CLS Celestica Inc.
$276.54
Celestica Inc. Q3 F2026 Earnings Call Transcript
AI Conference Call Analysis
Sign in or subscribe to read.Operator
Conference Call Operator
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Celestica third quarter 2026 financial results and 2026 investor and analyst day conference call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question or Please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Matthew Pallotta, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Matthew Pallotta
Head of Investor Relations
Good morning and thank you for joining us on Celestica's third quarter 2026 financial results and investor and analyst day conference call. On the agenda for today's call, we will begin with our third quarter financial results, followed by our 2026 Investor and Analyst Day. At the conclusion of the prepared remarks, we will open up the lines for Q&A. On the call today, we have Rob Mionis, Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Todd Ankenman, Chief Financial Officer, and joining for our investor and analyst day portion, Mandeep Chawla, Group President of Global Markets, Steven Dorwart, President of our Connectivity and Cloud Solution Segment and Todd Cooper, President of our Advanced Technology Solution Segment. Please note that during the course of this call, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the future performance of Celestica, our business outlook, guidance for the fourth quarter of 2026, our 2026 and 2027 annual outlook, and anticipated trends in our industry and their anticipated impact on our business. These are based on management's current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions as of October 26, 2026. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and their potential impact on our results cannot be reliably predicted at this time. For identification and discussion of the material assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, please refer to our public filings with the SEC and on CDAR+, as well as the investor relations section on our website. We undertake no obligation to update these forward-looking statements unless expressly required to do so by law. In addition, during this call, we will refer to various non-GAAP financial measures. We've included in our earnings release found in the investor relations section of our website a discussion of those non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation to the most comparable GAAP measures. Unless otherwise specified, all references to dollars on this call are to U.S. dollars, all per share information is based on diluted shares outstanding, and all references to comparative figures are a year-over-year comparison. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Rob.
Rob Mionis
Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Matt, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call. We're excited to be able to share with you more about Celestica's role in advancing AI infrastructure. Today, we will discuss a number of important developments and the long-term outlook of our business. We are seeing unprecedented momentum, positioning us for a strong end to 2026 and further acceleration into 2027. Before diving into the investor and analyst day portion of our call, Todd will walk us through our third quarter results, provide our fourth quarter guidance, and share our updated 2026 outlook. Todd, over to you.
Todd Ankenman
Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Rob, and good morning. It's a pleasure to join you for my first call today in this capacity, and I look forward to engaging with you all. Now turning to our third quarter 2026 performance. Revenue in the third quarter was $5.83 billion, up 83% and above the high end of our guidance range. A strong demand and solid operational execution led to higher than expected revenue in both our CCS and ATS segments. Our non-GAAP operating margin was 8.5%, up 90 basis points, driven by higher margins in both our segments. This, once again, represented the highest quarterly non-GAAP operating margin in the company's history. Our adjusted earnings per share was $3.30, exceeding the high end of our guidance range, and an increase of $1.72, or 109%. Moving on to some additional metrics, adjusted gross margin was 11.2%, down 50 basis points, largely due to mix in our CCS segment. Our adjusted effective tax rate for the quarter was 18%. Lastly, our strong earnings growth and disciplined working capital management resulted in adjusted ROAC of 64.7%, up approximately 27 percentage points compared to the prior year period. Before moving on to our segment performance, we'd like to inform everybody that we've renamed our CCSN markets to better reflect the program composition of our portfolio. Effective Q3 and going forward, our communications end market is renamed networking, and our enterprise end market is renamed compute and storage. This update is a change in naming convention only, and the composition of the end markets remains unchanged and does not impact previously reported financial results. Revenue in our CCS segment in the third quarter was $4.9 billion, up 102%, driven by very strong growth in both our networking and compute and storage end markets. Our CCS segment accounted for 84% of total company revenue. Our networking and market revenue was up 68%, higher than our outlook of approximately 60%, primarily driven by growth in 800G networking, complemented by early volumes on ramping 1.16 programs and solid demand in our 400G programs. Revenue in our compute and storage end market was up 242%, well above our outlook of approximately 190%, driven by ramping volumes in hyperscaler AI compute and complemented by stronger than expected demand in storage programs. In our HPS business, revenue was $2.3 billion in the third quarter, representing growth of 70%, driven by ramping 1.6T and 800G switch programs across multiple hyperscaler customers. Our HPS business accounted for 40% of total company revenue. ATS revenue for the quarter was $957 million, up 23%, and above our outlook of a mid-teens percentage increase. The strong growth was driven primarily by an acceleration in capital equipment and supported by higher demand in each of our other businesses. ATS segment accounted for 16% of total company revenue. Moving on to segment margins. CCS segment margin was 8.9% in the third quarter, an improvement of 60 basis points, driven by strong operating leverage. Our ATS segment margin was 6.6%, up 110 basis points, driven by improved mix and operating leverage. In the third quarter, three customers each counted for 10% or more of our total revenue, accounting for 35%, 17%, and 14%, respectively. Turning to working capital. At the end of the third quarter, our inventory balance was $4.5 billion, a sequential increase of $1.1 billion and a year-over-year increase of $2.5 billion, as we support very strong demand with an accelerating growth outlook in 2027. Cash cycle days for the quarter were 42, representing a 23-day improvement over the prior year and a five-day improvement sequentially. Moving on to cash flows, we generated $128 million of free cash flow in third quarter and $413 million year-to-date. Our