Back in March, our co-founder Michael flew out to Nvidia GTC, asked Jensen Huang about his $2 billion in optics investments, and sat down with Gilad Shatner, Nvidia’s SVP of Networking, to talk about the shift from copper to CPO. That trip produced our biggest article of the year and a Youtube video where Michael called Soitec his number one stock pick on camera. The stock ran 200% after that video went live.
Soitec became more than just a trade idea for us. The March deep-dive helped us build this newsletter and put Asymmetrical Bets on the map with the photonics community. A lot of you reading this are holding this stock or held it at some point because of that piece.
The stock has pulled back hard from its peak at €200.50, and trades at €117 today. But that €117 is still well above the ~€55 where we first called it and now Soitec just reported Q1 fiscal 2027, and everything Michael laid out in March is showing up directly in the print.
Revenue hit €113 million, up 23% YoY at constant currency and scope, well above the company’s own guidance of roughly 15% and Shares gained almost 22% on the day.
What moved the stock the most was Photonics-SOI. Management’s language on yesterday’s call tracks almost exactly what we described in March. CEO Laurent Rémont broke Photonics growth into three waves.
The first was telecom, going back roughly a decade.
The current wave is scale-out in the data center.
The next wave, still building, is scale-up, moving from pluggable transceivers toward CPO.
We also flagged Soitec’s CPO content multiplier in March, the idea that a CPO module consumes several times more Photonics-SOI wafer area than a standard pluggable transceiver. Rémont didn’t put a number on that this quarter, but he confirmed the mechanism. CPO adoption in scale-up is coming, and Soitec sells into pluggable, NPO, and CPO architectures without much preference for which one wins.
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