Silicom rides the O-RAN Market

Photo above: Silicom’s new Dual port 100G Ethernet PCIe Gen 4.0 Server Adapter

Silicom is betting on the Open Networks movement that gains more traction in Telecom wireles infrastructure market, and beleives tha it is responsible for its recent recovery. Silicom’s revenues for the fourth quarter of 2020 totalled $33.9 million, up 33% compared with $25.5 million for the fourth quarter of 2019, and up 19% compared with $28.4 million for the third quarter of 2020.

While remaining cautious due to the continued uncertainty of the macro environment, Management projects revenues of $28 to $29 million for the first quarter of 2021. The midpoint of this range represents approximately 30% growth over the first quarter of 2020.

“The strong quarter was driven primarily by our Smart Platforms and Smart Cards, the focus of our strategy for capitalizing on the industry’s Decoupling and Disaggregation trends'” said Shaike Orbach, Silicom’s President and CEO of Silicom. “These are the trends we foresaw already a few years ago, and for which we have been building our strategy and product lines. Decoupling and Disaggregation trends have become a reality in many market segments, including O-RAN for mobile 5G infrastructure deployments.”

“These trends were the drivers behind our most recent 4G/5G related strategic announcements, our sale of SD-WAN and NFV Smart Platforms to a variety of customers, and our sale of Smart Cards to a significant Cloud player. We feel confident that the Cloud, the Telco market for SD-WAN and NFV solutions, and the overall O-RAN-based mobile infrastructure market will be driving our growth throughout 2021 and beyond.”

O-RAN architecture is about the building a virtualized RAN (Radio Access Network) on open hardware and cloud, with embedded AI-powered radio control. The emerging standard is managed by the O-RAN ALLIANCE, founded in February 2018 by AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DOCOMO and Orange. Since then, O-RAN ALLIANCE has become a world-wide community of mobile network operators, vendors, and research & academic institutions operating in the Radio Access Network (RAN) industry.