Signaling that the long-anticipated ramp-up of its DOCSIS 3.1 business is finally at hand, Arris said it expects to ship 2 million modems and gateways supporting the cable network technology standard by the end of this year.
“During the quarter, we continued to see strong customer interest in our DOCSIS 3.1 solutions,” said Arris CPE chief Larry Robinson during Wednesday’s first-quarter earnings call with investment analysts (an event transcribed by Seeking Alpha).
“We’re in the process of quickly ramping production to address demand both domestically and internationally. In addition, we secured another significant win with a major European operator, extending our market position,” Robinson added.
RELATED: Arris' new CEO Bruce McClelland on strategy, DOCSIS 3.1 and M&A
DOCSIS 3.1 sales are also lifting Arris’ boat in the cloud and networking side of the business, with the President of that division, Dan Whalen, remarking, “We expect to see DOCSIS 3.1 momentum continue to strengthen, which will drive more CMTS sales and continued HFC expansion programs.
Overall, Arris posted first-quarter revenue of $1.48 billion, beating Wall Street forecasts of $1.46 billion, but down 8% year over year.
CPE division revenue was off by 3.2% to $1.05 billion, with the leading pay-TV vendor’s clients ordering fewer set-tops in the first quarter. “But broadband sales were up on good demand for advanced gateways and enhanced home networking,” said Arris CEO Bruce McClelland.
The pain point was in the networking and cloud side, which saw revenues drop nearly 18% year over year to $430 million in the first quarter.
Arris said CMTS sales were below historical levels due to strong year end 2016 demand and E6000 Gen 2 timing.
For his part, McClelland said business should pick up on both sides through the remainder of 2017.
“The key technology trends that underpin our business, fiber deep programs, DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades, advanced wireless home networking and 4K video, are definitely playing out,” McClelland said. “And the Gen 2 upgrade cycle on our E6000 CCAP platform will begin in next quarter. Our customers plan to leverage this platform to provide a variety of distributed access architectures, and we expect to be in commercial deployment of this new network design by the end of the year.”