The Zhitong Finance App learned that CICC released a research report stating that it participated in the CIOE China Optical Expo held in Shenzhen from September 9 to 11. The popularity of this year's Optical Expo increased unabated from previous years. More than 4,000 companies participated in the exhibition, and the overall number of visitors was nearly 190,000, an increase of 32% over the previous year. During the research period at this exhibition, we saw that the incremental scenario of optical communication expanded from scale-up/across to scale-in, and the optical interconnection cycle is expected to continue to drive the growth rate of optical communication hardware beyond the industry beta.
CICC's main views are as follows:
“Lock order” and “lock material” became the key words of the exhibition research, and demand certainty was further improved in 2027
In conjunction with exhibition research, it was seen that the order schedule of some high-speed optical chip companies has been extended to 2028 and beyond, and that the visibility of optical module orders covers 2027 and beyond; leading optical module manufacturers are actively targeting core materials such as DSP, mSAP PCBs, and high-speed optical chips. The bank anticipates that subsequent delivery differences will depend more on key material guarantees, yield and customer certification, with advanced process DSP likely to be the most critical link.
A number of new technologies converged in 2028, smoothly connecting with the boom in 2027
The bank expects that by 2028, after standards and engineering solutions gradually converge and yield rises, CPO may gradually scale up; OCS will move from private use by a few cloud vendors to more AI clusters, driving the decline of 2.4T light coherent applications; 400G per lane will drive device upgrades, and thin-film lithium niobate is expected to accelerate entry into customer verification and application windows.
The boundaries of Chinese companies' capabilities continue to extend from manufacturing and coupling to upstream chips and platforms
The fields of optical module packaging, precision optical coupling, FAU, and high-density connections have long been an advantage for Chinese manufacturers. At this exhibition, the tour also saw that domestic upstream chip and silicon optical platform capabilities continue to be replenished, and the domestic photoecological base continues to strengthen.
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