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Monday, October 26, 2026

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Merger Monday & Election Implications

EQT’s $50 billion merger with Range Resources and Ovintiv’s $1.26 billion acquisition of Logan Energy reshape North American oil and gas alongside Brazil and British Columbia election…

EQT $34BRRC $11B
Bison Insights 7 clicks

From X

@aleabitoreddit 1 click

Serenity on X

I guess what I've seen from Chinese laser capacity expansion: 1. Dongshan/Source Photonics (索尔思): 9M/month capacity -> 22M/month Q4 -> 300m/year in 2027 (mostly EML, but blended) Claims of 1B/year "target" for laser chips with no deadline, but I'd take this as a grain of salt. 2. Shijia (仕佳): 72M/year for 100mW CW, 2-3 year project (mainly 2029 full capacity online) 3. Yunling (云岭): 18.75M/year 70/100mW CW, 3 year schedule (mainly 2029 full capacity online) 4. Ligent (纳真), some reports stated 170M target for total capacity (also blended, lot of which is 200G EML) 5. Yuanjie: ~10M/year currently, expanding for early 2027 and 2028, but no quantities. 6. Hongchen: I think this was the perfect example of flooding H2 2026 arguments. With some some optical bears claiming 60-70M capacity... But this turned out to completely wrong... Their actual statements were "70/100 mW products are entering small-volume production". 7. Dingxin Optoelectronics - Targeting 15M/year blended (with 70/100mW CW and 100G EML lines) Obviously mapped many others like Everbright/Accelink and did some guesses around laser mixes, but only included public disclosures. From your pluggable vendor channel checks: - 70mW/100mW lasers are actually a bottleneck right now per Innolight/Cambridge channel checks, laser ASPs actually increasing. Lasers are tighter than they were a few months ago. I don't think there's a giant moat here, Chinese players are already competitive. But a bottleneck is a bottleneck, and anyone with capacity to monetize that will benefit, since it's a volume game. In terms of what the larger pluggable makers are actually doing: - Innolight September disclosure: actively introducing new suppliers and are planning to sign 2-3 year-long contracts to lock upstream capacity for lasers (still actively securing supply for 1.6T pluggables) So there's some game theory over who can lock up qualified capacity among all your players. Even if there's some over-ordering, laser BOM is cheap, so they'd probably want to lock up capacity with more suppliers than lose billions in downstream revenue. (also kinda hurts competitors) - High end lines (for CPO), non-competitive with Western players like $LITE / $COHR as of next few years. But Chinese players would eventually develop the technology. - $AAOI CEO: Chinese suppliers several years behind on high-power CPO/DWDM laser production "not in the next 2,3 years" - $LITE CEO questioned whether claimed Chinese manufacturing capacity was translating into commercial output. "At least at the moment, we see no impact from any Chinese laser supply." This is despite Shijia, Everbright, Yuanjie and others stating 400mW capabilities and capacity expansion targets from Chinese companies. Although Western CEOs might be disputing their reliability and capability to scale these lines. I see lower end range bottleneck for pluggable will gradually ease as more capacity comes online 2028. But all evidence points against near-term overflooding. The 100mW range for example, someone cited 2 years of equipment investment. Higher ranges were 3 years for equipment investment? So even some Chinese players take years for capacity to come online. The multi year laser shortage statements from laser company executives seems to be true... especially among higher end ranges, since buildout takes a lot of time. Legitimate competition coming from China, but as of now there's a scramble for CW LTAs among the industry in 2026-2027. Lot of capacity is probably allocated toward higher spec lasers or EML, as seen with EML bottlenecking $LITE for the longest time (they have more supply now) that they had to buy CW off the market instead of supplying it themselves. This is while tail end for 800G demand for example, might continue much much longer than expected with sovereign DC buildouts. So there might be some surprising dynamics for duration, we'll see. In the end I do think supply chains will be bifurcated: - Chinese players will prioritize domestic capabilities but heavily sources globally. - Western players (now) prioritize Western supply chains unless China comes online with cheap enough supply (which don't see happening near-term). TLDR: -> Multi-year shortage definitely seems accurate for higher end specs -> Lot of China capacity overflooding claims earlier from H1 turned out to be completely false. People keep making them for some reason across memory to photonics. -> Chinese laser players are competitive for 70mW/100MW, meaningful expansion Y/Y, but nothing showing overflooding, given laser demand increasing, probably gradual easing into 2028. We'll see, supply chain evolves month after month, just my current opinion from what I'm seeing.
@calvinblissett

