We came across a bullish thesis on Ciena Corporation on Make Money, Make Time’s Substack by Oliver | MMMT Wealth. In this article, we will summarize the bulls’ thesis on CIEN. Ciena Corporation’s share was trading at $209.84 as of December 16th. CIEN’s trailing and forward P/E were 246.87 and 48.54 respectively according to Yahoo Finance.
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Ciena Corporation, a network technology company, provides hardware, software, and services for various network operators in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia Pacific, Japan, and India. CIEN is positioned as a critical enabler of next-generation network infrastructure, focused on high-performance optical networking solutions that address surging bandwidth demand from cloud providers, telecom operators, and increasingly, data centers. The company designs advanced optical transceivers and digital signal processors powered by its WaveLogic 6 platform, which maximizes capacity, reach, and power efficiency across long-haul, metro, and subsea networks.
This technological leadership places Ciena at the center of accelerating data traffic driven by AI workloads, cloud migration, and video consumption. The recent acquisition of Nubis in September 2025 strategically expands Ciena’s addressable market into shorter-reach data center interconnect optics, allowing the company to participate more directly in east-west data center traffic and complement its historical strength in long-distance optical transport.
Financially, Ciena is entering a strong operating leverage phase. Revenue is estimated to grow 16.7% in FY26, reflecting improving carrier spending cycles and incremental contribution from data center optics. More importantly, EBITDA is expected to grow 48.5% over the same period, highlighting margin expansion as volumes scale and fixed costs are leveraged. Net income margins of approximately 8% indicate improving profitability, though still with room for further expansion as higher-margin platforms gain mix share.
From a valuation perspective, the market is assigning a premium multiple to Ciena’s growth and technology leadership, with the stock trading at 5.9x NTM EV/Sales, 37.6x NTM EV/EBITDA, and 58.6x NTM P/E. While these multiples appear elevated on current earnings, they reflect expectations for sustained growth, margin expansion, and Ciena’s strategic positioning in optical networking. Overall, CIEN represents a growth-oriented infrastructure play, offering leveraged upside to bandwidth demand trends, albeit with valuation sensitivity tied to execution and industry spending cycles.
