Arris reported a narrow 1% drop in fourth-quarter income to $1.74 billion, with video device sales declining 23.4% on a market shift to lighter-weight IP-driven boxes.
“The network-based DVR is becoming more of a significant capability, and the ability of the gateway to service up content to a whole bunch of client devices in the home is also becoming a bigger trend,” Arris CEO Bruce McClelland said during Wednesday’s earnings call.
However, Arris executives are bullish on 2018, with broadband device sales ticking up 9% to $433 million in fourth-quarter 2017. Network and cloud business is up 18% to $496 million, driven by deployments of Arris’ E6000 CMTS and the overall expansion of cable operator clients of DOCSIS 3.1 networks and technologies like Remote PHY and Remote PON.
In particular, Arris expressed confidence in the ability of its recently closed $800 million Ruckus Wireless business to build a brand-new revenue stream in the realm of enterprise networking. McClelland predicted 9% revenue growth in 2018 for Arris based on this addition.
RELATED: Arris to provide 4K set-tops for Bell Canada’s MediaFirst deployment
McClelland also expressed confidence that client infrastructure investments would be spurred by the Republican-led corporate tax bonanza, as well as the FCC’s recent deregulation of the internet.
The Suwanee, Georgia-based company announced its fourth-quarter earnings on the same day that it announced deployment of its second-generation E6000 Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) to seven clients: Comcast, Grande, TDS and WOW in the U.S.; and NOS Comunicações, LIWEST and TOYA in Europe.
Announced in October, the E6000 Gen 2 enables customers to upgrade existing CCAP chassis to achieve up to a 70% increase in headend service group density without consuming more rack space.