...For those on the webcast, thanks also for joining. My job is to get some important information out of the way before we get down to business. First, for our in-person guests, we have a strict rule regarding phones and recording, so please refrain from both for the entire day. Additionally, keep your badge on at all times and visible. We're gonna begin the day with formal remarks, beginning with our CEO, followed by our Senior Vice President and General Manager of Display, Mobile Consumer Electronics, and Corning Asia. You'll then hear from our Senior Vice President and General Manager of Optical Communications. And finally, our CFO will wrap up the formal remarks, putting a financial perspective on the day. This will conclude the webcast portion of the event. We'll then take a mid-morning stretch break.
You'll get a chance to get prepared for some hands-on demos and plant tour, and then we will, following the tour, we'll wrap up with some Q&A. I also want to let you know that we have remarks that contain forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially. You can find more information on our website. Also, we'll be talking about our financial results using Core performance measures. Reconciliations to GAAP may also be found on our website, and with that, I will turn the podium over to Wendell Weeks, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.
Good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
Welcome to our plant. It's great to have you all here. This is a really exciting time for the company. We've got an awful lot of news to share with you today. Before we begin, I would just note that we're reiterating our third quarter guidance that we previously provided to you on our July earnings call. That said, we invited you here today to discuss the progress we're making on our Springboard plan to add more than $3 billion in annualized sales, with powerful incremental profit and cash flow by the end of 2026. So I want to dive right into the highlights, starting with Display. Display's Springboard plan is centered on maintaining stable U.S. dollar net income. To achieve this, we are raising glass prices.
Our price actions, in combination with the hedges that we have in place through 2026, will deliver consistent profitability in Display. We expect to deliver net income of $900 million-$950 million next year, and expect to deliver net income margin of 25%, consistent with the last five years. Simply put, our price increases offset the weaker yen in our hedges, and we will maintain the same profitability. As a result, we don't see a need to recast 2024 financials. Most importantly, we will continue to be the low-cost technology and market leader in Display. Now, you're gonna hear a lot more from John Zhang on our Display strategy in just a few minutes. Optical Communications Springboard plan is about revenue growth, as cyclical and secular trends converge to drive demand for our unique capabilities.
Now, we recently achieved several major milestones I'd like to share with you today. Let's begin with the opportunity in generative AI. When we introduced our Gen AI products in June, we said we expected to grow our Enterprise business at a 25% compound annual growth rate over the next four years. Strong demand for our generative AI products drove outperformance in the second quarter, and our Enterprise segment grew by 42% year over year. And I'm happy to share today that the strong demand continues, and we expect Enterprise to grow by more than 40% in the third quarter versus last year. So our excellent progress building demand for our products inside data centers continues. Gen AI also provides an opportunity for our products that link data centers to each other.
Now, we introduced a set of innovations to help our customers build a new network to interconnect AI-enabled data centers. As part of an agreement with Lumen Technologies, which reserves 10% of our global fiber capacity for each of the next two years, we recently launched the first outside plant deployment of Corning's new Gen AI fiber and cable system that enables Lumen to fit anywhere from two to four times the amount of fiber into their existing conduit. So Gen AI continues to provide an exciting growth profile for our innovative products. We're also launching new products to support the government's effort to connect the unconnected, known as BEAD. Our solutions for rural applications are plug-and-play, making the deployments five times faster to install and reducing reliance on scarce skilled labor. Most importantly, these solutions lower the cost by 30%.
We have the right products to help make BEAD successful, and you will hear more from Mike about the opportunities that we're pursuing across Optical Communications. Our corporate Springboard plan is to add more than $3 billion in annualized sales with powerful incrementals by the end of 2026. Now, what this means is that we expect to grow profit significantly faster than we grow sales. Today, we would like to share our Springboard operating margin target. Our target is to achieve an operating margin of 20% by the end of 2026. This represents continued improvement in our profitability profile as we grow. When we introduced Springboard to you, our operating margin was 16.3% in quarter four of 2023. In the second quarter of 2024, our operating margin was 17.4%, an improvement of 110 basis points.
We expect operating margin to continue to expand, ultimately achieving our target of 20% by the end of 2026. So stepping back, our Springboard plan leads to an improving return profile so that our profits grow significantly faster than our revenues. And you'll hear much more on this from Ed later this morning. So I just shared a lot of key milestones, new Display pricing, strong progress on Optical growth, and new product launches in Optical, and we just shared the Springboard operating margin target. Now, you're gonna hear much more detail on those items from John in Display, from Mike in Optical, and Ed at the corporate level.
