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An earthquake and tsunami in Japan and a flood in the central heartland of Thailand caused panic buttons to be pressed in many sectors of industry. However, LightCounting's update to the optical communications market paints a rather optimistic outlook even as global macroeconomic uncertainty dominates headlines in 2011.

The report, titled "Tested by an Earthquake, a Tsunami and a Flood in 2011, the Industry Is Poised to Navigate Well Through Macroeconomic Uncertainty in 2012-2015," analyzes the optical component market and offers a forecast for the stipulated period.

Despite all the disruptions caused by a series of natural calamities and two years of stagnation in 2009 and 2010, total revenues and Capex of the top 12 service providers increased by 7.5 percent and five percent respectively. This growth was attributed to the increase in smartphones and mobile broadband services, increase in cloud computing and datacenter upgrades.

Although the increases are huge positives, carriers are still exercising caution and are coupling their Capex budgets with network infrastructure investments, resulting in steady cash flows for the networking industry.

Although sales of networking equipment have increased by more than 10 percent in 2011, carriers are still keeping their fingers crossed at the projected increase of 11 percent in the sales of optical transceivers by 2015.

Dr. Vladimir Kozlov, founder and CEO, LightCounting, said in a statement, “We maintain our earlier projections for the total optical transceiver market to grow at 11 percent CAGR in 2012-2015, but there is a good chance that these projections will prove to be conservative.”

He appeared optimistic about the impact that the recent changes in industry would have on the optical component and module suppliers and noted that demand for optical technologies would still remain robust for years if not decades.