According to the Dell’Oro Group’s report, in 3Q 2023, worldwide Campus Switch sales surged 24 percent year-over-year, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of over 20 percent growth in the market. Sales growth was broad-based across all regions except for China, which experienced an eight percent decline in the quarter. Sameh Boujelbene, Dell'Oro Group vice president, tells Lightwave that the macroeconomic uncertainty in China is adversely affecting enterprise spending.
HPE Aruba grew the fastest, gaining more than three points of revenue share during 3Q 2023, and several other vendors, including Arista, Cisco, CommScope, Extreme and Juniper, experienced an increase in sales.
Boujelbene attributes this growth to an improving supply environment, allowing for backlog fulfillment and improved lead times. Boujelbene also noted decreasing port shipments, saying in a press release, “We would like to note, however, that despite this improvement in supply that facilitated the ongoing release of backlog, total port shipments declined, marking a departure from five consecutive quarters of growth. Most of the decline originated from products and customer segments that were early to receive their orders and, therefore, were the first to be hit by a pause and a ‘digestion’ phase. That is the case [with] the 1 Gbps port speeds, as well as fixed switch form factors. In the meantime, we saw impressive growth in the higher priced 2.5/5.0 Gbps products as well as modular switches. This shift to a richer product mix resulted in higher prices that were able to more than offset the decline in total port shipments and resulted in ongoing growth in sales during the quarter.”
Regarding the digestion phase, Bouljelbene tells Lightwave it could start to abate toward the end of 2024. The report also shows that 5/5.0 Gbps ports more than tripled year-over-year in 3Q 2023 due both to increased adoption of Wi-Fi 6E Access Points and significant improvements in supply.
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