Symantec has more shoes to drop.

by Kris_Tuttle on April 29, 2008

Syman­tec reports earn­ings after the close on Wednes­day and we have no idea what it will be like.  What we do know is that the sit­u­a­tion in the field for Syman­tec is going from bad to worse.

Our most recent report was pro­duced in part­ner­ship with The­In­fo­Pro which col­lects input from enter­prise cus­tomers to under­stand fun­da­men­tal tech­nol­ogy shifts within IT.  The data for Syman­tec has been declin­ing steadily for some time and has recently accel­er­ated on the down­side.  If the cur­rent trends con­tinue Syman­tec spend­ing inten­tions will sug­gest an actual YoY decline for the first time since data start­ing being col­lected back in 2003.

The root of the prob­lem lies in the lack of exe­cu­tion between man­age­ment vision and the com­pany acqui­si­tions and the cus­tomer.  Prod­ucts haven’t been inte­grated.  The sales teams have suf­fered from lack of train­ing and high turnover.   Cus­tomers are relat­ing hor­ror sto­ries regard­ing tech­ni­cal sup­port and cus­tomer service.

Our report details a bit more of the data and delves into val­u­a­tion using typ­i­cal approaches along with our own long-term val­u­a­tion frame­work and the foren­sic account­ing of New Con­structs.  The net result is a fair value of about $14/share.

The only good news for share­hold­ers is that the stock is already trad­ing at a level where an acqui­si­tion by CA, HP or BMC would work.  That’s the only pos­i­tive sce­nario we see now given that man­age­ment hasn’t even acknowl­edged the depth of the issues, let alone start solv­ing them.  (Dell is at least past the acknowl­edge­ment stage here and work­ing on solutions.)

Based on what we see one would expect con­ser­v­a­tive guid­ance on Wednes­day and an inter­est­ing Ana­lyst Day on June 12th. 

– Kris Tuttle

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