Coherent Corp. (NYSE: COHR)
Coherent is an innovator and manufacturer of photonics technology and semiconductor materials. It is the most vertically integrated optics manufacturer offering a wide range of product solutions, including lasers, transceivers, optical modules and materials for industrial and electronic applications. Coherent is headquartered in Pennsylvania, with R&D and manufacturing facilities located notably in the US, China, and the UK. Additionally, it houses notable marketing and sales subsidiaries in Canada, Israel and Taiwan. As of June 30, 2025, Coherent employs over 30,000 employees, with the majority working in manufacturing (83%), while the rest of the workforce is distributed across R&D and sales.
Moving into FY 2026, Coherent has shifted its market segments from Networking, Materials and Lasers to i) Datacenters & Communications and ii) Industrial. In a general sense, Networking has been renamed to Data Centers & Communications, while Lasers and Materials have been mapped into the Industrials sector.
Within the Datacenters & Communications segment, Coherent operates a vertically integrated proprietary technology innovation space as well as in-house manufacturing of its products. Coherent sells directly to end market customers; within the data center space, customers include Cisco and Microsoft. However, due to the nature of hyperscaler secrecy and intense competition, official customers are not officially published by Coherent. Inside this space, Coherent sells transceivers—consisting of lasers, modulators, and photodetectors—that are used to communicate between GPUs within data centers. However, Coherent is also capturing the expanding market of data center interconnect (DCI), a growing market for connecting data centers. As LLM model capabilities continue to grow, hyperscalers have begun to train models across multiple data centers, which creates the need for DCI fibres and transceivers. It is important to note that Coherent creates most core components in-house, including lasers, detectors and silicon components. Within the telecommunications sector of this vertical, Coherent supplies similar transmission components, including transceivers and transport products, such as pump lasers. The scale of transmission is much longer, including transmission lines over thousands of kilometres.
Within the industrial market group, Coherent’s precision manufacturing includes producing materials, lasers, and semiconductor tools delivered to a variety of markets, including aerospace & defence, LiDAR technologies, and medical applications. Specifically, these include precision lasers for energy-dense defence applications, automotive applications such as EV battery welding, medical laser applications, as well as consumer electronic components embedded in smart devices, emerging AR / VR and the development of household robots.
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