capital expenditures were $274 million, or approximately 4.7% of revenue, compared to 1.2% of revenue in the prior year quarter. Here to date, our capital expenditures are $767 million, or 5.3% of revenue, and we continue to anticipate spending approximately $1 billion in 2026. During the third quarter, we completed our previously announced public offering of approximately 11.1 million shares with gross proceeds of $3.45 billion before underwriting discounts and offering expenses. At the end of the third quarter, our cash balance was approximately $4 billion, while our gross debt was $736 million, resulting in a net cash position of $3.2 billion. We had no outstanding draw on our revolver at the end of the quarter. Our gross debt to non-GAAP trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA leverage ratio was 0.4 turns, an improvement of 0.1 turns sequentially and 0.4 turns versus prior year. As of September 30th, 2026, we were in compliance with all our financial covenants under our credit agreement. Our cash balance, in combination with our revolver, provides us with approximately $5.7 billion of available liquidity, positioning us to support strong anticipated future growth. We did not repurchase any shares for cancellation during the third quarter under our current normal course issuer bid. Now moving on to our guidance for fourth quarter. Fourth quarter revenue is projected to be between $6.275 billion and $6.575 billion, representing growth of 76% at the midpoint. Adjusted earnings per share is anticipated to be between $3.37 and $3.57, representing an increase of $1.58 at the midpoint, or 84% growth. Our adjusted earnings per share assumes approximately 127 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding. Assuming the achievement of the midpoint of our revenue and adjusted EPS guidance ranges, our adjusted operating margin is expected to be 8.7%, which would represent an increase of 100 basis points. We anticipate our adjusted effective tax rate for the fourth quarter to be approximately 20%. Next, we'll review our revenue outlook for each of our end markets. In our CCS segment, we expect revenue in our networking and market to grow approximately 65%, primarily driven by hyperscaler-led growth in 800G programs and the ramping of our 1.6T programs. In our compute and storage and market, we expect growth of approximately 160%, driven by the continued strength in hyperscaler AI compute, as well as front-demand storage. In our ATS segment, we anticipate revenue to be up in the low 20s percentage range, driven primarily by strong growth in our capital equipment business, as well as new program ramps in our other businesses. Our solid fourth quarter guidance reflects our continued momentum to close out the year. This, combined with our strong year-to-day performance, supports our increased 2026 financial outlook. Our 2026 revenue outlook increases from $20.5 billion to $21 billion, representing growth of 69%. We are also raising our adjusted EPS outlook to $11.55, up from $11.30, representing growth of 91%. Reflective in our outlook is a full year adjusted operating margin of 8.4%, unchanged from our previous outlook. Finally, our free cash flow outlook for 2026 is $460 million, compared to our previous outlook of $600 million. Thank you, Todd. At our investor day a year ago, we talked about Celestica being future-ready. Over the past year, that future has arrived rapidly.
Rob Mionis
Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
as our growth trajectory has steepened dramatically. Today, Celestica stands at the forefront of driving technology advancements as we are actively helping build the world's leading platforms for advanced AI infrastructure. For the remainder of our call, members of our executive leadership team and I will discuss our operations, financials, strategy, and capabilities that position Celestica as a key contributor to the AI investment super cycle. Our strategy, technical capabilities, and market tailwinds coalesce around four distinct pillars that drive sustainable long-term shareholder value creation. First is differentiation. Celestica acts as a critical launch partner on next-generation platforms. Hyperscalers partner with us from early-stage R&D to co-design, commercialize, and scale their most complex AI networking and compute solutions. Second is growth. We hold industry-leading positions in AI data center technologies, benefiting from generational secular growth tailwinds. We strategically pursue technologies where we have a competitive advantage, anchored by our leadership position in Ethernet networking and full system design capabilities for next-generation AI compute platforms. Visibility Our multi-generational customer engagements and deep alignment with our hyperscaler and frontier AI lab customers enable us to pursue long-term capacity planning with high confidence. Disciplined Approach to Investments We employ an investment framework to drive long-term earnings growth while filtering those decisions through our strategy and key financial hurdles on margins and return on capital. These four pillars create a powerful foundation for compounding shareholder value over the long term. Our business is fundamentally stronger today than at any time in Celestica's history, reflected by our accelerating financial performance, driven by a step function change in our scale, profitability, and earnings power. Over the three-year period to 2026, Celestica's revenue is expected to have delivered a 38% gager, More than doubling our top line. At the same time, margin improvements are driving non-gap adjusted EPS to compound at an even faster 67% CAGR, representing a nearly five-fold increase over the same period. Our growth has been deliberate, strategic and profitable. When leading technology companies choose Celestica for their most complex solutions, Thank you for joining us. The integration of full stack design and scale manufacturing of highly complex platforms produces a powerful combination that is greater than the sum of its parts and enables a strong competitive moat that is challenging for our competitors to replicate. We'll take a closer look at each of these foundational capabilities, which have helped position us as a preferred multi-generational partner for leading AI data center innovators. Thank you for joining us. This has become a preferred approach to product development for our hyperscaler and frontier AI lab customers. By leveraging our system level design capabilities, we collaborate directly with our customers to deliver customized solutions. These solutions enable superior price to performance and an overall lower total cost of ownership while also ensuring supply chain flexibility and vendor diversification. The commercialization phase acts as the vital bridge between design and mass production, enabling a seamless transition that is critical to the timing and quality of program delivery. Separating design and manufacturing across different vendors can leave blind spots, where each can miss critical considerations that have the potential to lead to ramp delays, poor yields, and costly redesigns when moving from prototype to mass production. Celestica's