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Technology Stocks : Juniper Networks - JNPR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ibexx who wrote (2923)	1/14/2002 12:38:14 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 3350

Forbes.com Juniper Will Set The Tone By Mark Lewis Networking stocks received a short-lived boost last week when Cisco Systems expressed optimism about current conditions. But what is good for Cisco is not necessarily good for its rivals, so investors will be all ears tomorrow when Juniper Networks becomes the first major networker to report fourth-quarter earnings. Juniper issued a warning on Dec. 20 that its earnings would come in at 5 cents per share--just half what the firm had predicted in October. So Wall Street already knows that the actual numbers will be bad. "The question is guidance," says analyst Ariane Mahler of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, who expects Juniper's first-quarter 2002 revenue to be flat at best. Goldman Sachs' Natarajan Subrahmanyan agrees that the first quarter for Juniper and its telecom equipment peers will be weak. "We expect that vendors will broadly guide to a sequentially lower March and continue to give minimal long-term guidance based on low visibility, but will imply a sales bottom in the March quarter," he said in a research note today. "However, we do believe that stocks are pricing in a March bottom, and with a weak March and no real evidence of a June quarter pick up, these stocks could trade sideways till we see evidence of improvement." Any confirmation of that prediction from Juniper executives tomorrow could take some air out of this stock, which lost 85% of its value last year but is still richly valued by traditional measures. Juniper's share price has been holding fairly steady so far this month, suggesting that investors are not sure which way this firm is headed. Despite his bleak prognosis for the first quarter, Subrahmanyan is bullish on Juniper, which he thinks will be among the winners for 2002. Juniper sells core routers to telecom carriers, which have been cutting their capital spending--but Subrahmanyan sees next-generation infrastructure equipment sales as the driver when the recovery finally arrives. And Juniper has a fast new router that may give Cisco fits. Mahler, however, says she is less impressed by the prospects for Juniper's new router, "which I'm not so sure people will need." The Wall Street consensus estimate for Juniper's fourth-quarter earnings as compiled by Thomson Financial/First Call is 5 cents per share, compared to 24 cents for the year-ago quarter. For full-year 2001 the consensus is 48 cents, off from the 53 cents it earned in 2000. The current consensus for full-year 2002 is 27 cents. Among the other networking firms expected to report earnings this week are Extreme Networks , Redback Networks and Sonus Networks . biz.yahoo.com