But before I turn it over to them, I think it'd be useful to provide just a little bit of context and nomenclature on Springboard, so that as you hear from our leaders today, you'll be able to put what they're presenting into the context of our overall Springboard plan. Now, I'm gonna use this chart to explain our incremental sales opportunity. We introduced Springboard in quarter three last year, using our quarter four projected sales of $3.25 billion as the starting point, which put us at a $13 billion annualized run rate. The Y-axis represents incremental sales above our quarter four 2023 run rate, and the X-axis represents time for the following five years. Now, let's fill in some numbers. Here is our internal non-risk adjusted Springboard plan.
This is what our business leaders are using, and when you hear John speak about Display and Mike speak about Optical, this is the Springboard plan they are discussing. Now, there's an awful lot to take away from this slide. The first is, we have a significant sales opportunity. We're looking at potential growth of $8 billion in annualized sales run rate by the end of 2028, with $5 billion by the end of 2026. We expect growth across all our Market-A ccess Platforms, driven by a combination of upward, cyclical, and secular trends. Now, this is our internal plan.
When we say it's not risk-adjusted, what we mean is that the projections are based on a number of assumptions, including markets recovering back to historical trend lines with continued growth thereafter, successful adoption of new innovations across a number of markets and platforms, and successful execution of all of our operational milestones for productivity and for price. But what we wanted to do is take our $8 billion opportunity and translate it into a high-confidence plan for our shareholders. To do that, first, we focused on a three-year time period. Second, we probabilistically adjusted for different potential outcomes in each of our Market-A ccess Platforms, including market dynamics, timing of secular trends, successful adoption of our innovations, as well as volume, pricing, and market share across all of our businesses, and the potential that some of our markets may go through down cycles.
And this is how we come to the high-confidence Springboard plan for our shareholders. Now, it's important to note that we purposely drew this as a wedge. We weren't trying to guide every quarter for the next twelve quarters. It obviously will not be a straight line, but we're also not dealing with a hockey stick. When we built the plan, we expected to see strong growth this year, and that's exactly what we're seeing. We're off to a very strong start, and Ed will update you more today on our Springboard progress. Now, you're gonna get to hear from our business leaders. John is our Senior Vice President and General Manager of Display and Mobile Consumer Electronics. He has led our Display Technologies business since 2014 . Under his strategic leadership, the business has improved its technology, cost, and market leadership.
John led the formation of Samsung Corning Advanced Glass with Samsung, as well as Corning's acquisition of Samsung Corning Precision Materials. John built our competitively advantaged position in China, from the first Display melting investment, all the way through our three Gen 10.5 facilities, making us a powerhouse in Display. This year, we added mobile consumer electronics to John's responsibilities, and John has centralized management of our Fusion assets and flat glass expertise. We call that organization, Corning Glass Innovations, and the combined organization continues to achieve exceptional productivity in Display, freeing up assets and resources to pursue new growth and unlocking new synergies to accelerate more Corning opportunities across our other Market-A ccess Platforms. Please welcome John Zhang.
Thank you, Wendell, and good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to be here with you today. First, I want to emphasize the complementary nature of the two MAPs for which I'm responsible, Display and mobile consumer electronics. Our precision flat glass business leverage all three of our Core Technologies and three of our Manufacturing and Engineering Platforms to bring the displays we rely on into our homes, hands, and offices. Fusion is an essential through line connecting Display and MCE, and a compelling example of the power of our 3-4-5 Framework. We built our Gorilla Glass business on the Fusion assets that we originally capitalized for Display. By repurposing and reapplying our Fusion knowledge and assets from our Display business, we saved about $1 billion in capital spending as we built a world-leading $2 billion mobile consumer electronics business.
As we continue to improve the productivity of our Fusion fleet, we're able to free up manufacturing assets to capture growth in many of the other markets we serve, including Auto, Optical, Architecture, and more. Today, I'm going to focus on Display. Our Display Market-A ccess Platform plays an important role in Corning's overall Springboard growth plan. In Wendell's earlier remarks, he outlined our full non-risk adjusted opportunity, the plan we are all executing at the business level. I want to look at the total opportunity in Display over the three-year Springboard timeframe. Our strategic priority is to maintain profitability in Display business.
