Soitec: Still A Photonics Winner, But At What Price?
A company I love, a setup I do not. Why the business is one of the best-positioned photonics names in the world, and why the stock at €192 still makes no sense.
The number that should scare you
On 28 May, the day after Soitec reported its FY26 results, the stock closed up 24.5% in a single session. Year to date, it is up roughly 673%. At €192 per share, the company is worth about €7.3bn.
And it got there on the back of numbers that, stripped of the narrative, were objectively poor: revenue down 30% organically to €592m, a gross margin of 16.3% against a consensus closer to 20%, a current operating loss, and a reported net loss of €220m once impairments are counted.
Soitec has been one of the great round-trips of the European semiconductor complex.
Let me be clear about where I land, because the rest of this piece earns the right to say it. I love this business. I do not love this setup.
Soitec is one of the best-positioned photonics names in Europe, arguably in the world. The technology is real, the moat is real, and the structural story behind it is one I have written about at length. But the stock, at this price and on the timeline investors are implicitly underwriting, simply does not make sense.
A great deal of the money buying Soitec today does not understand what the company actually does, and a meaningful slice of it is going to end up as someone else’s exit liquidity.
I like the business. I do not like the security at this price. Those are two different statements, and the entire point of this note is to keep them apart.
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A confession - I have followed this company for years
I have known Soitec for a long time.
I knew it in the glory days, when Paul Boudre ran it and the company was the darling of the French tech complex, the proof that Europe could build a genuinely differentiated deep-tech franchise in semiconductors. I have met management many times across the years. I have watched the share price do almost everything a share price can do: ride the RF-SOI 5G boom toward €230 in 2022, then get left for dead through a brutal multi-year inventory correction that took it to around €20 by December 2025, then re-rate almost vertically as the market rediscovered photonics.
On May 28th, I attended the FY26 results conference in Paris and met the new management.
Laurent Rémont took over as CEO on 1 April 2026, arriving from Infineon (one of the best run EU semis company and the dominant power semi and AI power company), succeeding Pierre Barnabé. He is a serious operator with deep semiconductor experience in mobile, automotive and AI-relevant end markets, and his early message was the right one: discipline, execution, cash generation, and a recognition that the company needs to rebuild credibility on guidance. That last point matters more than it sounds, and we will come back to it.
I say all of this so there is no ambiguity. This is not a hit piece from someone who does not get the story, it is the opposite. I get the story completely, which is exactly why I think the price has detached from it.
What Soitec actually does, and why most buyers today do not know
Soitec does not make chips. It makes the engineered substrates that other people’s chips are built on.
