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Cisco Cuts Into Arris CMTS Margins

Arris Group Inc. (Nasdaq: ARRS) shipped a record number of Docsis 3.0 downstream ports in the first quarter, but Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: Cisco 3560)'s line of new, denser cable modem termination system (CMTS) line cards put the squeeze on margins.

Arris shipped 62,000 CMTS downstream ports in the first quarter, up 36 percent from the previous quarter, but revenues, at US$267.4 million, were flat compared with the year-ago period. The company's Broadband Communications Systems (BCS) division, which houses Arris's CMTS products, posted gross margins of 37.3 percent in the first quarter, down from 45.4 percent in the year-ago quarter.

Blame a lot of that on Cisco 3560g, a modular CMTS line card that packs in 72 downstreams and 60 upstream ports, and its 20/20 card for integrated CMTS deployments. (See Cisco Aiming to One-Up Cable's Upstream , Cisco Reclaims CMTS Lead and Cisco Alters CMTS Vision With '20/20' Card .)

Arris is countering with a new field-upgradable CMTS line card for its flagship box, the C4, but the vendor "had to continue to adjust pricing to remain competitive" in the first quarter, company President and CEO Bob Stanzione said on Wednesday's earnings call. "We did not want to lose market share … so we had to forward price."

But Stanzione's confident that margins will improve in the second quarter as it begins to deliver a capacity upgrade that doubles the downstream density of existing CMTS linecards -- from 16 downstreams to 32. Arris said MSOs can use the new 7.4 software release to boost blade capacity without having to remove it from the C4 chassis.

Bruce McClelland, president of the BCS unit, said the field upgrade, enabled through a license key, applies to all CMTS cards the company has been shipping since mid-2008. ws-c2960-24tc-l,Arris expects to release a similar feature later this year that will double CMTS blade upstream capacity.

But some analysts are skeptical. The company's "growth prospects remain very uncertain, particularly in light of the software-driven upgrade cycle and implicit CMTS price erosion currently facing the company," Jefferies & Co. Inc. Analyst George Notter wrote in a note issued this morning.

Looking ahead, Arris is still working on its next-gen CMTS, dubbed the E6 cable edge router -- a product that's expected to be its entry into the budding Converged Multiservice Access Platform (CMAP) market. Arris expects the E6 to reach lab trials later this year. (See Comcast Targets First CMAP Field Trial .)


 
Cisco ( CSCO ) is shutting down its Flip video camera unit after buying it in 2009 for $590 million. While this caught many Cisco watchers by surprise, we believe it was probably the right move and have discussed this in recent Cisco articles . Cisco competes with Juniper ( JNPR ), HP ( HPQ ) and Alcatel-Lucent ( ALU ) in the networking equipment business but has done several acquisitions over the years that have led the company away from its core businesses. Below we discuss our take on this move.

Our price estimate for Cisco stands at $24.20 , which is a premium of roughly 40% to the market price.

Looking at the Flip

The Flip camera was a great product before everyone had a smartphone.

The Flip offers easy video recording that is mobile and convenient. Now that smartphones have essentially the same capabilities in a compact offering, who wants to carry a Flip Camera when their smartphone can do the job? We wrote articles previously connecting these opinions to the potential value of the businesses in notes titled Does used Cisco Need to Lose Weight? and New Flip Cam Feature Great for Users, an Afterthought for Investors.

If we look at the value of the Flip, $590 million seems like a pretty frothy price to pay for this device. We estimate that the Flip Camera and Linksys constitute around 1.34% of Cisco's value, which implies a combined value of around $1.75 billion based on our estimated value and $1.2 billion based on the current market capitalization. Within this segment, we forecast that Linksys' contributes more than Flip and that Flip's value is below the $590 million paid initially.

The company says that it is shutting the unit down to focus on its core networking business, and despite positive revenue growth, we believe this is probably the right move.

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