What you hear from me today is that we'll achieve consistent profitability by instituting currency-based price adjustment and maintaining our market technology and cost leadership, all while benefiting from a market growing at low single-digit rate, driven by an increase in TV screen size, while the supply-demand is in our favor. Again, our goal is to maintain profitability in Display. You can think about that as a stable U.S. dollar net income over the life of the Springboard plan, despite external factors like currency. We have previously told you we are implementing a currency-based price adjustment beginning in Q3. The yen has been the Display glass pricing currency since the inception of the LCD business in Japan. Panel makers, meanwhile, sell panels in U.S. dollars. So as the yen depreciated since the beginning of 2022, there became opportunity to share the impact of the weaker yen.
Therefore, we're taking actions to raise price. At the same time, we will maintain our leadership position and to capture low single digit volume growth. These actions, in combination with our existing hedges through 2026, allow us to achieve stable U.S. dollar income. Specifically, we expect our 2025 segment net income to be between $900 million and $950 million, and we expect the net income margin of 25% going forward. Now, let me explain why we have high confidence in achieving this strong financial outcome. We remain the worldwide Display glass market leader, with significant advantage over competitors in cost, scale, and technology. High-quality Display glass is key to improving display performance. Our exceptionally stable glass substrate help panel makers increase display performance and improve their yield, while also allowing for efficient manufacturing of today's premium large thin sets.
Our superior quality and reliable supply make us vital to the industry and a partner of choice among leading panel makers. Our latest Gen 10.5 technology produces glass larger than two king-size mattresses, over 100 sq ft per sheet, as thin as a business card. It's also incredibly flat. Imagine a sheet of glass as the Pacific Ocean. Fusion-formed glass is so flat that it would equate to only 3 centimeters high ripple on the surface. Gen 10.5 glass is today's most efficient way to produce large TV panels. Our customers can produce six 75-inch TVs from one substrate. This reflects a 30% cut efficiency gain for them versus the Gen 8.5 glass substrate that came before.
As our production lines are directly connected to the fabs of our co-located customers, we also minimize our carbon footprint in the transportation process, while further improving our customers' manufacturing yield. Corning is the world's first manufacturer of Gen 10.5 glass substrate, and the knowledge we've gained and the productivity we have unlocked from pioneering large Gen substrate manufacturing translates to substantial productivity and cost advantage over competitors in Gen 10.5. We produce all generations of our glass, including the Gen 10.5, on our continuously advancing Fusion platform, which is foundational to our technology advantage in Display. The process harnesses gravity to form glass in midair. The glass never touches another surface and requires no polishing before being delivered to customers who use it to build displays that consumers demand.
We have never stopped perfecting our Fusion process, and it will remain the leading glass supplier for LCD, OLED, and other advanced display panels. Turning to demand, the outlook is solid. We expect Display glass market to grow low single digit in the next three to five years, supported by a large, stable TV unit base and growing screen size. We intend to capitalize on consumers' preference for larger, high-performing screens. The portion of the worldwide TV units that's sixty-five inch and above was only 10% of the market in 2019 , just over 20% in 2023 , and we expect to account for over 30% of the total in 2028 . This drives average TV screen size to be up by about one inch a year. Demand for large-sized TV is great news for Corning.
Because of our leadership in Gen 10.5, we are positioned very well to meet the growing demand. And against the backdrop of growing demand, glass supply-demand is favorable. Supply-demand balance improved from 2019 to 2023, as available glass supply reduced. At the same time, in 2023, we executed a price increase to offset inflationary pressure, and we were successful. Glass supply has further tightened in 2024, and we expect the supply-demand environment to remain favorable for the foreseeable future. These factors, taken together, our leadership, favorable industry condition, give us confidence that we can achieve the strong financial result that we are guiding. Now, before I close, let me just briefly touch on how Display is supporting Corning's growth through our 3-4-5 Framework.
As we improve the productivity and performance of Fusion in Display, we free up and enhance assets to capture growth in many other markets we serve across the company. Our ability to reuse, innovate, and repurpose Fusion create breakthrough products and processes for our customers, improving the return on our innovation investment and reduce our capital intensity. Here's how. I already shared a compelling reapplication of Fusion, our Gorilla Glass business, but the impact of Fusion reached even further. We're doing the same in automotive. Our automotive customers have come to value our glass expertise, and we have a triple-digit automotive glass business using our Fusion assets, and the Fusion-formed glass is ready to serve the Optical Communication segment, too. Fusion-formed glass enables high-density interconnect, offers thermal dimensional stability, and is an optimized substrate for processor chips and for optical waveguides for co-packaged optics.
