Welcome to MACOM's second fiscal quarter 2026 conference call. This call is being recorded today, Thursday, May 7th, 2026. At this time, all participants on a listen only mode. I will now turn the call to Mr. Steve Ferranti, MACOM's Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Mr. Ferranti, please go ahead.
Thank you, Livia. Good morning, and welcome to our call to discuss MACOM's financial results for the second fiscal quarter of 2026. I would like to remind everyone that our discussion today will contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to certain risks and uncertainties as defined in the safe harbor for forward-looking statements contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those discussed today.
For a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could result in those differences, we refer you to MACOM's filings with the SEC. Management statements during this call will also include a discussion of certain adjusted non-GAAP financial information. A reconciliation of GAAP to adjusted non-GAAP results are provided in the company's press release and related Form 8-K, which was filed with the SEC today. With that, I'll turn over the call to Steve Daly, President and CEO of MACOM.
Thank you, and good morning. I will begin today's call with a general company update. After that, Jack Kober, our Chief Financial Officer, will review our Q2 results for fiscal year 2026. When Jack is finished, I will provide revenue and earnings guidance for the third quarter of FY 2026, and then we will be happy to take some questions. Revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2026 was $289 million, and adjusted EPS was $1.09 per diluted share. Demand for our products is strong across our three end markets, and our backlog continues to build. Our sequential financial performance improved across most key metrics in Q2, including gross and operating margins. Our Q2 book-to-bill ratio was 1.5 to 1, and orders booked and shipped within the quarter was 18% of total revenue.
All three end markets had exceptional bookings, with notable outperformance in the data center. Our backlog remains at a record level. We believe this strength reflects that we are in the right markets with the right products at the right time. Turning to recent market trends, Q2 revenue performance by end market was as expected, with all end markets growing sequentially. Industrial and Defense was $120.7 million. Data center was $98.2 million. Telecom was $70.1 million. Data center was up approximately 14.5% sequentially. Telecom was up 3% sequentially. I&D was up 2.5% sequentially. Both I&D and data center revenues are at record levels. As we look to the second half of our fiscal year, we expect data center and I&D revenues to continue to lead our growth.
With the exceptional first half bookings, we are positioned for a strong second half. Additionally, we expect to see momentum from our telecom segment as we enter our fiscal 2027 due to the anticipated timing of LEO space production programs and associated revenues. We believe our growth strategy of strengthening our core technologies and expanding our product portfolio around 3 central themes, highest power, highest frequency, and highest data rate, is working. We believe we are establishing ourselves as a differentiated strategic supplier to our customers. Next, I'll quickly summarize progress on our 5 goals for FY 2026, which we outlined on our last call. First, taking advantage of the data center opportunity.
We continue to enhance our design and manufacturing capabilities to support our customers in this market, we are pleased to raise our data center FY 2026 revenue growth base case from 35%-40% to over 60%. Second, expanding our 5G market share. We have developed 2 new process technologies which will provide us with both performance and cost benefits. Gen4 GaN is our next generation process for high-power linear amplifiers for 5G base stations, we expect our new IPD processes will enable us to insource these components while achieving better electrical performance at a lower cost. Our technology teams have done a great job making these processes a reality. Third, extending our leadership in A&D. I am pleased that we recently received a Defense Manufacturing Technology Achievement Award sponsored by the Joint Defense Manufacturing Technology Panel.
The panel includes members from various armed services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. This award reflects our progress to increase manufacturability of advanced GaN technology. Our team continues to innovate, and we look forward to introducing a wide range of advanced GaN MMIC products in the next 12 to 18 months. Fourth, continued development of advanced III-V semiconductor technologies. We continue to strengthen our semiconductor processing expertise and capabilities. As an example, our team has done amazing work on ohmic regrowth for advanced high-efficiency GaN amplifiers. In addition, we are developing advanced indium phosphide epitaxial stacks for our next generation optical products for the data center. Last, management of our capital and investments. As we discussed last quarter, we have numerous strategic investment activities that we believe will support our fiscal 2027 and 2028 revenue growth objectives.
We take a disciplined approach to managing capital investments for near and long-term success. I'll take a moment to review each of our three core markets in more depth. Data center. Based on customer engagements and general market trends, we expect 1.6T deployments inside the data center to continue to be strong throughout calendar 2026. Today, our revenue growth is primarily being driven by increased pluggable optical modules and optical cable production volumes using our 800 and 1.6T PAM4 products. As a reminder, our portfolio is highly diversified, supporting NRZ, PAM4, and coherent modulations across EML, silicon photonics, and VCSEL-based architectures. We are also seeing modest growth from our lower data rate 100G single-mode and multi-mode products. Demand for our 200 gig per lane photodetectors continues to grow, supporting 800G and 1.6T optical connectivity.
Part of our near-term and long-term growth strategy is to expand our photonics portfolio with both higher speed photodetectors and CW lasers. We are seeing growing interest in coherent light solutions, as coherent modulation can enable higher bandwidth performance with significantly improved power efficiency, especially in shorter reach applications. We believe coherent light solutions will expand, we are well-positioned to support this trend. We continue to promote linear equalizer products to help extend the reach of copper interconnects at 800G and 1.6T. We are working closely with customers to address their specific program requirements and various use cases. In many cases, our newest products are designed for co-packaged and highly integrated architectures like CPO and NPO. We can differentiate in this market based on our strong customer relationships, IC and system design expertise, as well as our unique photonic materials.
