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Thursday, May 28, 2015

Two Major Vendors Shift Risk Categories: 1Q 2015 Vendor Financial Index Results

Ericsson Jumps into the Med-Risk Category and ALU Moves from Medium Risk to High Risk

ACG Research has released its 1Q 2015 Vendor Financial Index report, which delivers independent information about the sustainability of a vendor or company to help providers assess the risk of selecting the right vendor to meet their business requirements and to ascertain a risk level on the stability of the vendor regardless of technology innovations.

Low-risk vendors for the quarter are Adtran, Brocade, Cisco, and Juniper. Characteristics of low-risk vendors include strong revenue outlook, high operating margins because of sales, solid gross margin and expense discipline, low debt dependency, and high receivable efficiency ratio.

Adtran’s performance is predicted to improve in 2015 as a result of higher carrier expenditure in U.S. and Europe. Tier 1 U.S. and Tier 2, Tier 3 carriers’ business is expected to grow. Broadband Access platforms will drive growth. Brocade’s SAN revenue is expected to be down by 8% to 11% QoQ. IP networking revenue is projected to be up by 3% to 11% QoQ. Global Services revenue is expected to grow 2%. Focus for new business is on large enterprises and cloud service providers. The firm is collaboratively working on Dell’s new open standard NFV platform. Cisco’s Vision is strong for Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and InterCloud. ACI and APIC are predicted to be the cornerstone of the next generation of networking architectures. The volatility in service provider and emerging markets will continue to be a concern. Order growth in SDN will add to revenue in 2Q15. Juniper’s strategy is focused on Cloud Ecosystems and High-IQ Networks segments. Partnership with Vmware will enable highly automated cloud datacenter solutions for both service provider and mission-critical enterprise network.

Alcatel-Lucent, which was a medium risk last quarter, Cyan, Ciena and ZTE are high risk, which is characterized by low inventory turnover ratio, revenue decreases and low value of equity to debt ratio. Alcatel-Lucent, soon to be called Nokia, saw a decrease in revenue in 1Q (21.5% sequentially) because of a decline in spending in the North America market and increase in cost of sales. The merger with Nokia will shift ALU’s priorities to include expanding Nokia-ALU’s optical networking portfolio with the introduction of high-capacity metro optical networking platforms and a scalable wavelength routing technology.

Ericsson, which moved from low risk to medium risk, is expected to see slow growth in its North American mobile broadband business. The company’s investment focus is in both core and new businesses in IP networks, cloud, OSS, BSS, TV and media to capture new markets.

For more information about ACG Research’s Vendor Financial Index service or other syndicated and consulting services, contact sales@acgcc.com.

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