Calvin Blissett on X

$NTWK: $7.86, ~$94M mkt cap, ~$19M net cash, ~$75M EV. FY26 (June) was a record: revenue $74.4M, adj EBITDA $9.2M. FY27 guide is $10.5M to $11.4M of EBITDA, so ~7x. NetSol writes the loan and lease software auto captives, banks and equipment lessors run on, the kind of system a lender changes once a decade. The founding Ghauri family runs it and owns ~14-15%. Hidden asset: its majority-owned Pakistan sub, NetSol PK, is separately listed on the PSX at ~$38M, about 40% of NTWK's whole market cap. The stock has nearly tripled off its $2.73 low, so this isn't a cigar butt anymore, you're paying for the growth guide now. Risks: most of the cash sits offshore, minority holders take almost half of net income, Pakistan FX and politics, lumpy license deals. Size it small.
@calvinblissett 2 clicks

Calvin Blissett on X

$PRGS: $46.45, ~$1.9B mkt cap, ~$1.5B net debt, ~$3.4B EV. Guiding $275M to $283M of adj FCF this year, a ~14.7% FCF yield on the equity, and ~7.5x non-GAAP EPS. This is the levered one. Progress is a software roll-up: it buys sticky, mature products (OpenEdge, Chef, MOVEit, ShareFile), strips out cost, runs ~40% non-GAAP margins and uses the cash to pay down debt and buy back stock. Just closed Domo for $400M, ~3.5x pro forma EBITDA, funded on the revolver, so net leverage is ~2.9x pro forma. The bet is simple: keep throwing off ~$280M a year, push leverage back toward 2x, and the equity owns a bigger slice of the EV every year. Value Line's price in this issue was $38.61, it has run to $46.45 since, so it's not a secret anymore. Risks: ~3x leverage, flat organic growth (ARR +1%), MOVEit litigation, and GAAP EPS is a fraction of non-GAAP.
@calvinblissett 1 click

Calvin Blissett on X

$DH: $1.08, ~$156M mkt cap, ~$23M net cash. Guiding $57M to $59M of adj EBITDA for 2026, so ~2.3x EV/EBITDA and ~18% trailing FCF yield. Definitive sells data on hospitals and doctors to pharma and medtech sales teams. Revenue is shrinking (-9% in Q2) and the stock went from a $27 IPO in 2021 to about a dollar. Now the controller wants it back. Advent (58.5%) offered $1.02 cash on Sept 1, and founder Jason Krantz (17.6%) would roll his stake. The stock trades above the bid, so the market expects the special committee (Rothschild advising) to get more. $1.02 for a 26% margin data business at ~2.3x EBITDA is a lowball. Nasdaq's sub-$1 cure deadline is Dec 15. Risk: a controller can wait you out, and nothing is signed.
@calvinblissett 2 clicks

Calvin Blissett on X

$RNGR: $14.71, ~$345M mkt cap, ~$395M EV after the STEP deal. Q2 adj EBITDA $28.6M, so ~3.5x run-rate EBITDA. Ranger runs well-service rigs, wireline and coiled tubing in the Permian and Bakken: the crews that keep old oil wells producing. Unsexy, but maintenance work holds up better than drilling. Capital allocation is the pitch. They've bought back ~4.6M shares since 2023 at ~$11 avg, pay a dividend, and just bought STEP's US coiled tubing assets for $27.5M, ~2.5x expected 2027 EBITDA. Chevron gave them 3 more hybrid ECHO rigs in July. Mgmt is targeting $100M+ of EBITDA against a ~$395M EV. Risk: H1 FCF was negative because customers paid slow (receivables went from $78M to $124M). When that cash comes home, FCF jumps.
@calvinblissett 9 clicks

Calvin Blissett on X

$MQ: $18.85, $1.96B mkt cap, ~$700M cash and zero debt. Over a third of the market cap is cash, so EV is ~$1.26B. Marqeta is the card-issuing plumbing behind Cash App cards, BNPL cards and expense cards. Volume grew 32% last quarter to $120B, revenue +17%, adj EBITDA $37M. EBITDA is guided up low-30s% this year (~$144M), so ~8.7x EV/EBITDA for a business still growing double digits, and it was $29M of EBITDA in 2024. They're eating their own shares: $391M bought back in 2025, $94M more in H1, fresh $150M authorization in August. Catch: Q3 guide has revenue growth slowing to 6-8% and Block is the elephant customer. The Nov 3 print tells you if it's a pothole or a cliff.

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Molina & Kinsale

Molina Healthcare and Kinsale Capital’s earnings are reassessed through a long-term lens, emphasizing conviction and detachment during…

MOH $11BKNSL $8.6B
Bearstone 6 clicks

Tower Semiconductor Deep Dive

Tower Semiconductor’s low-loss photonics chips halve lasers in 1.6T optical modules, supporting a $680 million annualized photonics run…

TSEM $19B
CV's Substack 9 clicks

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