In summary, as we look ahead, we see many new large opportunities in the data center. We believe our SAM is increasing due to the combination of AI-driven market growth combined with our product portfolio expansion. Our strategy is to collaborate with the leaders in the industry and support their connectivity needs, whether it's scale up, scale out, or scale across. Turning to our I&D business, we are seeing many growth opportunities across the industrial and defense markets, primarily in the defense segment. Comparing our first half results of FY 2026 with the first half of FY 2025, our I&D business grew by 22%. Overall demand remains healthy, and notably, we expect revenues from our top 25 defense customers to significantly increase from FY 2025 to FY 2026.
Our defense customer base is large and very broad, and we typically support radar systems, missile and missile defense systems, drone and drone defense systems, communication systems, and wideband electronic warfare systems. Today, we support a wide range of production programs across a diverse range of applications. We are also involved with redesigns and upgrades of existing platforms to improve performance against new threats and to improve overall system performance with more capable and modern electronics. Finally, the DoD is pushing our customers for rapid design and deployment of new systems and capabilities, spanning from modern radars to better electronic warfare systems, new space-based sensors, and even more secure communications. These systems are typically using higher frequencies, higher RF or microwave power levels, and higher levels of integration. In some cases, high-performance optical systems are deployed, such as RF over fiber for remote antenna systems.
The pace of innovation in the defense market is accelerating by both the traditional defense primes and the newer, more nimble defense companies. These demanding requirements play directly to MACOM's strengths. We offer our customers turnkey support from custom chip design to subsystem solutions. All of this is driving incremental semiconductor content growth opportunities and opening up new design win opportunities. MACOM has numerous competitive advantages within the I&D market. At the heart of these is MACOM's deep expertise in high-performance IC design capabilities spanning RF, microwave, millimeter wave, and optical domains. We have a growing team of system designers with architectural knowledge, which enable us to engage much earlier in our customers' project design cycles. We present the full scope of MACOM's capabilities to help solve the customer's technical challenges.
MACOM also offers European and U.S.-based wafer fab and U.S.-based hybrid manufacturing capabilities at scale with proven technology, reliability, and long-term supply assurance. Factors that are increasingly important as defense customers prioritize domestic sourcing and supply chain security. Within the telecom end market, satellite-based broadband access and direct to device, or D2D, opportunities remain robust with numerous LEO networks in the planning and production stages. The number of LEO satellites planned to be launched continues to grow as more companies compete to provide commercial broadband data, voice, and video communications by satellite. These networks typically use microwave or millimeter wave frequencies and free space optics, or FSO, communications for satellite to satellite or satellite to ground communications. Today, we are supporting LEO broadband constellations and D2D programs that are either in development, low rate initial production, or LRIP, or full production.
LEO and MEO constellations have many key areas where MACOM can contribute, including large phase array antennas with active beam steering, D2D links operating at UHF or S-bands, data center-like electronics with high-speed optical links transferring data within or across the satellite, free space optics for satellite to satellite communications, and ground terminal and gateway linearization for high-power transmitters. I'll note the backhaul networks for these constellations continues to move higher in frequencies. The 40 nanometer GaN technology, which MACOM recently licensed from Hughes Research Laboratories, HRL, is being transferred to MACOM's fab. This technology will enable high-capacity satellite links using E-band, W-band, and D-band. Ground stations and gateways are also a key part of the LEO networks. MACOM specializes in designing products and solutions that overcome nonlinearity of RF, microwave, and millimeter wave signal transmission for satellite communication systems.
In many cases, ground to satellite links prefer linearization of SSPAs or TWTAs to boost the linear power efficiency of the link. Turning towards the 5G segment of telecom, our global team continues to secure new business and macro base stations driven by the need for high-performance amplifiers and multiband radios. Our RF power team is now sampling our new Gen4 GaN products to customers, which we believe will further improve our competitiveness. We expect the global RAN market will be flat in 2026, with some regional variations. However, for MACOM, we expect our future 5G growth will be driven by content and market share gains as we have, one, recently added new resources. Two, roll out new products and technologies like Gen4 GaN, SOI control products, and power amplifier modules, or PAMs. Three, gain market share in high and low power macro and MIMO amplifiers.
We are making good progress improving the overall performance and competitiveness of our base station portfolio, especially in the 2.7 to 3.5 gigahertz bands. Last, we believe the cable TV infrastructure market segment is also improving. We have been releasing new products and working with customers on design wins to support the upgrades from DOCSIS 3.1 to DOCSIS 4.0. Before turning it over to Jack, I would like to quickly highlight how teamwork across the organization directly impacts our financial results, with operations and engineering being a great example. Our North Carolina fab has been increasing wafer production while simultaneously improving yields and lowering cycle times. This performance is driving improved customer satisfaction and contributing to new business and enabling us to win new customers.
Our Massachusetts fab has been installing complex processing equipment to support production ramps in some areas while maintaining production continuity in other areas. Seamlessly adding this capacity is enabling us to gain market share from our competitors. Our global planning team continues to partner with key suppliers and partners to ensure that customers are getting the deliveries they need on time. This results in brand loyalty and enables us to fully leverage our entire technology portfolio into the market and capture market share. These examples illustrate how dedication, commitment to excellence, teamwork, and coordination of our manufacturing, engineering, and planning community is directly leading to market share gains and revenue growth. In summary, our strategy is to continue to build a best-in-class diversified semiconductor portfolio that will enable MACOM to capture a larger share of the 3 markets we focus on.
