be able to do CO2 capture under the water. And we are doing also PRM, which is reservoir monitoring, so it will help you to really have a better efficiency in the management of the oil field. SMART, I have already mentioned. We'll get sensors into equipment, and you will be able to monitor a lot of elements that the scientist community will have access for the next 25 years in terms of information, and this is really something that does not exist. On top of that, we are working on the modernization of ASN. Clearly, the fleet rejuvenation was one. Second, we have also used the 5G private wireless network in our two factories to have better efficiency and better quality. So it has been deployed in Calais and Greenwich to enhance our capability and also to help for the quality of our product. We have also done a huge modernization of tools and processes to really cope with the high demand that we have seen and we continue to see for the industry. That's why overall, we believe, okay, that ASN is well placed to manage the need of the growth that we are seeing on the Internet traffic and for the new products that the industry is expecting us to deliver. Thank you. Federico, back to you.

So Alain was telling me that after this cable that is bigger than the perimeter of the Earth, the next challenge is to do a cable bigger than the distance from Earth to the Moon. So thank you, and thank you, Alain and all the division heads. I hope that you have by now some enough food for thought for the Q&A. We are looking forward to it. Just let me do a little recap. We are seeing investments from all sites. The important thing is that we are investing in the right technologies in order to cope with the growth that we are seeing in all the markets and divisions in the long term. So we are able to cope with that. In Fixed Networks, we keep on leaning on the OLT multi-GPON cards. We maintain our strategy in the devices on non-negotiating revenues with margins. In Optical Networks, we are really, really excited about the momentum that we are getting with the new technologies that we launched with PSE-6s. In IP Network, our differentiator continue being a superior portfolio, not just from the chip viewpoint, but also with the surrounding software that allow us to get the momentum we are having in the enterprise and the webscale space. And in submarine cable, you just heard about the massive backlog and the investments that customers are doing, where we are looking forward to close on new opportunities. So with that said, allow me to call back David for the Q&A.

Thanks, Federico. And thank you all for the presentations. I'll welcome the team to the stage while I make a few remarks. So we will now move to the Q&A session. As a reminder, as you know, these events are intended to be focused on products, technology and strategy rather than a financial update, and I'm sure you'll have few questions as well on that. But I would ask, obviously, if you'd prioritize towards the network infrastructure business given who we have. For those present in the room, [ Paula ] and [ Alexey ] will go around with microphones, so do please raise your hands if you have any questions. For those that are on the webcast, if you can use the box, I'll be able to see the questions on my laptop and then I can put those to the team. So if you have any questions, please raise your hands. Andrew, do you want to go ahead?

I was hoping that you could go into a little bit more detail on some of the points you were making about the supply chain normalization that's been happening over the last couple of quarters or so. We've clearly heard from a number of your peers, your competitors, your suppliers, of how this is affecting them, and you can see it in terms of the financial impact in the near term. Can you just speak to sort of when you started to see this in your own business and the type of impact and sort of your level of confidence, therefore, in the outlook that you've given us for 2023?

All right. So let me start, and then I will pass the floor to my colleagues. We're really proud of how we handled supply chain crisis in the last 2 years. Yes, we had some customers in which we have some delays, but we didn't have any major crisis in the last 2 years. Why? For two reasons. One, because we anticipated the crisis, and we had a much better kind of relation, if you wish, with the customers. We anticipated what was coming. We went to the customers and asked them, do yourself a favor by letting me know more into your forecast what are you going to need. And if the customer do that and all the customers at the same time do that, we are able to build the inventory that allow us to serve them for the next 2 years. Of course, we did better than competition with suppliers. So we did the same with our suppliers. So we manage both ends of the supply chain well on time. And that's the reason why the baseline today is different from us compared to competition. So I see some of my competitors recovering from not being able to deliver in the last 2 years. We have been able to deliver. And yes, what we are seeing now is a different thing. We are not confronting a supply chain situation anymore, in general. I mean there are components here and there. But in general, what we are confronting is a macroeconomic situation at times and depending on the region.

