GLW - Corning Incorporated (GLW) Morgan Stanley Technology Media & Telecom Conference - (Transcript)
2024-03-05 16:49:06 ET
Corning Incorporated (GLW)
Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference Call
March 05, 2024, 11:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Edward Schlesinger - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Meta Marshall - Morgan Stanley
Presentation
Meta Marshall
All right. Welcome, everybody. I'm Meta Marshall. I cover the networking space here at Morgan Stanley. We're delighted to have Corning here today, Edward Schlesinger, CFO. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. And if you want to introduce yourself in a more appropriate fashion, that would be great.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q - Meta Marshall
But Corning -- maybe let's just kick off. So Corning saw recessionary demand across most of your portfolio for much of 2023. You noted on the Q4 call that Q1 should mark a bottom, just what are signposts you're watching for in the various segments for when demand could return?
Edward Schlesinger
So thanks, Meta. It's great to be here. Thanks for having Corning. Yes, as you mentioned, we're definitely seeing a depressed demand across most of our markets. We've described it as the markets and our businesses being below their long-term trend lines. And the causality of that is a little bit different in each of the businesses, but some common things, and we're looking for those as the signposts for things to return. So for example, in our Optical Communications business, customers bought too much. So we're looking for them to digest that excess inventory as we kind of go through the year. We're expecting that to happen at some point, maybe the middle of 2024. Again, sticking with Optical, we're looking at the rate of deployments in the carrier space where we constantly are in discussions with our customers. If they deplete their inventory, that will increase our sales, right, even if they don't increase their deployments, but we're expecting deployments to increase through the year to some extent. And in the hyperscale space, we're looking at the increase in capacity for AI models. In Display, panel maker utilization, we look at the rate of utilization of panel makers and that level is depressed -- was depressed in the fourth quarter. In the first quarter, we're expecting that to increase. That will be a signpost for us. And so those are the sorts of things that we watch. And again, we're expecting all of our markets to return back to those trend lines over time....
Corning Incorporated (GLW) Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference - (Transcript)