Ciena (Nasdaq: CIEN) hasn't been able to establish an earnings trend, bouncing between beating and falling short of estimates during the past fiscal year. The company will unveil its latest earnings on Wednesday, March 7. Ciena is a provider of communications networking equipment, software, and services that support the transport, switching, aggregation, and management of voice, video, and data traffic.

What analysts say:

  • Buy, sell, or hold?: Analysts are bullish on this stock. Only one rates it as a sell, while 13 recommend it as a buy. Analysts like Ciena better than competitor Tellabs overall. Analysts still rate the stock a moderate buy, but they are a bit more wary about it compared to three months ago.
  • Revenue forecasts: On average, analysts predict $417.3 million in revenue this quarter. That would represent a decline of 3.7% from the year-ago quarter.
  • Wall Street earnings expectations: The average analyst estimate is a loss of $0.17 per share. Estimates range from a loss of $0.25 to a loss of $0.10.

What our community says:
CAPS All-Stars are in strong support of the stock, with 82.9% granting it an outperform rating. The community at large is in line with the All-Stars, with 86.4% assigning it a rating of outperform. Ciena's bearish CAPS rating of two out of five stars falls short of the Fool community sentiment.

Management:
Revenue has now gone up for three straight quarters.

Now, a look at how efficient management has been at running the business. Margins illustrate how efficiently a company captures portions of sales dollars. The company's net margins have been increasing year over year for the last four quarters. Net margins reflect what percentage of revenue becomes profit. Here is how Ciena has been doing for the last four quarters:

Quarter

Q4

Q3

Q2

Q1

Gross Margin

41.7%

42.5%

39.7%

38.9%

Operating Margin

(3.6%)

(4.0%)

(13.3%)

(17.1%)

Net Margin

(4.9%)

(7.2%)

(15.0%)

(18.2%)

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Earnings estimates provided by Zacks.