What reads like a classic turnaround tale is really the quietly dramatic reinvention of a company that went from humble IBM spin-off and commodity contract manufacturer to a design-led partner building the plumbing of the AI cloud. After surviving telecom and smartphone busts, leadership rebooted Celestica in 2016—walking away from low-margin customers, investing in joint design-manufacturing and a Hardware Platform Solutions (HPS) push—and was perfectly positioned when the AI boom (and ChatGPT) made high-speed networking, liquid cooling, and bespoke rack systems suddenly indispensable. The result: rapidly improving margins, outsized HPS growth, a global “China‑Plus‑One” footprint and deep hyperscaler relationships that make Celestica sticky but expose it to concentration and cyclical hardware risk.

Transcript https://empor.top/us/CLS

• I. Introduction: The "Picks and Shovels" of the Data Center
• II. The Blue Blood Origins: IBM Canada & The Spin-Off
• III. The Icarus Moment: The Telecom Bubble & The Crash
• IV. The Wilderness Years: The "Commodity Trap"
• V. The Inflection Point: The 2016 Pivot
• VI. The Hardware Platform Solutions (HPS) Strategy
• VII. The Modern Era: AI, Complexity & Supply Chains
• VIII. The Playbook: Analysis & Frameworks
• IX. Bear vs. Bull & Future Outlook
• X. Conclusion & Grading the Transformation
• XI. Recommended Reading