Symantec (NASDAQ:SYMC) will report its Q3 FY2012 earnings on January 25. We currently have a $20 Trefis price estimate for Symantec, which stands more than 20% above its market price. Symantec derives a major portion of its revenue from three businesses – Storage software, Security software for businesses, and Norton antivirus. These three divisons combined account for around 85% of Symantec’s $20 Trefis price estimate. Symantec competes primarily with Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) via McAfee in security software and IBM (NYSE:IBM), EMC (NYSE:EMC), HP (NYSE:HPQ) and NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) in storage software.
Check out our complete analysis of Symantec
Focus on enterprise security software
Symantec is one of the strongest players in security software for the enterprise, a business which accounts for nearly 17% of Symantec’s value. In the last couple of quarters, Symantec has announced several new enterprise software offerings like the Symantec O3 cloud security platform, a data loss prevention product for tablets, and new cloud based security and backup offerings. It also launched a new enterprise mobile security offering – the Symantec Mobile Security Assessment Suite, and acquired LiveOffice, a cloud-based enterprise email archiving solution, which will be integrated with Enterprise Vault. We estimate its market share in enterprise security to be around 30% in 2011, and we expect it to show a marginal increase throughout the forecast period.
Symantec slipping in storage software
Storage and availability management software is Symantec’s most important business, and accounts for nearly 37% of Symantec’s value. However, Symantec has been losing market share in this market in the last couple of quarters. Its storage software market share was down to 15.3% in Q3 2011.
It recently upgraded its network storage appliance, and launched new upgrades which enable customers to create secure virtual private clouds. We expect it to stem the decline and marginally increase its market share to nearly 17% by the end of the forecast period. We will be watching the earnings announcement closely for any numbers which may indicate where Symantec is headed in this segment, or any mention of Symantec’s product strategy regarding the same.
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