Show me the past data for what? What is the future? CSCO could eat ANET alive!!! Through their law suits 
Two more names in my screen. Both a lot smaller:
ATHM
SFUN
Let me know if they are any good. Still reading up on them.
One that’s a lot bigger: STZ
STZ is well known, one of the largest distillers, like DEO. Both STZ and DEO are good. STZ has some NAPA wineyards too. I had STZ until last sale recently.
ATHM looks fine, profitable with good profit margin, for me, but not SFUN (like penny stocks).
We need to grab at near low point.
It is ongoing issue like AAPL vs SAMSUNG, never ends, but company grows over a period.
1 Like
SFUN does look like crap. I like ATHM. Don’t know anything about STZ until last night. Need to study more.
STZ is the largest USA company in that sector, comparable with DEO (UK based).
Someone in reddit wrote about ANET. Here it is reproduced.
What is Arista?
Arista Networks is a classic disruptor that has almost everything going right for it these days. Arista’s cloud-based networking technology beats traditional hardware in both speed and capacity, and the world’s increasing appetite for data helped the company increase revenue more than tenfold over the past six years. Arista’s third-quarter report was more of the same: Sales grew more than 50% and net income more than doubled. Fourth-quarter results come out in two weeks, and management has guided for continued growth, with the top line expected to increase about 40% over last year. And about Arista’s leadership: It’s top-notch. Co-founder and chairman Andy Bechtolsheim is a Silicon Valley legend, founding Sun Microsystems and funding Google in its infancy. CEO Jayshree Ullal and co-founder and chief technology officer Kenneth Duda are superstars in their own right. What’s more, Bechtolsheim and Ullal control about 23% of shares between them. Plug in for a long run with this innovator.
Arista Networks’ fourth-quarter results continued its impressive run of growth. Revenue jumped 43% to $467.9 million, and that was slightly higher than the consensus forecast among investors for $463 million in sales. Adjusted net income soared 77% to $137.3 million, and the resulting adjusted earnings of $1.71 per share topped the $1.42 per share that most of those following the stock had expected to see. Sales gains were well balanced across Arista’s segments, with product sales jumping 41% even as the smaller but still important services division experienced stronger growth of more than 55%. Internal efficiency remained strong, with gross margin rising another 1.5 percentage points to 65.9%.
As we’ve seen before, Arista kept a tight rein on most of its expenses. Research and development costs jumped by half, but a decline in overhead expenses and just slight increases in sales and marketing costs helped keep operating expenses in line. That in turn helped to boost Arista’s earnings by a greater percentage than its revenue gains.
CEO Jayshree Ullal was very happy with the way that the year ended. “2017 represents a market tipping point,” Ullal said, “with Arista’s disruptive software-driven architecture gaining mainstream acceptance as we surpassed 15 million cumulative ports of cloud networking.” CFO Ita Brennan pointed to 2017’s 46% revenue jump and 70% rise in adjusted earnings per share as further marks of success for the year.
Arista CAN keep growing:
Arista’s future remains bright. One reason why Arista had such a strong year was that business from key customer Microsoft grew even faster than the company had expected. Microsoft made up about 16% of Arista’s business, and Ullal pointed both to Microsoft’s own success with Azure and to Arista’s Microsoft engineering team in developing use cases that appealed to users of the systems. Such collaborations with what the CEO called “cloud titans” will be a top priority in driving Arista’s future growth.
2018 promises to be an interesting year for Arista. The company expects to enter into the 400 gigabit Ethernet market space in the coming year, and after having reached the status of market share leader in the 100 gigabit Ethernet switching industry, Arista can expect to lever its reputation among purchasers to work more closely with service providers, cloud specialty providers, and enterprise customers more broadly.
Arista’s first-quarter guidance was generally in line with what investors had foreseen. A range of $450 million to $468 million in revenue was in line with the consensus forecast for $458 million, and guidance for adjusted gross margin of 63% to 65% and operating margin of 32% was generally consistent with past quarters.
Yet shareholders wanted more from Arista, perhaps through stronger projections for 2018 or further signs of accelerating growth in key product areas. In response to that disappointment, the stock dropped 13% in pre-market trading Friday following the Thursday afternoon announcement. In the long run, though, Arista Networks seems to be doing everything it can to capture a growing piece of the important networking space. Long-term investors might well see any pullback for the stock as a buying opportunity rather than a cause for concern.
Why I’m still VERY bullish on Arista:
It shouldn’t be surprising that growth will moderate as Arista builds from its larger base. Of course, investors should also keep in mind that Arista has made a habit of underpromising and overdelivering, so I won’t be surprised if this outlook proves conservative when 2018 is said and done. But it also didn’t help that Arista Networks’ stock price had more than tripled over the past year leading up to this report, likely tempting some skittish investors to take profits despite the continued relative strength of Arista’s underlying business.
This was another strong report from Arista Networks, and contrary to what Friday’s decline might indicate, long-term investors should be more than pleased with their position.
My strategy is that it has dipped and I will watch it if it dips more and i’ll jump in when it starts rising.
2 Likes