vertically integrated model eliminates this friction. Through our design for manufacturability approach, our design and manufacturing engineering teams work side by side from initial development straight through commercialization. This allows us to identify and resolve critical production hurdles early on. We believe this is one of the more underappreciated strengths of our model relative to competitors within our industry. It continues to be a crucial differentiator that unlocks both scale and speed to market for our customers. Finally, operational excellence is deeply ingrained in Celestica's DNA. Scaling a highly complex product from proof of concept to mass production is a technical discipline in itself. It presents unique operational and engineering challenges, a critical area where we often see industry competitors struggle. Our customers rely on us to continuously innovate our manufacturing and testing processes to deliver their most complex solutions. Our stewardship culture sets us apart from other operators. We take the initiative to own the complete solution end-to-end and approach problem solving as a true technology partner. We standardize these best practices through the Celestica operating system, ensuring strict adherence to standards of quality and reliability throughout our global network as programs scale. To support the significant anticipated acceleration in demand driven by recent program awards, we have approved plans to significantly increase our global capacity over the next couple of years, adding to our growing network of over 40 sites in 16 countries. In North America, Our U.S. presence is centered in Texas, where we are adding capacity across multiple sites to enable critical home country manufacturing for hyperscaler customers. The new capacity supports advanced L11 integration for a scale deployment of liquid-cooled AI racks. And to address power bottlenecks, we are adding hundreds of megawatts across our network, including at our U.S. sites. In Mexico, we continue to support demand for nearshoring by investing in upgrades at our campus in Monterey. In Asia, our data center customers are seeking additional capacity at our flagship Thailand campus to leverage our exceptional local capabilities and talent. We are making significant additions to support major production ramps through 2027 and 2028. We are also making targeted investments in Japan and Malaysia to support our networking programs and offer our customers greater geographic diversity across the Asia region. Our regionalized multi-node network strategy delivers a flexible, resilient supply chain that helps customers mitigate geopolitical and operational risk while scaling their deployments. Within our network, we are making targeted investments in new automation lines to ramp at scale production. Today, this includes automating L6 through L10 processes for manufacturing the latest generation networking and compute trays. We're also deploying new lines to automate L11 rack assembly. We believe this is a capability that is unique among competing ODMs and strengthens our value proposition for hyperscalers, particularly in higher cost labor-constrained markets. By automating highly repetitive tasks, such as cabling and fiber optic insertion, we are solving critical bottlenecks in high-sensitivity cleanroom environments. These applications also extend into several of our ATSN markets with fully automated lines in operation at facilities in Mexico and Europe. We take a phased approach to these investments, verifying operational viability before scaling, which we believe deliver attractive payback periods, faster ramps, and repeatable high yields. As we navigate this high growth phase, we will continue finding new opportunities to drive scale without compromising the exacting quality and reliability our customers depend on. Our differentiated model allows us to serve a highly specialized role for our customers. Where the EMS model is restricted in its design capabilities and the OEM model leans toward more rigid architectures, Celestica combines critical elements of both these models. Through delivering an integrated end-to-end capability stack, beginning with collaborative early-stage co-design through to full-scale manufacturing and deployment, we operate as a true technology partner. Our ability to customize leading-edge AI infrastructure is supported by our investments in HPS hardware roadmaps, a flexible software stack, and our commitment to open vendor ecosystems. Furthermore, our operational rigor and end-to-end ownership of the solution ensures a seamless transition from prototype to manufacturing at scale. Ultimately, we believe this differentiated model continues to position Celestica as a preferred partner, closely aligning our development strategies and growth investments with our customers' multi-year roadmaps. With that, I will now turn the call over to Mandeep, Group President, Global Markets, to discuss our growth strategy. Mandeep, over to you.
Mandeep Chawla
Group President, Global Markets
Thank you, Rob, and good morning, everyone. Our demand environment today is defined by an unprecedented AI investment super cycle, bringing fundamental changes to both our business and our industry. One of these is our improved long-term demand visibility compared to historical norms. High demand for AI compute capacity has seen it become heavily constrained by power and hardware availability. Because of this, hyperscaler customers are undertaking longer-term commitments and engaging with providers like Celestica in multi-year planning cycles to secure the necessary components and manufacturing capacity. Our supply chain strategy manages overall technology availability rather than basic procurement, collaborating with ecosystem partners early to qualify components and build design flexibility. Furthermore, our design-led HPS programs require customers to pursue early alignment on product development with us and our silicon ecosystem partners up to 24 months in advance of mass production. We expect these dynamics, particularly our visibility enabled by design-led timelines, to persist, allowing us to pursue our long-term growth investments with confidence. We view the AI infrastructure build-out as a durable multi-year investment cycle, and we believe we are positioned well to capture this opportunity. Third-party forecasts anticipate cumulative data center CapEx will reach more than $3 trillion by 2030, representing nearly $2 trillion in incremental TAM growth from 2026. Constrained AI compute capacity due to surging demand for AI workloads serves as a strong signal for continued investment. Forecasts anticipate total annual AI accelerator shipments will almost triple from 2026 to 2030, with every AI accelerator deployed driving investment in high-performance networking, making these core technologies that we support amongst the fastest growing segments of the broader data center ecosystem. Importantly, nearly 70% of this capital investment is expected to be concentrated amongst the largest US hyperscalers and leading frontier AI labs, who comprise the majority of our CCS customer base. These indicators align with the multi-year demand signals we are