Arista Networks downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at BNP Paribas Exane

BNP Paribas Exane analyst Karl Ackerman downgraded Arista Networks (ANET) to Neutral from Outperform with a price target of $106, down from $109. The firm sees increasing competitive pressure for the company and encroaching share opportunities in backend ethernet networking from Nvidia (NVDA) and white-box vendors such as Celestica (CLS). Arista is “less appealing” versus Nvidia, which has a better profile but lower valuation, the analyst tells investors in a research note. BNP believes Nvidia could capture the “lion share” of GPU networking infrastructure.