Our agility and strong teamwork across our organization helps us address opportunities and ultimately beat the competition that are often larger and have more resources. Jack will now provide a more detailed review of our financial results.
Thanks, Steve. Good morning to everyone. The results from our second quarter improved from Q1, and MACOM again achieved multiple new quarterly records associated with our financial performance. We have seen operational improvements across the organization, which is driving increased revenue growth and profitability. Fiscal Q2 revenue was $289 million, up 6.4% sequentially and up over 22% year-on-year, driven by growth across all three of our end markets, with data center leading, followed by I&D and telecom. The strong bookings across all our end markets resulted in a book-to-bill of 1.5 to 1. This was the largest quarterly bookings in the company's history. Adjusted gross profit for fiscal Q2 was $169 million, or 58.5% of revenue. This represents a gross margin increase of 90 basis points over the prior quarter.
We continue to make solid progress to increase our capacity and improve product yields, and we expect to see ongoing incremental progress across our fab operations during the remainder of fiscal 2026. The increase in product demand across the business have resulted in improved utilization of our operations and supported the recent gross margin improvement. As we move forward, we expect ongoing sequential gross margin improvements through the remainder of fiscal 2026. Total adjusted operating expense for our second quarter was $88.6 million, consisting of research and development expense of $59.1 million, and selling, general, and administrative expenses of $29.5 million. The anticipated sequential increase in adjusted operating expense compared to Q1 was primarily driven by ongoing R&D investments and employee-related costs.
As our business expands, we expect associated OpEx growth will be primarily related to increased R&D investments and higher variable costs. Consistent with past practice, we will remain very focused on managing our OpEx to balance long-term revenue growth and profitability with continued investment in the business to support all of our end markets. Depreciation expense for fiscal Q2 2026 remained relatively stable at $9 million, slightly above the prior quarter. Adjusted operating income in fiscal Q2 was another record, coming in at $80.5 million, up 8.8% sequentially from $74 million in fiscal Q1 2026, and up 34.5% year-over-year. I would like to note that our Q2 adjusted operating margin was 27.8% and has increased over the last three fiscal quarters.
We expect our adjusted operating margin to be approximately 30% next quarter, highlighting the leverage in our financial operating model. For fiscal Q2, we had adjusted net interest income of $6.5 million, a decrease of approximately $200,000 sequentially from $6.7 million in Q1. The slight decrease was primarily due to the planned repayment of $161 million of our 2026 convertible notes during the quarter. We are pleased to have been able to retire this debt and further delever our balance sheet. Our adjusted income tax rate in fiscal Q2 was 3% and resulted in an expense of approximately $2.6 million. We expect our adjusted income tax rate to remain at 3% for the remainder of fiscal 2026.
As of April third, 2026, our deferred tax asset balances were $202 million. We anticipate further utilizing our deferred tax asset balances, including R&D tax credits, through the remainder of fiscal 2026 and beyond. Depending on the jurisdictional mix of our income, we expect the U.S. government's recent tax legislation to support a low to mid-single digit adjusted tax rate for the next few fiscal years. Fiscal Q2 adjusted net income increased approximately 7.8% to $84.3 million, compared to $78.2 million in fiscal Q1 2026. Adjusted earnings per fully diluted share was $1.09, utilizing a share count of 77.6 million shares, compared to $1.02 of adjusted earnings per share in fiscal Q1 2026.
We continue to optimize the business's performance, which has contributed to sequential increases in our adjusted operating income and EPS over the past 11 quarters. Now on to operational balance sheet and cash flow items. Our Q2 accounts receivable balance was $160 million, consistent with our Q1 2026 balance. Our day sales outstanding averaged 50 days compared to the previous quarter at 54 days. Inventories were $252.2 million at quarter end, up sequentially from $238.9 million, largely driven by additional work in process inventory at our fabs, as well as higher balances to support increasing demand across the business. Inventory turns remained steady at 1.9 times, the same level as the preceding quarter. Fiscal Q2 cash flow from operations was approximately $78.7 million, up $35.8 million sequentially.
The sequential change was primarily due to the typical timing of supplier payments and other changes in working capital balances. We expect that our Q3 cash flow from operations will be in excess of $80 million. As our business continues to grow, there will be variations in cash flow from quarter to quarter. MACOM's business model has demonstrated strong cash flow from operations over the past few years. As an example, our cash flow from operations was $163 million in fiscal year 2024, $235 million in fiscal year 2025, and we believe we are on track for our cash flow from operations to exceed $300 million for fiscal year 2026.
Capital expenditures totaled $13.2 million for fiscal Q2. We estimate fiscal year 2026 CapEx to be in the range of $55 million-$65 million as we expand capacity to meet demand requirements across our end markets and also upgrade and enhance our production and engineering equipment as well as our facilities. Moving on to other balance sheet items. Cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments as of the end of the second fiscal quarter were $664.9 million. We view our cash balance as a strategic asset that can be used to help fund ongoing investments to support our growing business.
We are in a net cash position of approximately $325 million as of April third, 2026 when comparing our cash and short-term investments to the book value of our remaining $340 million of convertible notes, which mature in December 2029. Our strategy has been to focus on growing our profitability and managing our operating asset base, which has supported an improved return on invested capital over the past several years, demonstrating our goal of building long-term financial strength for the company. During the first two fiscal quarters of 2026, the entire MACOM team has contributed to helping achieve these record financial results. This hard work has established a strong foundation for us to build upon, and I look forward to the second half of our fiscal 2026. I will now turn the discussion back over to Steve.