Beyond these MAPs, we recently entered the Architecture market, one of the world's largest opportunity for flat glass, by introducing our Corning ATG glass to offer enhanced energy efficiency and lightweight. This industry represents an approximately 1.3 billion sq ft opportunity in North America alone. Our expertise and investment in Fusion continue to pay off in big ways, both in the Display industry and across our markets. So to summarize, here are the key things I want you to take away. Display Springboard plan is centered on maintaining a stable U.S. dollar net income. To achieve this objective, we're increasing Display glass price. We have high confidence we will be successful. Our customers value our products. The market is solid, supply-demand is tight, and we successfully raised price in 2023. An outcome of our action is consistent profitability.
In Display, we expect to deliver between $900 and $950 million in net income next year, and expect to maintain net income margin at 25% going forward, and the Fusion is enabling us to grow in other markets such as Gorilla Glass, Auto, Optical, and Architecture. Taken together, we have high confidence that Display will play an integral role in Corning's Springboard, Springboard plan by delivering consistent segment profitability while unlocking growth across the company. Thank you, and now I'll turn it back over to Wendell.
Thanks, John. Once again, thank you, John. Now I'd like to look at the growth opportunity that we're pursuing in Optical Communications. Now, those of you who joined us at the June investor event heard from Mike Bell, who outlined the tremendous opportunity Corning has built in Gen AI. Some of you may not know, but after thirty-three years of excellent service to the company, Mike is retiring from Corning at the end of twenty twenty-four. He played a pivotal role in shaping the evolution of this business and setting us up to capture the growth that we've just outlined in Springboard. Today, we're introducing you to Mike O'Day, who is taking the helm in Optical. Mike is a seasoned veteran of the business, with twenty-six years of good service.
And for about half a decade, he and I have worked very closely together to form and execute the Optical Communications Innovation Program Office, designed to sharpen our innovation potency and to drive adoption of key innovations by critical customers. All of the new-to-the-world innovations that you're going to get a chance to see today and touch today, the new fiber, the new cables, the new connectors, the new solutions, were all born out of this work stream. Mike and I also work together with key crystallizing customers, some of which you will also hear from today, who've adopted these innovations and have turned them into exciting growth opportunities. So it's my pleasure to introduce you to Mike O'Day.
Thank you, Wendell. I have to figure out how to go from good to great. I think there's a book about that, so... Okay, now, before I lay out what's happening with Optical, I want to offer my own personal welcome on behalf of all of Optical Communications, a warm welcome to our house. You are in the largest and lowest cost fiber facility in the world. How many American companies do you know that can say that are the largest and the lowest cost producers in their industry? Not very many. And we are incredibly proud of that fact, and when you see it, I think you'll appreciate and share in this pride alongside us. And why does that matter so much to us?
Because we're on the cusp of making the world more productive through AI, and also preparing to connect the rest of Americans who have not benefited from broadband connectivity, ever. So today, in our house, you will see fiber being made, you get to touch the new solutions being deployed, and then you'll get to hear from some of our customers of how we are solving their toughest economic and technical challenges with optical fiber made right here in North Carolina. So let's dive in. First, Opto will double our sales by 2026.... We'll do this through our innovation and manufacturing superpowers. And lastly, I'll have the opportunity today to unpack three growth trends and why our customers are adopting our new innovations. Now, this slide represents the total opportunity in our Optical business within the three-year Springboard timeframe.
We plan to double our revenue run rate from 2023 to 2026, as cyclical and secular trends converge, and we'll do this using much of our existing footprint, delivering strong incrementals and more net income. Now we're off to a great start. Through the second quarter, we are well ahead of plan. Springboard has us growing the Enterprise segment at a 25% CAGR through 2027, and for the second quarter, strong demand for our Gen AI products drove our outperformance and 40% growth year over year, and we're seeing this growth continue. We expect the Enterprise segment to grow more than 40% in the third quarter as well. Now, our strong launch stems from a unique combination of innovation, cost leadership, and strong advantaged customer access. Now, innovation is the secret to unlock more Corning and drive growth faster than the market.
