Sun Micro Growth to Slow, Salomon Says: Call of Day (Update2)
By Deborah Stern
New York, Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Wall Street is showing the first cracks in its bullish outlook for Sun Microsystems Inc.
Salomon Smith Barney Inc. analyst John Jones said the maker of server computers and software to run Web sites won't be able to keep sales growing as quickly as in past quarters, and he cut his recommendation on Sun to ``neutral'' from ``buy.''
The call makes Salomon the only one among Wall Street's 20 largest firms to rate Sun less than ``buy.'' For its part, Sun is among the few large technology companies that hasn't indicated sales or profit growth will disappoint investors.
Jones says Sun is poised for the same slowdown as everybody else. The company's sales growth could fall to the single digits over the next two to three quarters, he said in an interview.
``We've expected a deceleration of growth rates in Sun because they'd attained a level that was completely unsustainable,'' said Jones, who ranks third among enterprise hardware analysts in Institutional Investor magazine's survey of money managers.
According to Bloomberg data, 23 analysts rate Sun ``buy'' and three rate it ``hold,'' the same category as ``neutral.'' Among smaller Wall Street firms, Arthur Russell of Edward Jones & Co. has had a ``hold'' recommendation on Sun since March 2000, and the stock has fallen 39 percent in that time.
Last quarter, Sun's sales of hardware and software products grew 63 percent from a year earlier and services revenue rose 47 percent. New orders climbed 54 percent during the fiscal first quarter, the company said in October.
Investors shouldn't expect to see that kind of performance again from Sun or its peers, Salomon Smith Barney's Jones said.
``This is not a market that grows at 50 percent,'' said Jones, who slashed his forecast for Sun Micro's shares in a year to $30 from $55. The stock, which had lost 50 percent from its Sept. 1 peak through yesterday, today fell $1.50 to $30.44.
Analysts polled by First Call/Thomson Financial expect Sun's earnings to grow 37 percent this fiscal year, which ends in June, and 26 percent in fiscal 2002.
Profit growth for most other companies is slowing more than that. The companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index are likely to post earnings growth of 8.6 percent in 2001, down from 17.5 percent for 2000.
Shipping Delay
Sun may also be burdened by a delay in shipping a new line of products based on its more powerful UltraSparc III chip, Jones said. The chip will help the Palo Alto, California, company better compete with Hewlett-Packard Co. and International Business Machines Corp., both of which sell equipment that runs faster than Sun's current products.
``The competitive bar is being raised while customer annoyances with Sun's technology is putting them at higher risk'' of losing business to competitors, Jones said.
While he is the first analyst from a large Wall Street firm to cut his recommendation on Sun below a ``buy, Jones said he regrets not making the downgrade last month.
``I'm not early -- I'm late,'' Jones said. ``I should have done this about 15 points ago.''
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