Thank you, Jack. MACOM expects revenue in fiscal Q3, ending July 3, 2026 to be in the range of $331 million-$339 million. Adjusted gross margin is expected to be in the range of 59%-60%. Adjusted earnings per share is expected to be between $1.31 and $1.37 based on 78.5 million fully diluted shares. We expect sequential revenue growth in each of our 3 end markets.
We expect that data center will achieve approximately 35% sequential growth, and we expect industrial and defense to achieve growth approaching 10% and telecom to achieve low single-digit sequential growth. As Jack highlighted, we are excited to deliver more growth and profitability during the second half of FY 2026. As we continue to scale the business, we expect to see increased operating margins and profitability. I would now like to ask the operator to take any questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, to ask a question at this time, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. As a reminder, in the consideration of time, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. One moment for our first question. The first question coming from the line of Blayne Curtis with Jefferies. Your line is now open.
Hey, good morning and great results. Maybe I want to start on gross margin. Obviously, there's a lot of revenue drivers, but, you know, 100 basis points in the quarter. Can you just talk about volume and then mix? Obviously, data center is outperforming, so that must be a driver. I just want to see how to think about it, particularly as you go through the rest of the calendar year.
Yes. Thank you for the question, Blayne. Certainly volume is contributing to the improvements in the gross margins. We are seeing that our Lowell fab, as well as our North Carolina fab have been increasing outputs, that's certainly having a positive effect on gross margins. The other thing I'll add is you're correct to notice that our data center revenue as a total percentage of our revenue is increasing. In some instances, that's contributing to the improvements in gross margins, and in other areas, it isn't. We in all of our market segments, we have a normal distribution of gross margins. But generally speaking, the team has been very focused on yield enhancement, efficiencies, cost reductions as we're scaling across a whole wide range of technologies, some of which I talked about in the prepared remarks.
Generally speaking, a lot of great work. As Jack mentioned in his commentary, we expect continued improvements in gross margin. A few quarters ago, we had said publicly we were setting a target to exit the year around 59%. I think today we're updating that number to be most likely closer to 60%. Jack, maybe you can comment further.
I think you covered off on it, Stephen. There's definitely multiple factors that are helping to drive our gross margin improvements that we've seen here in the March quarter, where we're up 90 basis points. If you look to the midpoint of the guide, being up 100 basis points. It does become a bit more challenging as the gross margins go up to squeeze more savings out of it, but our teams are continuing to work hard. As Stephen had mentioned, we expect to see further gross margin improvements as we work our way through this year and into next year.
Thanks. I wanted to ask, you mentioned coherent light. There's a lot of talk about scale across these days. Kind of just curious your thoughts on how that market's developing, and then maybe a silly question, is it in data center or telecom?
We would put coherent light in the data center category. As you know, historically, we've put the metro long haul, which is more DCI, in the telecom segment. We, we are definitely focused on that, and this is an area where MACOM has really nice differentiation. You know, historically, there's been more of ZR-type platforms, and now they're moving to really higher data rate, higher gigabaud data rates.
Just in the last 3 years, you've seen platforms go from 64 gigabaud all the way up to 128. Even people are talking as high as 192. This is an area of strength for MACOM. Depending on what hyperscalers do in terms of deploying coherent light, you know, we wanna participate. We are in a very good position. It does touch a number of our product lines where we really have differentiated technology.
Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Tom O'Malley with Barclays. Your line is now open.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. My first is on the SatCom business in LEO. Through the earnings period here, you've heard companies talk about 7,000 to 10,000 launches over the next 3 years. Would you agree with that number? Maybe if you could spend some time talking on the content per satellite, if that's possible. You mentioned a lot of the different products, the phased array antenna, the optical electronics, et cetera. Some framework for thinking about the upside that could offer you. On the timing of that, it looks like telecom's up low single-digits in June, but you mentioned it improves in the back half of the fiscal year. Do you see a substantial step-up in the September quarter there?
Thanks for those questions, Tom. There's a lot there. Let me try to address, you know, as many as I can. I think it's important to put in perspective that MACOM has been servicing the space market for decades. We are a known entity, not only on the defense side, but more and more so on the commercial side. I think you're correct to highlight that there's growth in terms of the pure number of LEOs being launched, and these are typically smaller satellites going on affordable launch vehicles and whether it's servicing broadband, direct to cell, or even, you know, future talk about, you know, data centers in space, you know, we wanna participate in those. You know, we don't necessarily wanna comment on what the absolute quantities are.
I think there's a lot of information in the market about how much this market is growing. I think there's good information out there that's probably more accurate than ours. I would just highlight that we are absolutely engaged with the major players across the market. As I mentioned in my commentary, it really plays to our strengths. Yes, there's certainly huge demand and we're trying to focus on getting wins as best we can. In terms of the timing of our various programs, I would just say that we have active LEO production programs today. We have more that are in the sort of LRIP phase.
One of the larger programs that we've talked about in the past is in the phase of delivering what we call Electronic Modules. Basically our customers sort of finalizing their system design, and we do expect that to go into full rate production later this year or early next year, which is consistent with what we've said in the past. I don't think you should expect a step-up. You're going to see a ramp-up, and that will happen during the course of calendar 2027. Just as a reminder to everybody, we're involved in really 3 pieces of the puzzle for these networks. The first is on the satellite, what people refer to as the payload. The second is the gateways.
The third is, that we are seeing, opportunities in the terminals, with some of our components. Very exciting time for MACOM to be participating, across so many different customers. Our module and our chip design team is very busy, satisfying the requirements in this market.