observing with both our current and prospective customers. As we touched on, our core competencies are uniquely suited to serve the The first is accelerated upgrade cycles with new, more capable compute silicon now being introduced every 12 to 24 months while networking platforms are being refreshed approximately every two years. The second is leading-edge performance and technical requirements, which necessitate the most advanced design engineering and technical capabilities to enable the latest systems. The third is customization, which requires us to enable bespoke solutions designed to support multiple variants of silicon, compute architectures, and use cases, and tailored to their unique infrastructure specifications and AI workloads. The fourth is scale, requiring optimized, highly reliable manufacturing processes and supply chain support for the largest deployers of infrastructure in the industry. Finally, to address these specific challenges, Celesca collaborates directly with hyperscaler and frontier AI lab engineering teams via our JDM model to target the most critical design and manufacturing challenges. Why has Celesca been able to expand from switch design into full rack scale and system level solutions? In modern AI clusters, networking is the fundamental nervous system. Amongst core hardware technologies within AI data centers, high-speed networking design represents the most technically demanding engineering discipline. It requires multidisciplinary competencies in the areas of ultra-high-speed signal integrity, thermal management, optical connectivity, board design, software, and testing. Having mastered those challenges at 800G and 1.6T, we believe we have the foundational technical capabilities to engineer adjacent domains required to design complete AI systems across compute, power delivery systems, liquid cooling, cabling, intra and inter rack connectivity, software orchestration, and rack design. The boundary for design optimization is shifting from individualized and complete AI clusters where considerations regarding networking, optics, power and cooling are becoming increasingly interconnected. This dynamic creates a powerful competitive barrier. Moving up from server assembly and rack integration into designing high speed networking presents significant engineering challenges. It requires the kind of deep institutional knowledge and proof points that we have spent years building. However, moving from high-speed networking into converged system design is a shift that plays directly to the breadth of Seleska's core engineering capabilities and strengths, unlocking a growing set of opportunities where we see massive potential in the coming years. The value we deliver to leading AI platforms is directly reflected in our engagements with hyperscale We have earned this position by executing relentlessly across the critical success factors of speed to market, customization for optimization, and scale, allowing us to build strong multi-generational relationships with these customers. From 2023 through 2026, we expect Seleska's hyperscaler revenue to grow by approximately five times, expanding at a 71% CAGR. We are positioned to remain a critical provider to the industry's leading players as we are expanding our engagements to support additional hyperscaler and frontier AI lab customers in 2027. Our market position is reinforced by this diversified customer portfolio consisting of a number of the leading hyperscaler and frontier AI labs in the industry. This is supported by our deep relationships with an ecosystem of the leading designers of high performance compute and networking chips. We collaborate closely with silicon providers to align early on product roadmaps, supporting the next generation of chips in development. This enables us to begin our work on designing market ready solutions well ahead of wider commercial availability and collaborate on supply chain planning, supporting speed to market and availability for our mutual customers. Our breadth of critical relationships and collaborations have immense benefits that continue to pay dividends, solidifying our role as a critical technology solutions partner within the global AI data center ecosystem. With that, I'll now hand the call over to Steve to discuss our CCS segment.
Steven Dorwart
President, Connectivity and Cloud Solutions Segment
Thank you, Mandeep, and good morning, everyone. Our connectivity and cloud solutions segment continues to see unprecedented momentum from the AI infrastructure investment super cycle. We are actively designing, industrializing, and manufacturing the world's most advanced AI infrastructure for leading hyperscalers and frontier AI model labs. The trajectory of our financial performance reflects the tremendous scale of revenue growth we're driving with CCS revenue expected to reach $17.4 billion in 2026, which roughly quadruples our business in just three years. Our proprietary design capabilities delivered via our HBS offering continues to be an important driving force in our success and now accounts for roughly half of our CCS revenues. As we look ahead to 2027, we believe our expanding program wins and technology leadership position CCS to accelerate our growth trajectory. Our team is incredibly excited and energized by the pipeline of opportunities in front of us, which we believe have the potential to sustain our positive momentum in the years to come. Our HPS offering continues to see incredibly strong engagement from our customer base, helping bring leading-edge Ethernet networking and system-level solutions to market. To maintain our technology leadership, we have grown annual R&D spend by more than threefold since 2023 and expect to invest over $300 million in 2027. The scale of our investment enables us to support a rapidly growing breadth of technical capabilities, proof of concepts, and product roadmaps. We are seeing strong productivity from these investments, which translate directly into revenue opportunities, enabling us to engage earlier in product cycles, support more platforms, and convert proof of concepts into multi-year programs. We continue to support a broad portfolio of unique programs in active production and at various stages of development. And our team of over 1,600 HBS engineers across nine global design centers today is expected to grow to over 2,000 engineers by next year. While HBS built its reputation in high-performance Ethernet networking, we have successfully expanded the scope of our projects into custom ASIC compute and rack scale systems, which opens up opportunities for greater design-led engagement in the market. Our R&D strategy consists of a structured four-step innovation lifecycle. We first explore the development of new proof of concepts and capabilities to support emerging technologies alongside our key partners, well before the formal RFPs, building expertise on frontier silicon ahead of industry adoption curves. Next, we evaluate the commercial viability, including potential scale of market adoption through rigorous screening to identify the candidates meriting further investment. Third, we industrialize the design by pairing early R&D directly with factory floor process