We begin with a deep understanding of our industry and customer insights that form our long-term technology vectors: density, ease of use, sustainability, and cost. These vectors then guide the work we do with our Core technical and engineering platforms. We then apply these proprietary Manufacturing and Engineering Platforms to scale our inventions, and this rigorous innovation approach has led to the creation of new-to-the-world solutions that you'll have a chance to see today. Now, our manufacturing excellence will be on full Display as you tour our facility. And as I mentioned earlier, Concord is the largest, lowest cost fiber factory in the world, and the scale you will see is stunning. As you walk the manufacturing floor, you will experience firsthand why we are so unique. We make one of the most precise materials known to man right here in this factory.
In fact, one strand of fiber is about the diameter of a strand of human hair and is three times stronger than steel. It has the roughness of about an atom, and if the Earth were that smooth, there would be no mountains taller than a double-decker bus. Now, while we've invented the first low-loss optical fiber, in the past four years, we have reinvented nearly every manufacturing process to give us smaller fibers while doubling our technical and cost leadership. Now, I've mentioned the cyclical and secular trends converging to create such a prime market opportunity for Optical. So now let's take a closer look at each trend and how we are positioned to compete. Now, as Wendell said, I've been in this business for twenty-six years, and I've never seen such a convergence of growth drivers in Optical before.
We have a cyclical trend resolving as carriers deplete excess inventory and return to buying at deployment rates. Then, we have the federal broadband investment, known as BEAD, gathering momentum, starting in the second half of 2025. And we will close by talking about the trend of Gen AI. This is driving growth both inside and outside the data center. Now, let me begin with the cyclical trend. Our fiber shipments have begun to return to the market trend line, and as you may recall, carriers stockpiled excess inventory during the post-pandemic era. Now, over the past eighteen months, they have been consuming this inventory, and we are seeing them begin to purchase closer to their current deployment levels, moving from 30% below the trend to 18% through the end of quarter two.
However, we still have a gap as they are deploying more than they are buying still today. But we expect to complete the return to trend by the first half of 2025. We have existing capacity in place to allow us to supply them as the demand materializes. Now, let us turn to the secular trend in carrier, the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, commonly known as BEAD. Now, this bipartisan initiative represents an unprecedented level of government funding, $42 billion for broadband infrastructure, of which about 10% or $4 billion will fund fiber, cable, and connectivity to connect the unconnected. BEAD deployments will begin in 2025, with project awards, dirt moving, and money flowing, and we are tracking the approval process and seeing progress. A few months ago, only one state had received preliminary approval.
Now we have 35, and those are all the states that you see depicted in green on the map. These states are now issuing requests for proposals, which is the first step towards procurement. Now, to support BEAD, we're launching new solutions uniquely aimed to solve the economic challenges of rural deployment. And you'll hear from one of our customers sharing how we partnered to enable rural broadband deployments.
They are extremely innovative company, and we think that our vision is very much aligned with their vision to try to connect the unconnected. Corning allows us to do things in a more cost-efficient manner. We're able to serve more customers because some of the innovation that Corning brings to the table. Corning was able to deliver what we needed to be delivered when we needed to be delivered.
When we needed to be delivered.
They've been at the forefront of products and services that really have enabled both Brightspeed and my company as a company to deliver services to customers in a very cost-efficient, very expeditious manner. They've been cutting edge in terms of technology. They're extremely open to listening to any sort of suggestions we have. I consider them to be a real true partner as opposed to just a supplier. The other thing that's pretty interesting is that once we start getting into some really expensive areas, like those that are eligible for BEAD funding, the Corning product line will, again, help us keep costs down, so we're able to do more with the money that we secure through grants, whether it's like, for example, the North Carolina GREAT Grant program or the like BEAD program.
So, this innovation that Corning brings to the marketplace and their ability to turn around and give us what we need when we need it allows us to keep this machine flowing so we can crank out north of 90,000 premises per month, which is, you know, pretty impressive, right? At least, granted, I'm biased, but pretty impressive when you consider that we started from essentially zero going back two years ago.
Brightspeed plus Corning equals connecting the unconnected. Now, to provide the needed density in these rural applications, as described by Brightspeed and many of our other customers, we use new fiber, new cables, and carry this forward to our connectivity platform. These outside plant connectors that you see on the screen are half the size of the legacy offerings, connecting to terminals that are four times smaller. This plug-and-play solution lowers the cost to install by shrinking handholes and pedestals and reducing pole attachment and permitting fees. This results in a very compelling value prop. These new rural solutions are five times faster to install and reduce costs up to 30% per home pass for our customers, compared to traditional spliced solutions, and we're leveraging these tech innovations and manufacturing capacity to support the BEAD deployments.
