Optical transport market grew 10 percent year-over-year to $3 billion in the first quarter

Dell’Oro Group predicts the market to grow 9 percent, to more than $13 billion, by year-end.

Worldwide optical market revenues grew to more than $12 billion in 2010, due to demand for DWDM systems in metro and core applications, explained Dell’Oro Group researchers in February. Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, and Huawei were the market leaders in DWDM and 40/100-Gbps wavelengths during 4Q10 and the year 2010.

“As expected, the optical market declined sequentially in the first quarter due to seasonality, but grew a healthy 10 percent year-over-year in 1Q11,” explains Jimmy Yu, senior director of optical transport research at Dell’Oro Group. “This was the third consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth for the optical transport market following the market slump that began in 4Q08 which extended through the middle of 2010.

“There was strong demand for optical equipment in North America and Latin America, where revenues were 17 percent and 34 percent higher, respectively, over the same period last year. The only region that showed a weak start to the year was China, where we estimate that optical sales declined 16 percent year-over-year,” adds Yu.

Huawei’s market share in 1Q11 declined by seven percentage points compared to the year-ago quarter to 18 percent. Alcatel-Lucent’s market share increased by two percentage points to 17 percent. Manufacturers Ciena and ZTE had the third and fourth highest market shares, reveals the report.

In contrast, the DSL, PON, and Ethernet FTTH equipment market declined 2% in the first quarter of 2011 (1Q11), according to market research firm Infonetics Research in its “PON, FTTH, and DSL Aggregation Equipment and Subscribers” preliminary vendor market share report.

The DSL aggregation equipment segment previously dropped 1.6% quarter-on-quarter in 4Q10 (see “Infonetics: Broadband aggregation spending grows 27% in 2010”).