Santec's optical instruments have a path beyond R&D as GMT Global specifies them for high-volume transceiver manufacturing equipment. GMT lists Santec's tunable lasers and power meters in its standard fiber-array and lens-coupling stations; GMT's cumulative sales rose 208% through September. Santec said in August that these instruments were still mainly used in R&D, and more detail on design wins is awaited at the upcoming results. x.com 

Sivers Semiconductors is undervalued because its photonics subsidiary's valuation potential is likely grossly mispriced, though that unit deserves a hefty discount until listed. Sivers Photonics failed to list via a SPAC in 2024, even early in the AI boom; the main wireless business is boring; and unlisted subsidiaries trade at deep discounts until holders see a path to monetization. Per @aleabitoreddit, Sivers, a laser maker for hyperscaler photonic supply chains, is valued at only about $200M. … Show more

Sumitomo Electric Industries is a growth company priced as value, at a 16.2x trailing P/E despite holding many long-term agreements with AI hyperscalers spanning fiber to lasers. AI has created a bigger medium-term anomaly, pushing value investing toward high-growth, deep-value companies. x.com 

Credo has the widest gap between fundamentals and share price among optics names, but also the worst chart, so it merits a staged, half-size entry rather than a full one. The optics selloff is macro, not fundamental: markets priced a 92-93% chance of a 25bp Fed hike, the 10-year yield hit 5.04%, the highest since 2007, and chip stocks fell 5% after Dario Amodei called for slowing frontier AI. Rate moves cut optical multiples before the rest of AI hardware, and they are still compressing. x.com 

Japanese small caps remain a strong short because TOPIX is removing almost all of them, leaving no passive investor on the other side; M&A is a short seller's only real fear. Quants shorting stocks at 2x EV/EBITDA and 0.3x book are winning. More pain is likely for deep-value holders while they wait for companies to delist at higher prices. x.com  x.com 

Soitec is an attractive name in the photonics supply chain. Per @HyperTechInvest, it trades at 14x forward EV/EBITDA, the lowest among key photonics suppliers, versus 33x for Coherent, 45x for Lumentum and 120x for Applied Optoelectronics. @zephyr_z9 flags a risk of demand destruction in mobile. x.com  x.com 

Coherent has the most substance in the optical group and the only real base on its chart, while the sector's sell-off is macro, not fundamental. At about 23x 2027 estimates it looks mispriced, and it is the only company holding 6-inch InP, silicon photonics, OCS and CPO engines at once. It alone has stopped making lows. Rate-hike pricing and a 5.04% 10-year are still compressing optical multiples, so staged, defined-risk entries beat full commitments; a daily close below 264 invalidates it. … Show more

Win Semiconductors sits in the path of every dollar as optical interconnects grow from $15B to $154B, and the market is not fully pricing that in. As the largest pure-play compound semiconductor foundry, with 65% share, it makes GaAs, InP and GaN chips for 5G, satellites, radar and AI optics, and is Sivers' DFB laser manufacturing partner. Its best quarter in years brought EPS up 30x and revenue up 28%, with Q2 guided up 14-16% at only 60% utilization. x.com 

PlanOptik looks massively mispriced at a €35M market cap if it is the bottleneck for the glass wafers behind Silex's MEMS business ahead of the 2027 ramp. Per @ren_stocks, PlanOptik's specialty glass wafers feed Silex Microsystems' MEMS mirror dies, which go into Lumentum's optical circuit switches for Google's AI data centers. Silex earned a 34% EBIT margin in Q1 2026, and its IPO valued it at SEK 8.9 billion. x.com 

Soitec's discount likely won't last until 2027, because a 300% increase in silicon area for co-packaged optics is too strong a catalyst for the market to ignore for two years. Per @michaelsikand, a pluggable or LPO transceiver uses about 50 square millimeters of photonics-SOI per chip versus about 200 for a CPO switch package, with CPO production ramping in 2027. x.com