engineering, eliminating handoff friction and de-risking the transition from NPI to mass production. Finally, we commercialize complete HPS solutions like our DS6000 series switches, which serve as market-ready proof points of our IP and expertise and can be leveraged as reference designs for customized JDM variants. We've developed this disciplined innovation formula to de-risk development schedules, support high first-pass manufacturing yields, and dramatically shorten time to market. Modern AI data centers are undergoing fundamental structural changes that are driving our technical investments today. First, advances in technology and greater infrastructure scale are lowering the technical and economic barriers to hyperscalers designing a proliferation of new high-performance custom ASIC chips. This leads to the second, as each new custom chip requires a bespoke rack-scale compute architecture and, in many cases, a customized networking fabric to support. As the level of customization increases, foundational aspects of the system must be tailored for the specific silicon and performance requirements, requiring a bottoms-up approach to designing each new architecture. Third, compressed upgrade cycles necessitate that all of this is done faster and more frequently. With silicon upgrade cycles contracting to 12 to 24 months, hyperscalers and chip designers are often developing multiple generations concurrently at various stages, making a well-executed development phase and faster time to market more critical than ever. These developments are resulting in a growing number of unique product roadmaps and architectures, increasing technical demands on design engineering resources both at customers and design partners like Celestica. To keep pace, our strategy focuses on enabling core technologies and manufacturing capabilities that serve as foundational building blocks for leading-edge systems with broad applicability, allowing us to support a wider range of customized solutions and customers simultaneously. With rising complexity and demand for customized solutions, we believe the value of Celestica's model continues to increase. Our engineers are working on solving today's foundational technical challenges to enable the next generation of leading edge AI systems. First, as we've touched on already, is the shift towards engineering full rack scale and system level solutions. We see it becoming more challenging and in some cases impractical to approach the design of networking and compute components independently from the entire rack or system, leading to a deeper scope of engagement. We are witnessing this in networking fabrics, where we are seeing an increasing use of disaggregated, dedicated networking racks, as well as compute architectures. Next is increasing integration of optical components into the rack design, the networking trays with approaches such as co-package optics and eventually into compute trays. We will touch more on this later. The move towards integrated optics is also related to the challenges associated with signal integrity. As we move towards 400 gig surdeys, this tightens electrical loss budgets and restricts copper distances, requiring simultaneous optimization across the entire physical path, driving the need for advances in PCB laminates, surface mount packaging, and direct attached copper. With our deep institutional knowledge in this area, we continue to invest in specialized engineering talent, simulation, and lab capabilities to develop and validate next generation designs. Finally, the areas of power density and thermal management are tightly coupled as rack designs approach 500 kilowatt or more. Here, Celestica is actively engineering solutions to accommodate the transition to 800 volt DC power distribution architectures. Future systems will leverage the use of advanced liquid cooling for components beyond GPUs and switch silicon to include optics and memory. We are actively evaluating next-gen technologies, including two-phase liquid cooling and advanced thermal interface materials. By solving these challenges at the system level, we help customers bring high-performance platforms to market faster and effectively scale increasingly complex AI infrastructure. Now diving into our end markets, beginning with our networking portfolio, anchored by our market-leading Ethernet networking business. In 2026, networking revenue is expected to reach $11.8 billion, up 66%. Our momentum this year is being driven by ramping 800-gig switch deployments, along with the beginning of mass production in our earliest 1.6T programs. Looking into 2027, we expect 800G to continue its very strong growth trajectory and 1.6T volumes to accelerate substantially across a broadening base of customers and programs, including a number of variants supporting scale-up. As a result, we anticipate that our 1.6T revenue will surpass 800G revenue next year. To address evolving network architectures, Celestica has continued to develop our flagship family of DS series switches for the 1.6T generation within our HPS portfolio. Last year, we introduced the DS6000 and DS6001, the air-cooled and liquid-cooled variants of our Broadcom Tomahawk 6 based switches. This year, we've added two new variants. Earlier this year, we announced the DS6010, a scale-up switch purpose-built and co-engineered for AMD's Helios rack scale architecture, utilizing UA-Link over Ethernet, which we will dive into further in a moment. Earlier this month at the OCP Global Summit, we introduced the DS6005, our first co-package optics design built on Broadcom's Tomahawk 6 Davison chip, integrating high-density silicon photonics engines, liquid cooling, and field-replaceable external laser modules in a 1.5 OU form factor, delivering maximum power efficiency for dense clusters. All DS6000 series platforms are supported by Celestica's enterprise-grade sonic software stack, providing open, flexible network telemetry and fabric orchestration. We are seeing expanding investments across every tier of AI networks. Celestica has Ethernet networking solutions for use in all of the different domains within the data center. However, within our portfolio, we primarily support designs at the leading edge bandwidths deployed in backend networks for scale out and a fast growing portfolio within scale up, supporting low latency XPU to XPU connectivity. Back-end fabrics comprise the majority of the AI-driven demand. They link tens of thousands of AI accelerators demanding maximum bandwidth, ultra-low packet latency, and operate on shorter two-year refresh cycles with the majority of spend dominated by hyperscalers. Front-end networks have lower bandwidth and less stringent latency requirements relative to back-end, though this domain is still an important part of hyperscale data centers as well. We've seen the evolution of the various technologies and networking shape our strategy and the different roadmaps we are supporting. Historically, Ethernet and AI backend networks supported primarily scale out and emerging scale across fabrics and relied on traditional copper interconnects and pluggable optical transceivers. As the industry transitions into the 1.6T generation, networking requirements