Yes. And I'll just add some comments. So in 2021, which was some of the height of the supply chain crisis, we actually grew 35% in revenue. So I think the facts speak to the ability of our operations team to drive the right actions with our suppliers and with our customers. And then I talked about the 15% growth in 2022. So those are good examples. And some facts as to why we see an ease. It's not -- it's never over. There's always some excitement going on in the market. But lead times for components have come down from 78 weeks for the most complex down to much more normal lead times, 26 weeks, in that range. So that's helping us to manage. And as I said, our customers, and as Federico said, our customers were working with us and were providing to us purchase orders for long term so that we could manage with our suppliers and confirm with them and get commitments from them on delivery because we were providing purchase orders to them that were longer term as well. And now there's a bit of inventory here and there as a result of that, and we're working through that. But I think this is a much better position for us to be in, to have that growth and that ability to be able to deliver, particularly when customers were running out in their warehouses. So now this 2023, we talk about it as a reset, with customers changing their lead times now for purchase orders and getting back more to normal.

Okay. Janardan, please go ahead.

Janardan from Jefferies. Got a few questions actually. Going to the optical business, you've said your target is 2% growth as the market CAGR, and you'll grow faster. Obviously, you've started off Q1 at 50%, which is a lot faster. So my question is, one, can you -- given the kind of visibility you have, I know you can't have visibility until 2025 and things like that. But at least for the shorter term, what kind of growth can we meaningfully expect? Is it sort of a high single digit? Can it be a double digit? And where are you getting that growth from? You said it's a base -- base was sort of low last year. But even then, it's pretty high. Is it webscale? Is it enterprise? Is it CSP?

So I'll probably take that in from the middle out. I think, first of all, yes, the growth and what you see in the growth is always composed of a number of things, especially for optics, which is, okay, not as much as ASN but is, to a large degree, a project business. So there's always a bit of lumpiness in the business. For sure, juggling all the challenges around the raw material supply chains has caused some interesting things. And in the middle of all that, we've been taking footprint. And we've been taking footprint in all 3 segments. We've taken footprint in CSPs. We have, as I said earlier, been generating wins in the webscale place, and we've been growing in enterprise as well. So we've been taking footprint and growing. And superimposed on top of that then, underneath underlying market growth project dynamics, other interesting dynamics in whichever corner of the world we're operating in, and it does do that. I think going back to the overall question, I'm quite confident we'll grow above market this year. I'm not really in a position though to give anything more than that. Unless David, you want to?

Not today.

And on the on the fixed access or fixed networks, your growth -- you talked about inventory just now. I mean, is there any -- is that a factor at all in the growth rates, which have slowed down a little bit? Is the underlying market stronger than what you're experiencing? Because like your wireless division is -- your mobile networks division is suffering from some inventory at customers. Is that a headwind in this year? And when you talk about homes passed versus homes connected, can you just describe the opportunity on both sides, I mean, on a pass versus the connection?

So hopefully, I'll keep all your questions straight in my head. If not, you can nudge me along. So in terms of your question about inventory, some customers have built up inventory. Not all, but some have. And I'll say those that could afford to, in those difficult times, had the ability to, those customers did collect some inventory, but not all. Some are short and some are a bit desperate at times. So it's, again, not a situation with all. Maybe it's more regionally focused. So that's a headwind. And I spoke a little bit earlier about the fact that there's also a little bit more caution this year. We see a lot of upgrades happening in the U.S. to 10G PON to XGS. But in some regions, they're a little bit more conservative about that growth. So those are some of the dynamics. But long term, as I said, we see a path for growth for a very, very long time. It takes -- it does take a long time to do this. So homes passed. Now that's a part of the business we do very small business in terms of the construction and the actual laying of the fiber. Very, very small. We try not to do a lot of that business because Federico doesn't want us to. No. Seriously, it's not a very easy business to manage that risk. But we do it when customers really, really want a turnkey. But that part of our business is very small. So homes passed is the homes that the fiber goes by, and then homes connected is really where we come into play and homes connected is about the equipment. So it's about connecting through our ONTs, making sure that there's ports at the OLTs, at the customers' office sites. And now Federico, did you want to...

Yes, I want to add something, a small thing just now that you mentioned about home passed. Home passed normally goes in waves. So customers across the world decide to pass more homes, and it takes time. And sometimes, there are stupid limitations like the number of qualified personnel to do the splicing in the fibers. We are not in that business. Although sometimes, we do it.

With the regulation.

