What to Expect From FireEye Earnings

FireEye, Inc. (NASDAQ: FEYE) is scheduled to report its third quarter financial results on Wednesday. The consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters call for a net loss of $0.45 per share on $167.13 million in revenue. The same period from the previous year had a net loss of $0.51 per share on $114.21 million in revenue.

This stock has been absolutely crushed, tumbling as much as 40% since June, and could offer massive upside. FireEye has been mentioned recently as a takeover target, with numerous big tech companies listed as possible suitors. The company announced earlier this year that it will be working with Visa to help the credit card giant develop products for merchants and credit card issuers to defend against large-scale attacks on payment data. FireEye is in an arena where it may drive the next big wave of cybersecurity technology.

FireEye has invented a purpose-built, virtual machine-based security platform that provides real-time threat protection to enterprises and governments worldwide against the next generation of cyber attacks. These highly sophisticated cyber attacks easily circumvent traditional signature-based defenses, such as next-generation firewalls, IPS, anti-virus and gateways. The FireEye Threat Prevention Platform provides real-time, dynamic threat protection without the use of signatures to protect an organization across the primary threat vectors and across the different stages of an attack life cycle. The core of the FireEye platform is a virtual execution engine, complemented by dynamic threat intelligence, to identify and block cyber attacks in real time. FireEye has over 3,400 customers across 67 countries, including over 250 of the Fortune 500.

A few analysts weighed in on FireEye ahead of its earnings report:

• Wedbush downgraded it to a Neutral rating from Outperform and lowered the price target to $32 from $41.
• Stephens reiterated a Hold rating.
• Stifel upgraded it to a Buy rating with a $55 price target.

So far in 2015, FireEye has underperformed the market and the stock is down nearly 13% year to date. Over the past 52-weeks the stock is down 19%.

Shares of FireEye were recently trading up 6% at $29.23, with a consensus analyst price target of $47.22 and a 52-week trading range of $26.03 to $55.33.