Report
Valens Research

CIEN - Valens Credit Report - 2023 11 23

Credit markets are overstating CIEN's credit risk with a YTW of 6.624% relative to an Intrinsic YTW of 5.604% and an Intrinsic CDS of 116bps. Furthermore, Moody's is overstating the company's fundamental credit risk, with its speculative Ba1 credit rating three notches lower than Valens' IG4+ (Baa1) credit rating.

Incentives Dictate Behavior™ analysis highlights mixed signals for credit holders. As positives, most members of management are material owners of CIEN equity relative to their annual compensation indicating that they may be aligned with shareholders to pursue long-term value creation for the company. Furthermore, management has low change-in-control compensation relative to their average annual compensation indicating that they may not be incentivized to pursue a takeover or accept a sale of the company, decreasing event risk for creditors.

Earnings Call Forensics™ of CIEN's Q3 2023 (8/31/2023) call highlights that management is confident they delivered an adjusted EPS of $0.59 for Q3 and ended the quarter with $1.30 billion in cash and investments.
Underlying
Ciena Corporation

Ciena is a networking systems, services and software company, providing solutions that enable a range of network operators to deploy and manage networks that deliver services to businesses and consumers. The company provides hardware, software and services that support the transport, switching, aggregation, service delivery and management of video, data and voice traffic on communications networks. The company's solutions are used by communications service providers, cable and multiservice operators, Web-scale providers, submarine network operators, governments, enterprises, research and education institutions and other network operators.

Provider
Valens Research
Valens Research

In 2009, just as the dust was settling from the last major equity and credit market crises, we launched a boutique research firm with the intention of breaking Wall Street’s biases and broken incentives:

  • GAAP and IFRS have failed to provide rules for reliable financial statement reporting
  • Stock analyst recommendations are not grounded in disciplined financial analysis
  • Credit agencies have been set up to grossly fail in their responsibilities to investors and the public markets
  • Utter lack of willingness of major research firms to employ the the most advanced forensic analysis available

We sought to provide investors and company analysts with a source of information that changed all that.
Many years later, our business model remains because little has changed on Wall Street.

  • Corporate credit ratings remain years behind the fundamental underpinnings of company performance
  • Stock analysts continue to make recommendations with deeply inherent biases
  • Research firms have failed to break down the walls between credit, equity, and macroeconomic research
  • The governing accounting bodies have created more leeway for mis-estimates and mis-classifications as financials have become unwieldy and overwhelming

The integrity of Valens Research is founded in our disciplined processes and analytics. No “star” analysts. No corporate advisory relationships. No-nonsense opinions and recommendations.

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