Thank you. Now our next question coming from the line of Tore Svanberg with Stifel. Your line is now open.
Thank you, and congratulations on the strong results. I had a question on the data center growth, now basically targeting more than 60%. You know, just curious, above and beyond just higher CapEx from some of your end customers, what's, you know, what's some of the delta here, some of the new revenue that's layering in?
Very much, the expansion of our product portfolio, and we've talked about really over the last 12 months, the ramp-up of some of our optical components. That has certainly helped drive some of the growth. I would say generally speaking, our focus is on 1.6T, 800G. These are areas where we're seeing a lot of strength. We expect that strength to continue. In fact, we're seeing more and more demand as we sort of enter our second half. In terms of the new revenue or the new categories of revenue for our fiscal 2027, certainly, the higher data rates, so 3.2T, possibly some coherent light, ramp-ups.
Also depending on the work that we're doing with our laser portfolio, we may be able to add some revenue to our fiscal 2027 or even fiscal 2028 on CW lasers. A lot of good activity there. We have been also, as everybody knows, engaged with people that are deploying copper in providing equalizers not only onboard, you know, the PC boards, but also cable-based. Very excited about those opportunities as well.
Very good. As my follow-up, Steve, you talked more than usual on this call about, you know, team collaboration, you know, making sure capacity is in place. You know, sounds like, you know, your operations executions is allowing you to gain some share. You know, just curious why, you know, why you brought that up on this particular call. Are you seeing competitors perhaps not have enough capacity and not good planning to keep up? Or is there, you know, something else that's driving that inflection point? Thank you.
Well, I think, you know, Jack and I are just, you know, privileged to be able to represent our employees. I think it's important to highlight the work that they're doing in collaborating to make these results happen. As you know, last year, the company grew by over 30%, this year we're on a path, certainly to be in that range or higher. We have a lot of different technologies ramping at the same time, that absolutely requires coordination, collaboration, good, clean discussions with customers to set proper expectations. We just wanted to highlight that.
In terms of, you know, sort of opportunities, I'll just note that because there is certainly some constraints within the data center market, we believe that's opening up interesting opportunities for MACOM, including, by the way, what I would consider the legacy class of lasers. As many customers are, and competitors are, pivoting to more, let's say, the higher power or CW lasers to support silicon photonics, that's creating a little bit of a gap in DFB lasers. And we have a very strong, broad DFB laser portfolio that can support what I would consider legacy data center 100G modules. You know, that could be a great business for us over the next 1 to 2 years, and those products are ready today.
Thank you. Our next question in queue coming from the line of Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company. Your line is now open.
Thanks for asking. Let me ask a question. Steve, I guess just wanted to follow up on the laser question. I think in the past, you said you had a couple of customers that were evaluating your CW lasers. You thought it would still sort of be a 6 to 12-month eval process. Could you give us any update on how you're feeling about the CW laser opportunity? You know, are you more confident that those could ramp and contribute to fiscal 2027 growth?
I don't think too much has changed in the last three months. We have excellent optical performance of our 75 milliwatt class lasers. Customers have tested and validated performance. What our fab is doing today is dialing in a process of record. That work is not complete, we continue to tweak the process to optimize really reliability. It's all about reliability. Typically, in these systems, the weakest link is the laser, you need to make sure you have a very robust laser. There's a lot of qual work running in parallel with developing a process of record. That work continues, and that's all MACOM internal work.
When we're ready and we feel like we have a reliable product, then we'll start working with module customers so that they can start their module quals. After that comes the hyperscaler qualification. When you add all that up and look at the timeline, you're really talking about potentially, and this is assuming everything goes well, and oftentimes it doesn't, you know, a fiscal 2027 or 2028 timeframe of contribution. We are absolutely getting pull from the market. We know there's demand. We just have a lot of work to do to convince ourselves that we're ready to ramp this kind of a product into high volume.
I would, at this stage, not put your CW laser, you know, in your models, certainly not for fiscal 2026 or I would say even 2027. I think there's gonna be a lot of other great things happening that will allow us to, perhaps not only do as well as we've done this year in terms of growth, but maybe even exceed it next year because we have a lot of other irons in the fire.
Thank you for that. I guess wanting to come back on the utilization rates. I think, you know, over the past couple of years, you had mentioned the Lowell utilization rate was sort of suffering from, you know, some puts and takes in a couple of the larger defense programs and I think, you know, lower demand on the industrial side, MRI in particular. Has that utilization rate come back with the IND business recovering, or do you still feel like there's further room for improvement in the utilization rates of Lowell? Obviously, that could be a margin tailwind as utilization increases.
I think you're correct in those comments. We are seeing increased utilization on our traditional Lowell-based defense business. Our defense business this year is trending to, you know, certainly over 20% full year growth. That, much of that, not all of it, but much of it is coming out of our Lowell fab. That is beneficial to the, you know, the, you know, gross and operating margins. Your commentary about our MRI business, which we categorize as industrial, is also improving. We have a very strong franchise for high voltage, non-magnetic, really kilovolt level diodes that are used in these MRI coils. We are seeing positive trends on that business. We expect those trends to continue.
Yes, those two things are definitely helping the Lowell utilization. There's 2 other important things going on in our Lowell fab as well. The first is developing the advanced GaN that I talked about in my prepared remarks. The second is the ramping up of our optical product line within the Lowell, which is an indium phosphide-based product.
Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Sean O'Loughlin with TD Cowen. Your line is now open.