These products are manufactured in the U.S., making them fully compliant with the Build America, Buy America provision in BEAD, and you'll have a chance to see these solutions on Display later today. Now, I'll transition to generative AI, a secular trend that is well underway. Let's start with how Gen AI impacts data center Architectures. Now, first, data centers have been built to support traditional cloud-based applications, so think of web browsing, social media, video streaming. Those are the kinds of applications that operate over the cloud, traditional cloud network. A network that you access every day when you stream Netflix or listen to your favorite song on Spotify. Now, Gen AI, on the other hand, requires a second network, which allows an application to learn from a set of data and then create new data based on what it has learned.
Gen AI is very compute-intensive, that it's built from these high-speed GPUs. For large language models to do their job, every GPU must be connected to every other GPU. You'll notice on the diagram, the speed of the AI connections are faster, representing higher data rates to enable AI computing. Combined, that means 10 times more fiber connections than what exists in the traditional cloud data center, all in the same physical space. This is what drives more Corning in every Gen AI data center and places a tremendous premium on density. To meet the high-density needs of Gen AI, we reinvented everything, starting again with the optical fiber. Contour fiber is 40% smaller, with improved bend resilience and low signal loss. That combination of qualities underscores what makes Corning the best in the world at glass science and optical physics.
This smaller fiber enables a cable revolution. We took our deep process understanding of extrusion and created a new-to-the-world cable with twice as much fiber in the same diameter, and we'll give you a close-up look at this cable later in our demos, and I think you'll really appreciate the density of the fiber when you see it. Next, we invented a new MMC connector, which miniaturizes fiber connectivity. It can accommodate 36 times more fiber, that's right, 36 times more fiber, within a data center rack. These connectors are precisely aligned to less than a micron to ensure no light escapes the fiber connection, and finally, we put all of these components together into integrated solutions customized for large data centers that are 90% denser, 4 times faster to install, and 55% greener.
They're fully plug and play, moving time-consuming work from the field to our factories, which makes them four times faster to install while reducing the reliance on skilled labor that's, frankly, not available today. Now, this value prop has resonated across the Gen AI ecosystem. We have the right technology, we've made the right capacity investments, and we have the right customer access to realize the growth from Gen AI. Now, let's look at what Gen AI is driving outside the data center. Gen AI not only requires more fiber within the data center, but it does require fiber between the data centers as well. Simply put, GPUs are power hungry, and there may not be enough power at any given data center site. Therefore, GPU clusters may need to be split out between data centers where more power is available.
Alternatively, new locations are being built where power and land is available, but optical fiber may not be. Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Ohio are notable examples of where hyperscalers are working on new AI data center builds. This need, all centered around power availability, has created a market opportunity to interconnect these AI data centers. Now, let's listen to Dave Ward, the CTO of Lumen, to share more about this emerging trend.
I'm Dave Ward, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Product Officer at Lumen. I'd like to explain to you a problem that we had that's just a fantastic problem for a business to have. With the rise of generative AI and the impact on the economy, Lumen was called in by our customers and partners to be able to deliver a massive expansion of bandwidth capabilities to the new data centers being built around the country. To the point, it's the largest expansion of the internet in our lifetime. So to achieve these goals, we realized we need to not only create a large construction project, but also bring new fiber capabilities to deliver the bandwidth to these data centers.
So we turned to a great partner, Corning, who, with new fiber and new cable technology, is able to enable us to deliver orders of magnitude higher bandwidth to these data centers than that was ever possible before. Now, one thing to note, there's a lot of computational power and GPUs required within the data center, but what Lumen focuses on is connecting those data centers together and connecting them to customers and the internet, and so all of that bandwidth to move data into the data centers requires tons and tons of bandwidth. That bandwidth is delivered by optical fiber technology across Lumen's network. So Lumen and Corning have partnered together with Corning's next-generation fiber capabilities and Lumen's incredibly wide capabilities and scope of our network, to connect these new data centers all across the country and to deliver them directly to customers.
Thanks to Corning's next-gen fiber technology, Lumen has become the trusted network for AI.
