Juniper beats Q3 earnings expectations in spite of slow cloud deployments
Juniper released its third quarter financial results on Tuesday, beating earnings estimates and posting revenues in line with expectations. However, the networking company lowered its Q4 outlook due to the slower pace of expected deployments from its cloud customers. Q4 expectations were still close to analyst estimates, and shares were up in after-hours trading.
Non-GAAP net income for Q3 came to $191 million, a decrease of 10 percent year-over-year. Diluted earnings per share came to 54 cents. Net revenues were $1.18 billion, a decrease of 6 percent year-over-year.
Wall Street was expecting earnings of 45 cents a share on revenue of $1.18 billion.
"We reported better than expected Q3 results, as continued enterprise strength and better than expected service provider results more than offset weakness in the cloud," CEO Rami Rahim said in a statement. "While our Q4 outlook is being impacted by the pace of deployments at several cloud customers, we believe this is a temporary headwind and remain confident that we have the right products and strategy in place to grow the business in 2019."
For Q4, Juniper is expecting non-GAAP net income per share to come to 57 cents, plus or minus 3 cents. It expects revenues around $1.22 billion, plus or minus $30.0 million.
Juniper notes that the midpoint of its revenue outlook, $1.22 billion, reflects a year-over-year decline. The company said it previously expected Q4 to return to growth on a year-over-year basis, and the adjustment reflects the slower pace of expected Cloud deployments.
Wall Street is expecting Q4 revenues of $1.25 billion, at the higher end of Juniper's outlook.