Clearfield, Inc. (NASDAQ: CLFD)

Clearfield, Inc. designs, manufactures, and distributes fiber protection, fiber management, and fiber delivery solutions to enable rapid and cost effective fiber fed deployment for broadband service providers primarily across North America. Substantially all final build and assembly is completed at the company’s plants in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota and Tijuana, Mexico, with manufacturing support from a network of domestic and global manufacturing partners. Clearfield offers its products on both a quick turn and scheduled delivery basis. The company’s mission is to enable the lifestyle that better broadband provides through innovative product design that accelerates fiber based deployment making communications simpler and more affordable for people everywhere. Clearfield believes its products give broadband service providers a competitive advantage as demand for fiber based services rises to historic levels, allowing providers to pass and connect more homes.

Clearfield generates revenue by selling its fiber optic products directly to broadband service providers and through authorized distributors, manufacturing sales representatives and sales agents. Its product portfolio includes the FieldSmart series of panels cabinets wall boxes and enclosures, the Clearview Cassette as a core building block, WaveSmart optical components for signal coupling splitting termination multiplexing demultiplexing and attenuation, Active Cabinets using the FiberFlex product line, CraftSmart FiberFirst pedestals, various access terminals such as the TetherSmart Multi Fiber Terminal and the YOURx access terminals, the FieldShield fiber pathway and protection system, and high quality fiber assemblies including custom solutions developed alongside OEM customers. The company also offers the ClearPass Connector Cleaning Dust Cap which enhances fiber connector cleaning and network performance. Clearfield’s products allow customers to connect twice as many homes in their fiber to the home builds by using fewer resources in less time, speeding up time to revenue for multiple dwelling units and multiple tenant units by reducing labor and materials needed to provide gigabit service, and making business services more profitable through faster building access easier reconfiguration and quicker service turn up. Additionally, Clearfield helps remove barriers to wireless 4G and 5G deployments in backhaul from tower to cloud and fiber fronthaul from tower to antenna at the cell site through better fiber management test access and fiber protection.

The company operates through the following segments.

• Reportable Segment: This segment encompasses the design, manufacturing, and distribution of fiber management, fiber protection, and fiber delivery products that support broadband network deployment.

Clearfield operates in a highly competitive market for fiber management, fiber protection, and fiber delivery products where competition is based on functionality and features, price, product quality, availability and lead times, cost and ease of installation, service and support, long term returns to customers, scalability, product innovation, and manufacturing capability. Key competitors include Corning Cabling Systems, Inc., OFS (Furukawa Electric North America, Inc.), AFL Telecommunications (a subsidiary of Fujikura Ltd.), Fujikura Ltd., Nokia, Hexatronics Group, Amphenol and CommScope, Inc. For active cabinet product lines the company faces competition from Emerson Network Power, a subsidiary of Vertiv Co., and Charles Industries, Ltd., a subsidiary of Amphenol. For the FieldShield product line competitors include PPC Broadband, a subsidiary of Belden, Inc., and Emtelle UK Limited. Clearfield believes it has a competitive advantage with customers who can leverage the cost savings of the Clearview Cassette and those who need quick turn, high performance customized products, while many larger competitors possess greater resources in sales, product development, marketing, financial, technical, and engineering areas. As of September 30, 2025, Clearfield held 63 patents granted with multiple patent applications pending both inside and outside the United States, and these patents begin to expire in 2028.

Clearfield serves a diverse customer base of broadband service providers that it categorizes as National Carrier (wireline/wireless national telco carriers Tier 1), Community Broadband (Tier 2 and 3 telco carriers, utilities, municipalities, and alternative carriers), Large Regional Service Providers (ILECs operating multi state networks with more than 500,000 subscribers), Multiple System Operators (cable television), and International customers primarily in Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The company allocates sales from external customers to geographic areas based on the location to which the product is transported, with sales outside the United States principally to customers in Canada as well as countries in the Caribbean, Central/South America, and Mexico. Clearfield also sells through distributors, with two major distributor customers accounting for approximately 18% and 13% of net sales in the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025, and similar percentages in prior years. These major customers, like other customers, purchase products from time to time through purchase orders and there are no agreements obligating future purchases.