Great. Hi, guys. Thanks for letting me ask a question, and congrats on the really solid results and momentum. First question, I just wanted to get maybe an update or offer you the opportunity to update some of your comments on the fiscal 2026 segment growth other than Datacom. You know, we got the 60% growth. I think last quarter, we talked about high teens growth in I&D. You kinda just alluded to maybe over 20 and the high single digits in telecom. Any, you know, any updated thoughts there? Is that still what we should be thinking about?
I'll make some comments, and then maybe Jack can also talk about sort of P&L related items. I do think we have a solid plan for 2026. As I mentioned, our revenue growth is gonna be driven by data center and defense. Today, we're definitely trending towards top line in that sort of 30% range. I can tell you that last year, we did about 32%, and it would be nice to beat that. We also ideally would like to exit the year with at least 60% margin. We're not sure if that's gonna happen. We still have a lot of wood to chop between now and the end of September, which is the end of our fiscal year.
We do see a path to having, you know, strong revenue and earnings growth. Earnings growth should be quite nice this year, certainly coming from the second half. In terms of your commentary specifically about I&D and telecom, I think, we're thinking above 20% today for I&D. We're gonna try to push telecom to be low double digit.
Yeah. I think the only other item I would add, obviously, the defense piece has been quite strong for us over the past year plus. Industrial, we've been working our way through that. We touched upon the medical piece of industrial with the last question. More broadly, within industrial, it is a fairly broad category, we have seen a bit of an uptick there that's helping out with our Lowell utilization. It's also driving some of that revenue or top line improvement that we see in that combined industrial and defense end market.
Really, as we look at, filling out the rest of the P&L with some of that revenue growth, we are very much focused on improving those earnings and improving the leverage and the drop-through, from an operating income and also from an EPS perspective as we work our way through the remainder of 2026, and then, focus more on 2027 as well.
Thanks. That's helpful color. Quick follow-up, just on the input side, I know that indium phosphide is one of the materials that you use, and so, you know, I don't wanna over-index to these comments, but we've had some comments from public substrate suppliers about price increases. Just maybe generally across your manufacturing footprint, is that something that you're either having to absorb, and there's a timing mismatch? Or is the pricing environment for a lot of these products such that you're able to sort of pass those through? Or is that not really something that you're seeing outside of indium phosphide? Thanks.
Thanks for the question. I'm not sure we want to get into the cost basis of any materials we buy. We're constantly buying gases, precious metals, gold, you know, indium phosphide substrates, silicon carbide substrates. We have a very strong supply chain that works very closely with our partners to make sure we're getting what we want when we need it at a fair price. Although I will mention maybe one thing. You may have seen recently where MACOM announced a small investment in a company called IQE. We put out a press release on April 27th. This is sort of somewhat related to your question.
You people may not be familiar with IQE, they are a U.K.-based company that provides epitaxial services, and recently they went through a fundraising event where MACOM participated. They raised 80 million GBP. We participated with a 45 million GBP investment. Just to break that out very quickly, it was 30 million in equity for about 11% ownership, and a 15 million GBP convertible note. Ultimately, what we did as part of this transaction is put in place a long-term supply agreement to make sure that we have adequate supply of the technologies that we're currently acquiring from them and from others.
The why we did it really revolves around your question, which is, you know, what is MACOM doing to ensure we have strong supply chain security and resiliency? I think this is a great example of a strategic transaction, which is going to sure up not only our business regarding indium phosphide, but also the silicon carbide. Where we stand right now with that is it's going through regulatory approval. There'll be a shareholder vote, and it's expected to close in the next 30 to 60 days.
This is sort of an example of MACOM proactively looking at risk and retiring risk. This will backstop our expected growth, not only as it relates to indium phosphide-based products, but also silicon carbide-based products and some other technologies as well.
Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Will Stein with Truist Securities. Your line is now open.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats on the very strong outlook. The main thing I wanted to ask about was, Stephen, your prepared remarks. You talked about addressing the user terminal market within the LEO satellite industry. This is, I believe, a pretty big change in strategy, at least relative to what I've heard the company talk about. You know, we had the message previously that your focus was gonna be essentially in infrastructure, the satellites and the gateways. User terminals, of course, look more like, you know, it's customer premise equipment, right? It's sort of a consumer market. That's sort of uncharacteristic for you. Can you talk about what changed, what makes you want to address that market, what products you're selling, and sort of timing to ramp there? Thank you.
Yes, I think that's a great question. To be clear, when we look at that market, we're looking to be opportunistic. We are seeing some AESA technology basically using a wide range of control products, which would fit very nicely into our GaAs diode-based portfolio. You're correct to conclude we're not chasing SoCs or receivers or highly integrated customized chips for user terminals. That is not the case. We are seeing inbound requests for some of our control products. We will opportunistically look at that.
Great. Thanks. As a follow-up, I guess, the big picture question is you had a huge book to build this quarter. Obviously, that's not all for delivery in fiscal Q3. Can you talk about the spread across end markets and the duration of that? What's changing there? Thank you.
Well, certainly, as I mentioned, the strongest portion of our new orders was in the data center, but I will say that all three markets had a very strong booking event. Typically, these orders will be spread out over multiple quarters. You know, don't really wanna get into any more detail than that. We typically, just as a practice, only recognize bookings that are within a 12-month period as well. You know, this 1.5 book to bill really reflects orders that would be delivered within 12 months.
Thank you. Our next question in queue coming from the line of Christopher Rolland with Susquehanna . Your line is now open.