shift dramatically. Historically, scale-up fabrics linking accelerators inside a node relied on proprietary closed architectures. One of the more consequential shifts currently underway is the introduction of Ethernet for scale-up networking, which has already meaningfully expanded our addressable content within the network. Furthermore, at these higher bandwidths, traditional copper and pluggable optics begin reaching physical boundaries in power consumption, port density, and signal integrity. As a result, we are seeing the introduction of new interconnect technologies, including embedding of optics into the switch with co-package optics and near-package optics, as well as new standards supporting form factors like extra-dense pluggable optics. Ultimately, we see pluggable and integrated optics solutions coexisting over the long term, with each employed for appropriate use cases. We are supporting a growing number of networking roadmaps, which diversifies our broader product portfolio, including within each of our hyperscale customers, and enhances our value as a trusted technology partner that can help accelerate the path from design to deployment. Independent forecasts validate the significant market expansion underway in Ethernet data center networking. The TAM is projected to reach $173 billion by 2030. Within that, the high bandwidth segments, defined as 800G and higher, which comprise the majority of Celestica's current portfolio and pipeline, are forecasted to account for over 90%, a sevenfold increase. Looking at the markets by layers of the networking fabric, back-end AI networking is the fastest growing, expected to account for over 80% of total market spending by 2030, indexing us with the largest and highest growth segments of the market. As noted earlier, the adoption of Ethernet for scale-up networking is driving a significant new market opportunity. Scale-up Ethernet spending is projected to grow from negligible volumes in 2026 during the early stages of the 1.6T ramps to $55 billion by 2030, when it is expected to represent 40% of back-end Ethernet switch spending and about one-third of the total data center Ethernet market. From an architecture perspective, scale-up fabrics exhibit dramatically higher port attach rates and bandwidth requirements orders of magnitude higher, up to 10 times and 100 times that of scale-out networks and front-end networks, respectively. Scale-up fabrics also require ultra-low latency, custom chassis designs, and can effectively leverage open-source networking operating systems like Sonic. The requirements of these designs play directly to our strengths in system-level engineering on XPU architectures and our JDM model supporting customization, positioning Celestica for market leadership and scale-up Ethernet. One of the latest projects that serves as a valuable showcase of our networking design prowess is our collaboration with AMD on the DS6010 switch, which enables the scale-up fabric for AMD's Helios architecture, supporting high-speed, ultra-low latency connectivity of 72 AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs within a single rack. Alongside AMD's innovative architecture design team, our proven track record designing leading edge switches made Celestica a uniquely qualified collaboration partner for this project. The DS6010 represents a milestone in engineering and design leadership as the industry's first 204.8 terabit switch powered by two Broadcom Tomahawk 6 chips in a single one OU chassis, making it one of the most technically advanced solutions we've ever built. The open rack wide compatible design is connected via a high-density cable backplane, utilizes direct-to-chip liquid cooling, and supports full sonic integration. Our specialized manufacturing capabilities support the complex assembly and rigorous validation testing required for this high-performance design. Through this collaboration, we are enabling speed to market for the industry's leading hyperscalers and frontier AI labs deploying Helios. We expect to begin ramping by the end of the year. As we've discussed, at bandwidths reaching 1.6T and eventually migrating to 3.2T utilizing 400 GHz, traditional copper trace connectivity and standard pluggable transceivers face steep physical limits in signal integrity as well as power and thermal efficiency and form factor density. Emerging approaches such as XPO are addressing some of these challenges with a new pluggable form factor. Integrated optics designs such as CPO and NPO are approaches to board design and connectivity that involve migrating the optical engines closer to the switch silicon, a departure from traditional pluggables where the optical components are contained within a transceiver that's connected to the front panel. We believe we are in the very early stages of the industry's deployment of integrated optics architectures and that these solutions will progressively see increasing traction in the coming years. We are investing in product roadmaps to support each of these various approaches to integrated optics and next generation pluggables in order to enable customer flexibility across different architectures. Optical standardization efforts like the Optical Compute Interconnect Consortium will give hyperscalers vendor interoperability while elevating design partners like Celestica as a critical system orchestrator. The move towards integrated optics is not without its challenges. Beyond design, the reliable, scalable manufacturing for integrated optics presents new hurdles that are different from traditional copper-connected switches. Celestica has strategically invested in developing our capabilities and processes, including expanded state-of-the-art cleanroom space, robotic assembly and inspection systems, advanced optical fiber insertion where submicron tolerances are required, and multi-stage engineering validation testing protocols to support the high-volume manufacturing of these technologies. With the investments we are making and one of the industry's early proof points with the DS6005, we believe that we are at the forefront in building our capabilities towards commercializing integrated optics at scale with reliable commercial yields. As previously announced, these capabilities have earned us an award with a hyperscaler customer to co-design and manufacture a 1.6T rack scale co-package optics networking solution with production scheduled to ramp in late 2027. As we progress through the development process to be ready for 2027 availability, we believe we are one of the first teams in the world to have successfully brought up a functional CPO platform with Broadcom's Tomahawk 6, Davis & Silicon, and we are well into the testing phase. We are currently in discussion with other customers exploring proof of concepts and potential future designs. We believe that interest in these solutions will broaden across our customer base as networking technologies evolve in the coming years. This program award serves as a powerful validation of our early R&D investment and capabilities and positions Celestica as an early mover in commercializing Ethernet switches with integrated optics at hyperscale volumes. Celestica's technical capabilities