Now, the story behind Lumen, our Lumen deal bears telling, because it's a great example of how we leverage new innovations to solve real problems. As you heard, we invented new fiber and cables for Gen AI inside the data center, and then we hosted Lumen's leadership at our Corning Laboratories earlier this year to show them our new innovations. And then, once they saw those, they wanted to bring those new high-density products that we invented for Gen AI into the outside plant. And so we accelerated our development to do just that. Now, our products put two to four, two to four times more fiber in Lumen's existing conduits, tremendously increasing the value of their conduit network.
The map shows how Lumen is positioned to be able to provide the connections between data center campuses, which are represented by the blue circles, as their ducts align to many existing and future data center locations. Now, we look forward to showing you these new cables as well in our product demo area a little later this morning. I've covered a lot this morning. I hope you better understand the Optical Springboard plan that doubles our revenue by capturing the growth of the cyclical and secular trends, doing so with our unique, new to the industry innovations. We'll do this utilizing our existing footprint, delivering strong incrementals and increased net income. As of Q2, we're well ahead of plan, driven by the strong uptake of our Gen AI solutions, which will enable Enterprise growth of more than 25% a year for the next three years.
Our deep commitment to innovation, low-cost manufacturing, and advantaged customer access creates a long-term, sustainable competitive advantage for us. So thank you again for being in our house today, and I look forward to talking with you more during our visit. And I believe the demos and the tour are really going to bring to life everything we've discussed this morning. So before we do that, I'll turn it over to Ed.
All right. All right, good morning, everyone. It's great to be here, and I hope by now you have a great understanding of our Springboard plan and what we're trying to deliver over the next several years. Today, I'll spend my time highlighting the key takeaways we shared with you, how we're tracking against our Springboard plan, provide context on our new operating margin target, and then wrap up the morning before we let you tour this amazing facility. So first, let me just start by recapping some of the key takeaways that you heard from Wendell and John and Mike today. So first, in Display, we are raising glass prices to ensure we can maintain stable U.S. dollar net income. Our price actions, in combination with hedges we have in place, will deliver consistent profitability.
We have the majority of our yen exposure hedged for 2025 and 2026, and we have hedges in place beyond 2026. They're not at our 2024 Core rate of 107, but they're much better than the current spot rate. Our price increases offset the weaker yen in our hedges, and therefore, we will maintain the same profitability. As a result, we do not plan to recast our 2024 financials. Just one second. Oh. All right, sorry for that little technical difficulty. Hopefully, you all can hear me. What I was gonna say is that we expect to deliver net income of $900 million-$950 million next year, and expect to deliver net income margin of 25%, consistent with the last five years. In Optical Communications, we recently achieved several major milestones.
First, we shared with you in June that we expected our Enterprise business to grow to a 25% annual growth rate over the next four years. Strong demand for our Gen AI products drove outperformance in the second quarter, and our Enterprise business grew 42% year over year, and I'm happy to share that strong demand continues, and we expect Enterprise to grow by more than 40% in the third quarter. Second, we reached an agreement with Lumen Technologies for our new Gen AI fiber and cable system, which reserves 10% of our global fiber capacity for each of the next two years. And if you wanna quantify that opportunity in terms of revenue, it's roughly 10% of our Optical Communications revenue.
Third, we're launching a new product set to support the government's effort to connect the unconnected, known as BEAD, and we're seeing strong momentum in the procurement process. Just a few months ago, only one state had received preliminary approval, and now 35 states have, and we shared with you today how we're thinking about our powerful incrementals in the context of our Springboard plan, and we've quantified it for you by providing an operating margin target of 20% by the end of 2026, and I'll expand on that in a few minutes, so overall, we are feeling really good about our progress on Springboard, and as you heard us say, today is about Springboard and the progress against our long-term plans. It's not about the third quarter.
We'll be with you in several weeks to go through all the details of the quarter, but for now, I'd like to reiterate our guidance that we gave in July for the quarter. Our third quarter guidance was to grow sales to approximately $3.7 billion, with EPS in the range of $0.50-$0.54, and the quarter is going very well. We'll update you on our third quarter earnings call. Now, let me take a moment to update you on how we're tracking against our $3 billion high confidence plan and our $5 billion non-risk adjusted Springboard plan. So let me explain the $1.3 billion dot point you see on the chart. Our Q2 2024 sales were $3.6 billion. Our Q4 2023 sales were $3.27 billion, and the difference is three hundred and thirty million. When you annualize that, you get one point three billion dollars.
