I haven't traded NT for a fairly long time, but seems many people here are interested in NT. Here are my two cents:
1. There are no significant differences between Nortel Networks’ longer term growth and growth in recent years. Annual revenue growth has been −13.9% per year. Total asset growth has been −7.9% per year. Annual E.P.S. growth has been −27.5% per year. Equity growth has been −25.1% per year.
Nortel Networks’ historical income statement growth and balance sheet growth have diverged. Revenue growth has fallen short of asset growth; earnings growth has paralleled equity growth. With all those negative growth, how much uptrend room can we expect?
2. NT is too large and continues to suffer from too much legacy product market exposure to avoid the prevailing challenging carrier capex growth and pricing environment. The revenue disappointment together with higher-than-forecast opex offset solid gross margin to drive disappointing operating margin and the significant EPS shortfall. While Nortel generated a 70 basis points sequential increase in gross margin to 43.7%, operating margin came in at a disappointing 7.6%. On a positive note, Nortel commented that a significant portion of the higher than forecast operating expenditures was driven by sales commissions which are tied to orders as opposed to revenues. Nortel also announced further restructuring initiatives with plans to reduce its workforce by an additional 2,100 employees and to migrate an additional 1,000 jobs to lower cost regions.
3.Nortel offered the following guidance for calendar 2008:
CY08 Revenue: Low single digit growth. Assuming 3% growth, Nortel’s projection would translate to approximately $11.28bln which is lower than the Wall Street Consensus.
CY08 Gross Margin: Approximately 43%
CY08 Operating Margin: A 300 basis point increase, which translates to approximately 6.7% which is lower than Wall Street consensus’s previous 7.7% estimates.
4. One concern of NT is regarding its ability to drive meaningful rev growth while driving further margin gains sufficient to drive meaningful upside to NT’s stock. In short, NT faces numerous challenges in meeting its updated guidance given the ongoing constrained carrier capex environment. In order to drive meaningful EPS upside, NT will need to drive opex as a percentage of rev to levels that NT and few of its peers have ever achieved or sustained.
Overall, I still think NT is a MOMO play not a investment play at all.