and execution are reflected in our leading market share across our core customer base of hyperscalers and frontier AI labs, where we are seeing an inflection in our growth, even relative to our peers. Because we enable our customers' leading-edge deployments, we maintain the largest share of the highest bandwidth segments in data center Ethernet networking. Independent research outlets recognize Celestica as the world's number one provider in 800G and higher, accounting for 31% of revenue and 44% of total port shipments. Furthermore, in custom solutions, Celestica holds an even more dominant position with a 58% share of total custom Ethernet switch revenue, more than double our nearest competitor, positioning us to capture significant growth as hyperscalers increasingly evaluate bespoke solutions enabled by our HPS offering. Turning now to our compute and storage end market. For 2026, revenue is projected to reach $5.6 billion, up an impressive 170%, driven by major ramps in our AI compute business and complemented by solid demand in storage. We continue to anticipate exceptional growth in custom ASIC compute programs in 2027, driven by our multi-generational relationship with Google in support of their TPU platform and our production ramp with OpenAI's Jalapeno platform. We expect compute and storage to account for a growing share of CCS revenues in 2027 as these program ramps accelerate. The trend of customization for optimization is driving incredible growth in the deployment of new custom ASICs. The custom accelerator market is projected to exceed $430 billion by 2030, growth of more than seven times, and more than double the growth rate of merchant GPUs. Custom ASICs are expected to account for over one third of the AI accelerator market. These forecasts have accelerated considerably during the past year, reflecting why custom ASIC compute represents such a powerful multi-year tailwind for Celestica and validates our strategic focus on this opportunity. Our hyperscaler and frontier AI lab customer base are leading this shift. As exemplified by the leading platforms in the marketplace today, the fixed cost of a successful custom accelerator program are surpassed by the benefits of lower cost per chip and superior performance per watt due to customization for workload specificity. As an industry leader in system level co-design and manufacturing, Celestica is positioned as one of the premier infrastructure partners in this segment of the market. Celestica's role in supporting the launch of OpenAI's Jalapeno architecture is another important proof point reflecting the evolution of our system-level design capabilities. This program represents the culmination of more than two years of development with our HBS team, standing as our most comprehensive and complex project to date. The inference-optimized system leverages the first generation of OpenAI's custom ASIC platform Jalapeno, which was co-developed with Broadcom. It has been validated through OpenAI's published tests to deliver higher inference throughput per watt than the comparison systems across three tested open models. Celestica is helping bring this breakthrough architecture to life, supporting end-to-end delivery from co-design and engineering, software and testing, straight through volume production. Each unit in the dual rack system hosts 128 jalapeno accelerators utilizing a cabled backplane. Because of the incredible density, it is designed to accommodate extreme mechanical loads and advanced liquid cooling infrastructure. The system is supported by an Ethernet scale-up fabric leveraging 1.6T switches with Broadcom's Tomahawk 6 silicon, enabling multi-rack, multi-level connectivity in the scale-up domain for up to 2,048 accelerators and runs on a customized version of the sonic operating system co-developed with Celestica. It is expected to begin ramping production in 2027. Through our multi-generational relationship, Celestica and OpenAI are engaged in the development of future generations of their platform as we look to continue to build on our successful collaboration together. With that, I'll turn the presentation over to Todd Cooper to review our advanced technology solutions segment.
Todd Cooper
President, Advanced Technology Solutions Segment
Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. Two years ago, we undertook steps to strategically reshape our ATS portfolio, prioritizing higher margin programs and durable growth with Tier 1 customers. In 2026, we've seen the benefit of those as we expect a return to double-digit growth for the year, with our ATS segment expected to deliver revenue of $3.6 billion, up 13%, and for segment margins to be up 110 basis points to a record 6.4%. We drive distinctive value in an environment characterized by increasing complexity, regionalization and a greater need for engineering support as well as resilience in supply chain management, allowing us to drive faster time to market in a cost-effective manner for our customers. We believe this core value proposition underpins our strategic customer relationships and positions ATS for continued sustainable and profitable growth. Looking ahead to 2027, demand tailwinds and new program wins across our portfolio are expected to sustain our momentum and propel ATS to another year of double-digit growth. In capital equipment, strong AI-driven demand is necessitating foundries to make investments in new fab capacity, with market forecasts calling for wafer fab equipment spend and more than 40% next year and continue that strong growth in 2028. Our strong relationships with the leading wafer fab equipment OEMs and our differentiated capabilities position us for robust growth. In industrial, we expect solid growth on improving market trends complemented by ramping business in energy generation, storage and metering, along with our traditionally strong test and measurement and telematics markets. Further, early pursuits and data center power infrastructure are also showing promise, supported by our investments in specialized engineering teams to enable solutions for this market. Both aerospace and defense and the health tech sectors are expected to see solid base business demand with growth driven by new program ramps, in particular with increased defense demand across the US and Europe, as well as in advanced surgical robotics and diabetes care. We believe our strong position, market tailwinds, and targeted commercial strategy will enable us to deliver another year of solid growth in 2027. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. with new wins seeing an attach rate of 50%, validating the opportunity and our engineering value proposition. We expect higher engineering-led mix combined with improving operating leverage will continue to expand our segment margins. We remain disciplined in managing our commercial portfolio Balancing our exposure across proven tier one anchor customers with newer accounts that show the potential for high growth in emerging technologies. We believe this strategy has built a strong foundation that positions ATS for sustained high quality growth over the long term. I'll now turn the call over to Todd Inkeman to discuss our financial outlook.