That trend continues into quarter three. The additional sequential growth implied in our Q3 guidance increases our run rate in the third quarter to $1.7 billion. As you can see, we are running well ahead of our Springboard plan run rate. That being said, please remember, we're only a little over two quarters into a 12-quarter plan. Springboard is a milestone-based plan evolving over the next three years. We shared some of those recent milestones with you today, but we still have plenty more ahead of us, a lot of springs yet to activate. We'll update you as we continue to hit significant milestones. Now, a key component of our Springboard plan is to deliver powerful incrementals.
We have the capacity and technical capabilities in place to add more than $3 billion in annualized sales with minimal cash investment, and the cost and capital are already reflected in our financials. This means that we expect to grow profit significantly faster than sales. Our Springboard plan has always included a profitability target, and we plan to share that target with you after meeting a number of key milestones. Today, you heard the following: We're on a strong growth trajectory, and we've returned to year-over-year sales and EPS growth in the second quarter, and that momentum continues into the third quarter. We've received strong adoption of our Gen AI products, and that's powering growth in Optical Communications. And importantly, as John told you today, we have taken appropriate price actions in Display to maintain profitability, so our Display business provides a strong profitability base.
So we're meeting a number of those critical milestones. Our Springboard operating margin target is 20% by the end of 2026. The target leads to an improving return profile, with profitability growing significantly faster than sales. Let me provide some additional context on our march up. Our operating margin was 17.4% in the second quarter, a 110 basis point improvement as compared to our Springboard base Q4 2023, where we were 16.3%, and we expect operating margin to continue to expand in the third quarter. And interestingly, you can see the powerful incrementals at work in our Q2 results. Second quarter sales were $3.6 billion, up 10% from the Springboard base of $3.27 billion in Q4 of 2023.
If I apply that same math on operating margin dollars, it's up 17% from Q4, and EPS is up 21%, both almost double the growth rate of sales. Now we've shared what we mean by powerful incrementals and set a clear profitability target. Let me spend a minute on capital allocation. Our priorities remain the same. We prioritize investing for organic growth opportunities, and we believe this creates the most value for our shareholders over the long term. Because we have the capacity and technical capabilities in place to add more than $3 billion in annualized sales with minimal cash investment, we expect to generate a significant amount of cash flow over the Springboard timeframe. Now, we also seek to maintain a strong and efficient balance sheet, and we're in great shape here.
We have one of the longest debt tenors in the S&P 500. Our current average debt maturity is 23 years, with only about $1 billion in debt coming due in the next 5 years, and we have no significant debt coming due in any given year, and finally, we expect to continue our strong track record of returning excess cash to shareholders. Since 2013, we bought back half of our outstanding shares, or almost 800 million shares. This generated about $15 billion in value for our shareholders. Because of our growing confidence in Springboard, we started to buy back shares in the second quarter, and we've continued in the third quarter. Now, stepping back, the core of Springboard stems from our focused and cohesive portfolio.
Today, you heard from John and Mike on their priorities and milestones related to Springboard, and how our core capabilities are enabling our success. As a reminder, we invest in three Core Technologies: Glass Science, Ceramic Science, and Optical Physics, along with four proprietary Manufacturing and Engineering Platforms. We are the world leaders in each. And today, we focus our efforts on five Market-A ccess Platforms. This is our 3-4-5 approach. Our probability of success increases as we apply more of our world-class capabilities. Our cost of innovation declines as we reapply talent and repurpose our existing assets. Additionally, by combining the capabilities in our portfolio, we create higher and more sustainable competitive barriers, and we delight our customers.
Focusing our portfolio means we direct 80% of our resources on opportunities that use existing capabilities from at least two of the three areas in our portfolio. Few competitors can match our expertise in any one of our core capabilities. When we combine them, we can create market-leading positions. So thank you for joining us today as we provided critical updates on our key milestones of our Springboard plan. We shared an update on our Display price increases, key secular and cyclical drivers of growth in Optical Communications, and the quantification of our powerful incrementals by providing a target of 20% operating margin by the end of 2026. We look forward to keeping you updated as we continue to deliver our next milestones in our Springboard plan. Now, I'll turn it back over to Ann.
Okay, great. That ends the formal presentations, and it's the end of our webcast, so please disconnect all lines.