Juniper Sags On Modest Revenue

By David Gross

Juniper (JNPR) reported quarterly revenue of $1.01 billion after yeserday's close.   While this was up over 20% from last year's third quarter revenue of $823 million, Wall Street was disappointed.   Catharine Trebnik of Avian Securities commented to Reuters that:

"I think the market was expecting more on the top line, people thought they were going to kill the number. And there was a lot of that built into the share price."

This pretty much summed up Wall Street's view, and the stock was down 2% after hours.   But while the top line might not have impressed, the bottom line was up significantly year-over-year, over 60%, to $134 million.    Much like we saw with VMWare, Juniper's been growing revenue significantly faster than its SG&A, or operating, costs.   The 20%+ growth in revenue was accompanied by SG&A's that rose from $224 million to just $248 million, or barely over 10%.   R&D expenses were up over 20%, so Juniper's been hiring more engineers while creating few new positions in marketing, sales or finance.


While the company has long depended on telecom carriers, it has been stepping up its presence in the data center, including an announcement last week that PEER 1 hosting was filling its data center with Juniper's EX-series Ethernet switches.   Additionally, it has OEM'd BLADE's Top-of-Rack RackSwitch G8124, and branded it the EX2500.     But it's been silent about 40 Gigabit ports for data center networks, where we've seen announcements in the last week from Mellanox (MLNX), BLADE, and Extreme (EXTR).