Thanks so much for the question, guys, and congrats. I wanted to drill down on data center, particularly in June. It's just absolutely inflecting. I don't think we've seen this kinda growth before. My question is, why now? It sounds like a lot of it is optical. When it comes to discrete components, I'm just trying to figure out kinda why the inflection. Is it just a units play? Is there something here like new DSPs that don't contain TIAs and drivers? Or is it really this move to 1.6? What's really driving that over $30 million inflection in data center sequentially? Why now?
Yeah. Thank you for the question. If we pull back and look at the general trends of our data center business over the last 3 years, in 2024, we grew our data center business by 35%. In 2025, we grew it by 48%. Now we're in 2026, you know, forecasting over 60%. The trend is there to see in terms of a long-term growth. Clearly, we're investing in a variety of technologies that would be suitable for this market. We tend to gravitate towards the highest data rate type products. We were one of the early suppliers to the 1.6T rollout, and that is paying big dividends right now as that use case expands across the data center in various hyperscalers.
We're able to solidify strong positions there. Of course, we're overlaying our optical components. We talked about the PDs, the photodetectors. We're working on the lasers. They're not quite there yet. I don't know that there's an inflection point rather than a trend. The trend is that our portfolio is broad in nature, and we're gaining traction at a wide range of customers, selling a variety of functions. As part of our strategy, we want to be diversified. As you know, we don't sell DSPs, just for the record, but we want to support module manufacturers that are, for example, using LPO, or if a particular customer wants to electrify copper, or maybe they want to experiment with coherent or coherent light. These are all things that we're very focused on.
These are long-term activities that are now starting to pay dividends. It's not really an inflection point. I would say it's consistent with really the unit growth within the market as well. We're just trying to keep up with the growth, and that's some SAM expansion as well as portfolio expansion.
The only other item I would add, Steve, is yes, the higher speeds are definitely helping to contribute to the growth that we've seen, but also some of the lower speeds, 100G and below, have continued to hang in there over the past number of quarters and would expect that trend to continue as well.
Excellent. Perhaps as a follow-up on CPO this time, if you could talk about engagements, particularly on kinda large-scale architectures, whether they're trending towards ACC or LE, and kinda your outlook for this market. Do you think this is kind of the next big thing, or this is at this point, a little bit more of a TBD?
Yeah, I would put it in the category of a TBD. We are seeing real demand, real hardware, production ramps on the optical side. That is certainly the vast majority of our revenue today. You know, the electrified cable is a great opportunity for us, and it will be additive in the future. Of course, as I mentioned, we are going after equalizers not only for sort of traditional high speed, you know, 1.6T, but also PCIe and other applications that are closer to compute, let's say. We are very active with our equalizer portfolio at various accounts, and there is a wide range of use cases that we're chasing.
Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Tim Savageaux with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is now open.
Hey, good morning. I'll add my congrats on that guide. Pretty spectacular. My question, or at least first, is just trying to understand more about the size of your photonics or optical device business, which we're talking about more and more here. You know, I don't know what kind of color you're able to provide. You know, does that business get to 10% of data center revenue in any one of these quarters in the second half? That seems possible. Is it already there? You know, as you look at your sequential growth here in Q3 and heading into the second half of the year, is that a meaningful proportion coming from the optical device side? Then I'll follow up.
Great. Thanks for the question. Just to highlight that we don't typically break out revenue by product line, that would be mainly for competitive reasons. What you're asking is a very specific question that we would prefer to not answer so directly. I will say that we have a very strong product. I think our PD has definite advantages over what we're seeing in the market in terms of our ability to mass produce these with industry-leading dark currents, self hermetic chip, you know, lens integrated onto the device. We have developed in our Ann Arbor fab a very strong epi recipe that is providing the industry with very high levels of sensitivity.
All of those things are certainly playing into some of the successes we're having with the PDs. The other thing I'll note is we demonstrated, I think, a year ago, at OFC, the idea of stacking the PDs on our TIAs. That has certainly been beneficial in terms of supporting not only TIA growth, but also PD growth. We do have a diversified portfolio. We're not gonna break out, you know, how much is concentrated on any one product at any one time because it's constantly changing.
Okay. It sounds like it's getting to be material. Maybe we can get a binary answer on that. Either way, I do have a follow-up about, you know, kind of the inflection, and the question is about within data center customer diversification. Right. I mean, you know, you have a very big customer in China who's doing extremely well, and that could be a lot of it. Could you address maybe your reach throughout other major module suppliers in other places, and to what extent is that a big factor versus growth in your current major module customers? Thanks.
Right. I think embedded in that question is really what's your exposure to the hyperscalers? It really starts there in understanding what their needs are and understanding who they're using within their supply chain, we try to align ourselves with both. Depending on the hyperscaler, the platforms, the technology, they're working, we try to align ourselves either directly to their roadmaps or to their vendors' roadmaps. I will say that from maybe 1 year or 2 years ago, our diversity today is far stronger. We see revenue today in scale up, scale out, and scale across.
We are actively positioned in each one of these different areas, and that exposure varies by the module manufacturers, certainly varies by the hyperscaler. But at the end of the day, a lot of this is 1.6T. That is sort of the main event today. It's going to continue, as I mentioned, throughout the course of our fiscal 2026, calendar 2026 and even into 2027. If we pull back and we look at the work that we're doing there, as I mentioned earlier, I think we have potential to do really well in our fiscal 2027, where, you know, obviously, we'll have to wait and see how things go, but we are getting large orders that go out in time that support real production programs.
Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Karl Ackerman with BNP Paribas. Your line is now open.
Yes, thank you. I have two, if I may. Steve, your book-to-bill of 1.5 appears to be a record, certainly multiyear record anyway. Should we expect meaningful capital investments in fabs to support this backlog, or do you have the necessary capacity and assurance of supply to address this growth?
So we are investing in our fabs, and I think that's a very interesting question to ask, and let me just very briefly talk about that. About a year ago, we talked about increasing the wafer production capacity in our North Carolina fab by 30%. We said that would take 15 months. That work should be done by the end of this calendar year. We invested less than $20 million. It was about $15 million-$16 million. We had the opportunity to buy heavily discounted fab equipment from the market. That's baked into our numbers and the capital numbers. When you look at our Massachusetts fab, we are investing in equipment for advanced GaN. We're investing in equipment to expand indium phosphide capacity and production.
We're doing general modernization. In our French fab, we're moving the entire product line from 3-inch to 6-inch. That equipment is already in place. There's been very little money spent to do that. However, we are installing a new MOCVD reactor in France to support some of the volumes that we anticipate in the next 2 years. There is definitely moderate investments. As we think about our business and being diversified, you will not see us greenfielding, building a new fab, building a new factory. We think, you know, we have a target. Now that we hit $1 billion of revenue, we wanna hit $2 billion, and we don't need to buy a fab or build a fab to do it.
What we need to do is expand incrementally capacity within the walls of our existing facilities. That's why, as Jack mentioned in his commentary, you're gonna start to see tremendous earnings growth. Capital should be in that 4% to 5% of revenue range, and we have no major big investments planned. Do you wanna add to that, Jack?
That's correct. I think that the guide that we put out for the remainder of our fiscal year 2026 was $55 million-$65 million, depending on the timing of the completion of some of these items and when the capital was purchased. We've been very disciplined and don't expect the CapEx number to exceed that 5% of revenue. I think history has demonstrated that we'll be very prudent with what we're doing, but also opportunistic to make sure we can meet the capacity requirements that are out there.
Yep, very clear. Thank you. For my follow-up, last quarter, you spoke about how one of your competitors had exited the RF power GaN market. Do you believe that remains a tailwind for you throughout the second half of this year, or has that benefit now largely been realized? Thank you.
The benefit has not been realized, and if there is a benefit, right? If there is, it hasn't been realized yet. It won't happen in 2026. The revenue will start to shine through in 2027. The reason for that is, as we see some of the customers pivot and engage MACOM on new platforms, it takes time for those design wins to translate into revenue. It's really, I would say, best case, a back half of 2027 contribution. You know, as that competitor exited the market, they put in place last-time buys. They built inventory for customers. They're doing it very responsibly. Really what we're intersecting is new programs and new opportunities as opposed to existing programs that are in flight or in production.
Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America Securities. Your line is now open.
Hi, thank you for taking the question. This is Taksh Sankhe on behalf of Vivek, and congrats on the results as well. A follow-up on earlier gross margin question, clearly you said you're investing a lot in incremental capacity. At the same time, you're really scaling a lot in volume, you're improving yields. I just wanted to know the puts and takes into the what really goes inside gross margin medium to long term as you're already kind of at that target model level. Thank you.
Yeah. Not sure if we've put a target model out there, but definitely been working to try and improve our gross margin. As I've stated previously, there's a lot of moving pieces that contribute to the gross margin. We've got some of the normal costs that are out there, including labor, facility costs, equipment depreciation, those types of things, as well as material costs that's all working its way through our gross margin. Yeah, we've been pleased with the progress we've made over the past few quarters. As we look out to the remainder of 2026, look for continuing improvements on gross margin and also as we work our way through 2027.
Got it. And then more of a longer-term question. Obviously fiscal 2026 is really looking exceptional. As we look into 2027, and I think a lot of the same drivers should relatively remain. The 1.6T transition, the 200G PDs and etc. Do you see any other potential risks that would lead to results otherwise? For example, I think an earlier question to supply availability, maybe some component cost increase or any quarterly lumpiness or just your customer exposure mix. Any help in understanding how next year should project should be helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. I think yes to all of those elements that you described, that those are things we deal with on a regular basis. That's also why we're always hesitant to talk about long-term targets and growth because there's a lot of variables that are outside of our control. That said, you know, we are in a position where we have, you know, as I mentioned on my script, we're in the right place at the right time with a great product portfolio, and we have a lot of interest across the three markets. We do expect our fiscal 2027 to be a strong year.
You know, we don't think that this is a, you know, this growth we're seeing in this quarter, sort of a one-time event. We expect to see solid growth in 2027. I think it's the normal list of risks that you brought up. There's always geopolitical supply chain, you know, type issues that you have to deal with. We think we do that reasonably well. That's also of course, offset by new growth opportunities. The defense market right now is very active, not only here in the U.S., but also overseas. Have a growing customer base in Europe. When we were looking at our recent growth rates, you know, between North American and European defense customers, they're both growing at the same rate.
We were very pleased to see that. The Europeans are spending more money on electronics and defense systems, and we're participating in that's certainly gonna help next year. The data center, we're not expecting a slowdown. The hyperscalers continue to invest. That's clear. On the telecom side, we're well-positioned in Satcom, to have a very strong year in our fiscal 2027.
Thank you. There are no further questions in the queue at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Daly for any closing comments.
Thank you. In closing, I would like to thank all of our dedicated and talented employees who made these results possible. Have a nice day.
That concludes our conference for today. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.