Wire & cable: Earnings at non-Japanese companies (19): Corning‘s results: Fresh evidence of favorable business conditions for optical communications

Research evidence excerpt

Wire & cable: Earnings at non-Japanese companies (19): Corning‘s results: Fresh evidence of favorable business conditions for optical communications

Wire & cable: Earnings at non-Japanese Global Markets Research

companies (19) 29 July 2026

EQUITY: JAPAN STEEL, NONFERROUS METALS, WIRE & CABLE

Corning's results: Fresh evidence of favorable business Research Analysts

conditions for optical communications Japan steel, nonferrous metals, wire & cable

Yuji Matsumoto - NSC

Company says "if we could make more, we could sell more" yuji.matsumoto@nomura.com

+81 3 6703 1220

Generative AI product sales nearly doubled y-y

Corning released Apr–Jun results and held a briefing on 28 July. Sales in its optical

communications segment sales were up 32% y-y and after-tax profits in the segment were

1.8x the prior-year level. Carrier network sales, mainly to telecom carriers, rose only 1%,

but enterprise network sales, mainly sales to data centers, rose by a sharp 65%. The

company said that generative AI product sales nearly doubled (Figures1, 2, and 3). The

after-tax profit margin in the optical communications segment was broadly flat q-q at

21.1% (Figure4).

CEO says "if we could make more, we could sell more"

Our impression is that demand in the optical communications segment remains hearty,

particularly for data center applications, and during the Q&A session CEO Wendell P.

Weeks said "if we could make more, we could sell more". The company also said that

long-term agreements (LTAs) with customers were likely to continue to increase and

noted that LTAs already account for a large proportion of sales.

Investors may have been somewhat underwhelmed by lack of new developments

In Apr–Jun, the company's core sales and core EPS were both slightly higher than the