Todd Ankenman
Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Todd. Turning to our outlook for 2027, we see another year of accelerating revenue growth driven by unprecedented customer demand. We anticipate revenue of $40 billion, representing a 90% increase compared to our 2026 outlook, while non-GAAP operating margin is expected to be 9% for the full year, an expansion of 60 basis points. Underlying our revenue assumption is approximately 110% growth in CCS revenue, driven by rapidly growing demand in both networking and compute and storage, while ETS is expected to grow approximately 10%. As we expect to be ramping multiple large-scale new programs throughout the year, we anticipate sustained sequential growth, leading to meaningfully higher revenue in the second half versus the first half of 2027. We anticipate non-GAAP adjusted EPS of $21.50, up 86%. Our outlook assumes approximately 127 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding for the year. Capital expenditures are expected to be in the range of $1.5 to $2 billion, which directly supports the programs we have won to date. Our outlook assumes an adjusted effective tax rate of approximately 21%. Our financial outlook factors in our best assessment of dynamics, including the impact of supply constraints and timing of capacity ramps against a backdrop of higher customer demand. I want to spend a moment diving deeper on the dynamics underpinning our 2027 revenue outlook and our view of the longer-term multiyear growth trajectory. As we've discussed today, constrained supply and long design collaboration cycles have lengthened demand visibility. These multiyear customer commitments give us strong conviction in our growth investments and the sustainability of the demand we are witnessing today. In fact, our 2028 customer demand forecasts, based solely on awarded programs, are meaningfully higher than our 2027 revenue outlook. When we look across our core product pillars, the anticipated growth drivers are robust and mutually reinforcing. In networking, we expect the already strong momentum we are experiencing to accelerate during the transition to 1.6T bandwidths, which were in the very early stages of today. We expect these ramps to be significantly larger and faster than the 800G upgrade cycle of the past two years, as we anticipate benefiting from multiple incremental drivers of demand, including Ethernet use in scale-up and new customers and ecosystems in our portfolio. Importantly, recent networking upgrade cycles have shown to be additive to demand, and we expect 800G deployments to continue to grow alongside initial 1.6G rollouts next year. In AI compute, multi-generational program ramps across our existing and new hyperscaler and frontier AI lab customers continue to grow and scale, and are pointing to meaningfully higher volumes in 2027 and 2028. Finally, beyond our committed ramps, we have a significant funnel of pursuits, including a number of potential large-scale engagements with existing and new customers. With our confidence in the sustainability of the demand we are seeing, we are thoughtfully, yet proactively, positioning the company to capture these opportunities. The achievement of our $40 billion revenue outlook for 2027 would represent more than five-fold growth in just four years. Establishing this greater scale continues to enable structurally higher and more resilient operating margins. We expect our non-GAAP operating margin to expand to 9% in 2027, benefiting from design-led wins, cost discipline, and scale. We continue to commit higher levels of CapEx to support the expansion of our manufacturing network. Our plans for $1.5 to $2 billion of CapEx next year are intended to enable the scale necessary to support our multi-year growth plans. Additionally, with our 2027 outlook calling for nearly $20 billion of incremental revenue, we are investing meaningfully in working capital to support these large-scale ramps. The combination of these investments will result in a net use of cash in 2027. Over the past several years, we have managed to generate consistent and growing non-GAAP free cash flow, even as we have supported significant growth in revenue. Next year, however, the level of net cash usage will be a function of the sheer magnitude and velocity of our revenue ramp. Our balance sheet is conservatively financed and well-funded. With $4 billion of cash on hand, low leverage, and an additional $1.75 billion in available liquidity, we believe we are sufficiently capitalized at this time. When assessing potential investments, adjusted ROIC remains an important benchmark for capital efficiency and disciplined execution. Our adjusted ROIC has more than doubled in less than three years and has accelerated meaningfully in 2026 to 57% year-to-date, reflecting the incredible growth in margin improvements in our business and our strong track record of capital stewardship. The scale, efficiency, and profitability profile of our business enable us to generate consistently and structurally higher returns on capital than at any time in our company's history. We continue to employ our same prudent approach to capital deployment. We believe the investments we are underwriting in 2026 and in 2027 support short payback periods and fast revenue conversion and profit generation as we phase our investments to align with customer deployment schedules. As such, we expect to continue generating adjusted ROAC well above historical levels. Our financial growth framework is aimed towards driving long-term compounding of our adjusted EPS in a disciplined and sustainable manner. To achieve this, we evaluate every commercial opportunity through strict strategic filters. We select programs that align with our core competencies in design and manufacturing differentiation while supporting customers where we see the opportunity for long-term, multi-generational engagements. We aim to drive sustainable, adjusted operating margin expansion while also managing our mix at a portfolio level. And we assess investments based on adjusted ROAC hurdles and payback periods across multiple scenarios. This approach allows for risk mitigation while prioritizing our allocation of capital to the most strategically aligned projects with strong anticipated returns. As a management team, we pride ourselves on being trusted, thoughtful, and responsible stewards of capital. Our financial health is foundational to our capital allocation plans as we aim to support our multi-year growth trajectory while preserving financing and investment optionality. We are committed to maintaining a healthy and flexible balance sheet managed with investment grade discipline. Organic growth remains our top area of investment as we grow our engineering and commercial resources alongside major investments in our asset base to support higher levels of working capital and CapEx to grow our global manufacturing network. In this hyper growth environment we find ourselves in, we believe these are high return investments and the best use of our capital. We also look to leverage strategic M&A opportunistically to accelerate key capabilities and to grow our presence in existing or adjacent markets. Thank you, Todd and team. As we close out our prepared remarks, we want to revisit the pillars that are the foundation of our current success and that we continue to build upon for the future. Celestica finds itself at the threshold of a truly remarkable opportunity.
Rob Mionis
Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
and what I believe is the most exciting period for our company and our entire industry during my tenure as CEO. Our conviction is supported by our industry leading positions in some of the fastest growing segments of the AI data center build out and a multi-year demand outlook with structurally improved visibility with our leading hyperscale and frontier AI lab customers. Our differentiated capabilities and technology leadership position us as a critical multi-generational partner and our disciplined investment strategy has yielded us a proven track record of value creation. We hope today's discussion has provided you with a deeper understanding of our differentiated capabilities and our deliberate strategic positioning to capitalize on the unprecedented growth we see ahead. In closing, I want to extend our appreciation to our more than 34,000 global employees for their incredible efforts that make this all possible. Thank you all for joining us today. We'll now start the Q&A portion of our call, where we'll also be joined by Gavin Cato, Senior Vice President, CCS Engineering. I will now turn the call back over to the operator to open the line for your questions.
Operator
Conference Call Operator
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and rejoin the queue if you have a follow-up. Thank you for watching. Your first question comes from David Vogt with UBS. David, your line is open. Please go ahead.
David Vogt
Analyst, UBS
Great. Thanks, guys, for taking my question and all the details. And I'm sure we're going to get a lot of more color later today at the Investor InVet. But I wanted to ask your view of the 27 outlook.
Operator
Conference Call Operator
We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by as we resolve the issue.