Juniper posts Q1 revenue of $998 million, flat YoY

Juniper Networks reported Q1 2020 revenue of $998.0 million, flat year-over-year, and a decrease of 17% sequentially. GAAP net income was $20.4 million, a decrease of 34% year-over-year, and a decrease of 88% sequentially, resulting in diluted earnings per share of $0.06. Non-GAAP net income was $77.2 million, a decrease of 17% year-over-year, and a decrease of 61% sequentially, resulting in non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.23.

“Orders grew 10% on a year-over-year basis during the March quarter and improved across each of our core industry verticals. With our stronger than expected demand, we believe our financial results would have exceeded the mid-point of our guidance if not for supply challenges we faced resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Juniper’s CEO, Rami Rahim. “While we are starting to see some weakness in our enterprise pipeline, which is impacting visibility into the second half of the year, we believe the overall momentum we are seeing speaks to the strength of our solutions, our strong customer relationships and the efforts we undertook to diversify the business across verticals and customers over the past several years.”

“While we are seeing uncertainty in our business due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we expect to see sequential revenue and non-GAAP earnings growth in Q2. Confidence in our forecast is driven by strong backlog and healthy momentum with our Service Provider and Cloud customers. We believe these factors should help offset increased uncertainty in certain segments of the Enterprise market. Due to the uncertain macroenvironment we have widened our revenue range for the second quarter.

The company posted the following guidance for the quarter ending June 30, 2020:

• Revenue will be approximately $1,060 million, plus or minus $50 million.
• Non-GAAP gross margin will be approximately 59.5%, plus or minus 1.0%.
• Non-GAAP operating expenses will be approximately $480 million, plus or minus $5 million.
• Non-GAAP operating margin will be approximately 14.0% at the mid-point of revenue guidance.
• Non-GAAP tax rate will be approximately 19.5%.
• Non-GAAP net income per share will be approximately $0.34, plus or minus $0.05. This assumes a share count of approximately 332 million.