Netflix Soars, Juniper Sinks, AT&T Floats

July 24th, 2009 by · 2 Comments

It was a busy day yesterday on the earnings front.  In the telecom equipment segment, Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) had a rough time, although on paper things weren’t so bad.  Revenues of $786M were actually better than most had projected, breaking the steady downward trend.  Earnings per share of $0.19 seemed to be inline with expectations.  Likewise, projections for Q3 weren’t far off.  But there are projections and there are hopes, and clearly the market was hoping for much better.  The fortunes of equipment makers can turn on a dime, and Juniper’s stock price has risen lately on the hopes that they would do just that.  While things are clearly improving, that apparently wasn’t satisfying enough and the stock price took a beating after hours. 

Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX, news, filings) on the other hand continued to outrun its more vocal detractors.  Revenues of $408.5M were inline, earnings per share of $0.54 were a bit better than expected, and total subscribers grew to 10.6M.  Pretty good certainly, but deserving of the term ‘blockbuster earnings‘ and other rather amazed headlines?  Hmmm…  Again, there are projections and there are hopes, and there were quite a few out there hoping that Netflix would finally fail to live up to their billing this quarter and perhaps implode or something.  Didn’t happen.

And then we have AT&T, which continued its previous melody.  Revenues of $30.7B and earnings per share of $0.54 were both a touch above analyst projections.  The company as usual was able to lay the blame for not doing ‘better’ by selling tons of subsidized iPhones – with 2.4M activations in the quarter.  Net wireless customer additions were 1.3M or so.  Access lines of course fell by another 921,000, which again is par for the course.  But when you’re a giant in the midst of a recession, no surprises is exactly what the market likes to see.

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Categories: Financials · ILECs, PTTs · Telecom Equipment · Video

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2 Comments So Far


  • steve says:

    Might want to revise the Juniper commentary to note the closing price after regular trading on Friday – especially as JNPR came into the earnings call with a stock up 4% on the day. Good reason to not trust the after hours trading. sometimes it is right but it is disturbing how a relatively small number of f trades can “make” news that can be incredibly hard to un-make. Also have a look at their product deferred revenue (up $31m seq’l on top of revenues above guidance). As you might guess, I do own Juniper. Like your blog and generally enjoy the commentary.

  • Rob Powell says:

    You’re right, opinions certainly did change that day after I wrote the commentary. Alas, it’s not generally fair play for me to edit such things with hindsight – the world shall prove me blind occasionally. As you can tell, I thought the market was being a bit shortsighted, I’m glad they came to see otherwise.

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