Report Overview

Marconi and DWDM

Marconi blames reduced capital expenditure budgets for its troubles. We suspect the truth is more complex. Operators and CLECs have put a lot of optical bandwidth into Europe. This looked sensible when expected traffic growth was 100%+ a year. Now, operators see much lower demand growth, so they have little incentive to invest in Marconi’s bandwidth-enhancing DWDM technologies. New investment will not come in volume until existing capacity is used. We think this will occur in late 2002, not at the turn of this year as Marconi predicts. Demand will then rise again at a healthy clip. But will Marconi be able to retain its position in Europe or will Ciena or Cisco, with their newer technologies, have captured its major customers?

We examine the impact of a potential decrease in consumers’ expenditure by looking at the experience of the early 1990’s recession in the UK. We put forward a simple model of how consumers’ TMT expenditure might change in the event of recession in 2002.