“Customer’s excess inventory of DWDM systems continued to be at the center stage of the Optical Transport market decline in the first quarter of 2024,” said Jimmy Yu, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group.

“The four-quarter rolling average has developed an ominous downward trend for three quarters as economic headwinds tighten their grip on the market, moving into negative territory in year-over-year (Y/Y) growth rate in 1Q 2024,” stated Dave Bolan, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group.

“This was a tough quarter for the microwave transmission equipment market,” stated Jimmy Yu, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “The market slowdown occurred across multiple geographies with only two regions posting a positive year-over-year growth rate. Those regions were North America and the Middle East and Africa. As a result of the sharp slowdown in mobile networks, we lowered our full year 2024 outlook to only a one percent growth rate.

“It’s difficult to find a silver lining in the first quarter,” said Stefan Pongratz, Vice President and analyst at the Dell’Oro Group. “We’ve been monitoring the RAN market since the year 2000, and the contraction experienced in the first quarter marked the steepest decline in our entire history of covering this market…

“Although public RAN is still fueling the lion’s share of the overall RAN capex and the overall investment levels are tracking below some of the initial projections provided by the vendors in the early part of the 5G enterprise hype cycle, the fact of the matter is that private wireless is now growing at a formidable pace,” said Stefan Pongratz, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group.