Or regulation or permits or a lot of things. Sometimes, we do small things when a customer ask for it. We know how to do it, but we don't want an intense volume on that business because it's capital intensive and the balance sheet risk. But once the home are passed, then you have to connect them, and that's where we push the pedal to the metal. The good news is that there is a lot of room from -- in the world. And if you put everything in balance, what happen is that when one country is going from more home passed, another is connecting, and that balance. It can happen that between the inventory generated in the last 2 years, more than 30% growth in '21 and 15%...

35% and 15%, yes.

15% in 2020. It is something I have not seen in my life in this industry. So of course, there are -- there is going to be a time in which there is a pause for breath, but the demand is there. I mean, the angle for all the countries, all the customers is have 80%, 90% fiber homes connected, not passed.

Richard?

Thanks. One for Sandra and another on the IP side. Sandra, can you talk a little bit about the pace of fiber rollouts in the U.K., in Germany and especially in the U.S.? It seems there's been some slowdowns. We're waiting for Vodafone, Altice or VMED or others to kind of pick it up in the U.K. And do you see the potential for a major acceleration in the U.S. in '24 when this BEAD funding gets unleashed? On the IP side, I have a question about webscale. And can you talk a little bit about the upgrade from DAC to AEC in data fabric implementations? Do you think you can start to address an additional TAM in top-of-rack switching? Is there an interconnect opportunity? It feels like what the hyperscalers are asking for is a lot more and maybe now you have products to start addressing that.

So in the U.K., there certainly has been a lot of fiber growth, as I'm sure you've seen. And we've been a big part of that. We've had a large market share in that area. Now customers are looking for having multiple sources. We all see that what happened with the supply chain is everyone wants to de-risk and make sure that there's multiple suppliers. We're doing the same, and we have done the same as part of the process. So there's those activities going on, looking for multiple suppliers in that region. But that's -- it's still a big growth region. There's still a lot to yet connect. In the U.S., if you look at the chart that I had shown, in the U.S., we're probably 40% homes passed, maybe 30% connected. It's very, very low. And I emphasized that the government is committed to 100% homes passed. And we really see this as a phenomenal opportunity going forward. We'll probably even see some orders this year. The big push will be '25. I think there's a few states that are really ready to go with this June 30 spend or release of the funds for BEAD. I think it's Tennessee, where they're in a good position. But there's a lot of states that still have a lot of work to do because all the money is being sent to the states, and then the states have to set up their own regulation. They have to prove how they are connecting everyone and to the levels. And then once they get those approvals, they get the funding. So for some of the states, they're a bit behind and it's going to take a little bit of time. So I see this as '24, '25, even '26 in the U.S. to really get to that 100% connected state. And then Germany, I think there's a lot of work yet to do in Germany as well. They've been talking about it for some time now also.

In Germany, Italy, U.K., France, they are now all accelerating what they should have been doing some years ago. But it takes time, but it will come. And in the states, by the way, we have been preparing ourselves since one year for that in order to be able to get a significant size.

And some of those programs come with the requirement of Buy America, and that's the point that I made about working with the Commerce Department on making sure that we're qualified for that.

So then, Vach?

Yes. So obviously, servers are getting faster. The amount of data that they process and they need to pump out is getting higher. So the top-of-rack switches obviously are getting to 10G connectivity to 100G connectivity. And that's part of the redesign of these data centers is refreshing those boxes. And I think we have a good set of products there. It's not only there, but once your top-of-rack switch is doing 100G to the server, then its uplinks are in the 400G, and then the whole leaf-spine architecture is all taking upgrade. So we're seeing a push towards very high capacities at the spine level, at the leaf level, and at the top-of-rack switch. So in a way, we're fortunate we came in at this point, and we can build products right into that space and don't have a legacy bunch of products. But I think this is also changing dramatically because the workloads are going from pure server stuff, which is always going to be there, to some of the AI-type workloads, which are putting pressure on what you can do in a rack because these AI-based servers are extremely power hungry. So now we have to really focus on how much power does a top-of-rack switch use because you can only put so many in a rack if you've got limited power on the rack. So there's some exciting stuff that's happening right now, which we're addressing. And then we're working with a few hyperscalers on what are their plans for handling AI workloads, so we can build the right products for those.