Lumentum Holdings Inc Company Profile

Lumentum Holdings Inc. is an industry-leading provider of optical and photonic products defined by revenue and market share addressing a range of end market applications including Optical Communications and Commercial Lasers for manufacturing, inspection and life-science applications. We seek to use our core optical and photonic technology and our volume manufacturing capability to expand into attractive emerging markets that benefit from advantages that optical or photonics-based solutions provide, including 3D sensing for consumer electronics and diode light sources for a variety of consumer and industrial applications. The majority of our customers tend to be original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”) that incorporate our products into their products which then address end-market applications. For example, we sell fiber optic components that our network equipment manufacturer (“NEM”) customers assemble into communications networking systems, which they sell to network service providers or enterprises with their own networks. Similarly, many of our customers for our Lasers products incorporate our products into tools they produce, which are used for manufacturing processes by their customers. For 3D sensing, we sell diode lasers to manufacturers of consumer electronics products for mobile, personal computing, and gaming who then integrate our devices within their products, for eventual resale to consumers and also into other industrial applications.

We operate in two reportable segments: Optical Communications (“OpComms”) and Commercial Lasers (“Lasers”).
We have a global marketing and sales footprint that enables us to address global market opportunities for our products. We have manufacturing capabilities and facilities in North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, with employees engaged in R&D, administration, manufacturing, support and sales and marketing activities. Our headquarters are located in Milpitas, California, and we employed approximately 2,930 full-time employees around the world as of June 30, 2018.
Lumentum was incorporated in Delaware as a wholly owned subsidiary of JDS Uniphase Corporation (“JDSU”) on February 10, 2015, and is comprised of the former communications and commercial optical products (“CCOP”) segment and WaveReady product lines of JDSU. In August 2015, we became an independent publicly-traded company through the distribution by JDSU to its stockholders of 80.1% of our outstanding common stock (the “Separation”). Each JDSU stockholder of record as of the close of business on July 27, 2015, received one share of Lumentum common stock for every five shares of JDSU common stock held on such date. JDSU was renamed Viavi Solutions Inc. (“Viavi”) and at the time of distribution, retained ownership of 19.9% of Lumentum’s outstanding shares. Since the Separation, Viavi has sold a significant portion of its shares and is no longer a significant shareholder of Lumentum.

Our business traces its origins to Uniphase Corporation, which was formed in 1979, and became publicly traded in 1992. Uniphase was originally a supplier of commercial lasers, and later, a leading supplier of optical transmission products. In 1999, JDS Fitel Inc., a pioneer in products for fiber optic networking which was formed in 1981, merged with Uniphase to become JDSU, a global leader in optical networking. Subsequent acquisitions by JDSU broadened the depth and breadth of the OpComms and Lasers businesses, as well as the intellectual property, technology and product offerings, of what is now Lumentum. Notable amongst these acquisitions in the OpComms business were Agility Communications, Inc. in 2005 and Picolight, Inc. in 2007 which respectively brought widely tunable, long wavelength laser technology for metro and long haul networking applications and short wavelength vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (“VCSELs”) for enterprise, datacenter networking, and 3D sensing applications. The fundamental laser component technologies which we acquired through these acquisitions, form the basis of virtually all optical networks today and we believe will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. These technologies will enable us to develop highly integrated products to satisfy our communications customers’ ever increasing needs for smaller, lower power and lower cost optical products. Notable acquisitions in the Lasers business were Lightwave Electronics Corporation in 2005 and Time-Bandwidth Products Inc. (“Time-Bandwidth”) in 2014. Both of these Lasers acquisitions brought high power pulsed solid-state laser products and technology to our business, which address the micro laser machining market and expanded our addressable market.

The OpComms markets we serve are experiencing continually increasing needs for higher data transmission speeds, fiber optic network capacity and network agility. This is driven by rapid growth in both the number of higher bandwidth broadband connections, notably those associated with mobile devices, such as high-definition video, online gaming, cloud computing and the number and scale of datacenters that require fiber optic links to enable the higher speeds and increased scale necessary to deliver high bandwidth video and other services. Our technology, which was originally developed for communications applications is also finding use in other emerging market opportunities including 3D sensing applications that employ our laser technology in mobile devices, computers, augmented and virtual reality and other consumer electronics devices. Additionally, our products are used in emerging automotive, industrial, security, safety and surveillance applications.

In the Lasers markets, customer demand is driven by the need to enable faster, higher precision volume manufacturing techniques with lower power consumption, reduced manufacturing footprint and increased productivity. These capabilities are critical as industries develop products that are smaller and lighter, increasing productivity and yield and lowering their energy consumption.
Our optical and laser solutions, developed in close collaboration with OEM partners, are well positioned to meet demand resulting from these trends. We do, however, expect to continue to encounter a number of industry and market risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties may limit our visibility, and consequently, our ability to predict future revenue, profitability and general financial performance, and could create quarter over quarter variability in our financial measures. For example, the demand environment in China has fluctuated significantly in recent years, and has created volatility and uncertainty in our future demand. We cannot predict when or to what extent these uncertainties will be resolved. Our revenues, profitability and general financial performance may also be affected by: (i) pricing pressures, particularly within our OpComms markets, due to, among other things, a highly concentrated customer base, increasing competition, particularly from Asia-Pacific-based competitors, and a general commoditization trend for certain products; (ii) high product mix variability which affects revenue and gross margin; (iii) fluctuations in customer buying patterns, which cause volatility in demand, revenue and profitability; and (iv) the current trend of communication industry consolidation, which is expected to continue, that directly affects our customer bases and adds additional risk and uncertainty to our financial and business projections.