Corning Incorporated Citi’s 2026 Global TMT Conference

Ed? Thanks, Asiya, and thank you all for attending.

Thanks for having us today. I just want to make a couple of comments. First, I may make some forward-looking statements. I suggest that you review our filings and our website for potential reasons why actual results may differ materially from anything that I say today. Secondly, I wanted to just note that we had a customer announcement yesterday with Verizon. Hopefully, you have seen that announcement. It is a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar deal to help Verizon build out a new long-haul network that will support both their broadband part of the business as well as data center interconnect. For us, it is really a great relationship with Verizon. We have actually been a supplier to Verizon, had a relationship with them for 30 years, and here we are today helping them build out the AI data center interconnect network of the future.

I think that is great. It is one of the reasons why we like these long-term relationships, and I am sure we will talk a little bit about some others as well today. The other thing I would mention is we have previously shared that the data center interconnect opportunity for us was about a $1 billion opportunity, $1 billion a year by the end of the decade. Well, clearly, with the extension of our Lumen agreement and agreement we signed with Zayo and announced a while ago and this Verizon deal, we are going to get to that number much sooner than the end of the decade, and I think the opportunity is bigger than that. We will come back at some point, and we will talk a little bit about what that means. I think that is good news.

I want to mention in the context of our long-term financial plan that we call Springboard, we had shared with investors that we expected to hit a $20 billion run rate by the end of this year, $30 billion by the end of 2028, and $40 billion by the end of 2030. Deals like this really underpin our success and our ability to deliver those numbers. They give us more confidence in our ability to do that. We are not going to upgrade the $30 billion or the $40 billion today, but we will certainly come back and share our views on how those things are playing out over time. We do expect to deliver the $20 billion a quarter early here in the third quarter.

If you take that math and you compare it to the guidance we gave back in July, it means we're at the high end or slightly better than the sales guidance that we gave back in July. The third quarter is running really well, and we expect the fourth quarter to be bigger than the third quarter. So we expect sequential growth. If you take the year-over-year growth rate that we've been seeing in the second quarter and the third quarter, we're in the high teens, and we expect that to continue as we go into the fourth quarter and into next year. So a lot of momentum at Corning, and we're glad to be here today, so I'll turn it back over to Asiya.

Yeah. So, if I start with optical, clearly the demand is very strong. We had an investor event in May where we laid out our Springboard plan, and we felt really good about the optical space, the enterprise space, as we call it, our data center, NAI data center space, and we continue to see really strong momentum there. Orders continue to pick up. We're continuing to sign agreements, and we feel really good about visibility going out the next several years. So that's all strong, and I'm sure we'll spend some time talking about that as well. When I think about a customer like Verizon, that moves into the carrier space and optical, and demand is also really good in the carrier space for us as well. In the solar space, I think the market conditions continue to get better. The demand for solar energy is strong.

There's also been continued regulatory announcements. There was a Section 232 ruling that helps pricing in the solar space. So that's another space where I think the market is really good, and we have work to do to build out our capacity to continue to take advantage of that, but I think the market environment is very conducive for success for us there. In our glass innovations segment, we really have a number of markets. We have the display TV market, which remains solid. Continued good performance. The panel makers continue to run at relatively high utilization rates. We continue to see screen size growth, so in the display space, we feel pretty good. I think you all know that in the handheld space or consumer electronics, the markets are actually down. We're expecting them to be down year-over-year, primarily because of the price and shortage of memory.

We don't really see a change in that from how we've been thinking about it, but we'll continue to outperform those markets as we sell content into the handheld space. We'll sell more dollars per device. We'll do better than the underlying market. We also supply the semiconductor market in our advanced optics business, and that actually is a pretty strong market, and I expect that to be a grower for us over the next several years. I think our glass innovation business will grow despite maybe the handheld market not being that strong. Automotive remains muted. No change in our view there. Heavy duty, maybe slight recovery. We're starting to see that in North America, but we're not expecting a significant change there.

Again, we'll outperform the market as we sell more content into the market with respect to emissions as well as glass into the automotive space. That's probably the view. Definitely overall, on average, a little better, but mixed certainly across the board.

Yeah, I think signing deals like we did with Verizon and have done with other customers, and have others in the works, that certainly gives us more confidence that we can get to that, the upper bound and maybe beyond those numbers that we shared. I think the largest variable, especially as you go out to the end of the decade, is CPO or photonics. What happens with adoption of those types of products? We are planning to build out a $10 billion business where today we have no sales, by the end of the decade, selling products into NPO and CPO applications, so inside of a server tray. I think the timing of that and the adoption rate of that will have an impact on our ability to close that gap. I think the good news is we're starting to see a lot of activity.

We are starting to build out our supply chain, and hopefully next year we will start to see some sales there, and we will have a little bit of a better sense for how that plays out over this next several years.