Don't Let the Headlines Fog Your View of Corning’s Earnings Report
Here's our take on GLW's latest quarter and guidance, and why management needs to clarify these points in its Q2 2026 guidance.
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Corning (GLW) just reported first-quarter earnings, revealing a modest top-line and bottom-line beat — with earnings per share of $0.70 on revenue of $4.34 billion. That's vs. the consensus forecast for EPS of $0.69 on $4.3 billion in revenue.
Corning's just-barely-made-it beat paired with in-line EPS guidance for the current quarter on revenue of $4.6 billion — a hair of a miss relative to the $4.65 billion consensus — is what’s weighing on the stock this morning.
Inside those Q1 2026 results, Corning’s Optical Communications sales grew 36% year over year and 8.5% sequentially to $1.85 billion, a faster pace than the respective 24% and 3% figures posted in Q4 2025. That growth led the Optical segment to drive 42% of overall revenue in the quarter up from 39% in the year-ago quarter. That’s a nice data point for the networking-related companies we have in the Portfolio, including Arista Networks (ANET) , Marvell, and Broadcom (AVGO) , as well as Nvidia (NVDA) .
Remember, Corning's stock has benefited from the resurgence in AI and data center enthusiasm among investors.
Related: What's Going on at OpenAI? 8 Key Items Shaping the Stock Market Tuesday
Turning to Corning’s guidance, that modest revenue shortfall can be tied to the extended maintenance shutdown at Corning’s solar wafer facility. But as we think about its guidance, other end markets we have to consider are auto (10% of total revenue) as well as smartphone and others that comprise its Glass Innovations segment (33% of total revenue). With industry declines expected in the overall smartphone, PC, and connected device markets, given memory-related constraints, that 14% year-over-year revenue guidance is masking faster growth at the Optical Communications segment.
How much faster and whether it is a step up from the 36% year-over-year growth rate delivered in Q1 2026 is something we’ll learn (hopefully) during Corning’s earnings call this morning.
For now, though, the Wall Street herd that only reads headlines will see Corning’s revenue guidance miss and use it on top of today’s OpenAI headlines to take some recent gains out of AI and data center-related stocks.
But much like the Portfolio’s position in Marvell (MRVL) , GLW shares have been overall on a rocket ride of late, going from $85 in mid-January to the recent peak near $175. Not quite the double we saw in MRVL shares, but still a strong run. As we pointed out in Friday’s April Roundup, moves like that mean “the expectations bar for earnings reports we’re about to get, especially those tied to AI and data center, is now set even higher.”
Fortunately, we took some very big profits on Marvell shares in recent weeks and reduced our exposure when the shares were extremely oversold to a much smaller position size.
At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long ANET, AVGO, MRVL, and NVDA shares.
