Juniper CEO ‘Disappointed’ With Q4 Revenue, Weak Cloud Sales Persist

Weak cloud and service provider sales continued to hurt Juniper Networks’ bottom line in the fourth quarter of 2018. Juniper CEO Rami Rahim admitted that he was “disappointed” and warned investors that sluggish cloudsales will likely hurt the company’s first quarter 2019 results. “Wins and new use cases will be needed to drive cloud growth,” he said. “We are laser-focused on capturing these opportunities and view the 400-gig transition as an inflection point that will present opportunities for us to take share starting later this year.” Juniper hopes to be the first of the major telecom vendors to offer 400-gigabit Ethernet within its routing and switching portfolio and plans to roll out these new products during the first half of the year. The company ended the fourth quarter of 2018 with $1.18 billion in revenue, below the low end of its guidance and a 5 percent year-over-year drop. For the full year, net revenues declined 8 percent year over year to $4.65 billion.