Views on Juniper split ways

However, pessimists had the last word. Juniper slid in the last two hours of the week's regular trading to lose $1.03 for the day.

Few if any observers believe Juniper is a badly run company. Market research firms such as the Dell'Oro Group indicate that Juniper has seized market share from Cisco Systems over the last few years, and Juniper claims not to have lost any share in the latest quarters despite the recent introduction of Cisco routers with competitive performance.

Unfortunately for Juniper, it can't do anything about the diminished state of the overall networking market. And that gives naysayers ammunition.

"Although we continue to view Juniper as the technology leader in the (Internet Protocol) router market, we remain cautious on the shares in the near term," said Truc Do, analyst with Lazard Freres, which has a "hold" rating on Juniper.

Do believes many of the communications backbone providers that buy Juniper's products are ailing financially. And he sees Juniper's stock as expensive.

Buying Juniper nowadays requires patience.

Not many people believe the optical networking market will improve before next year. Some CEOs have predicted capital spending in the telecom market won't increase again until 2003, although executives these days prefer to err on the side of caution.

Yet Wall Street conventional wisdom tells investors to buy well-regarded stocks when their prices are depressed in bad economic times.

"Although (Juniper's) valuation is not cheap by any metric, and business visibility remains limited, we believe that the stock is a franchise name," Robertson Stephens' Johnson wrote. "We may be early in our recommendation, but we would rather be early than late with this recommendation."