Blue Coat: One Day, Three Ratings

Blue Coat (BCSI) shares are headed lower this morning after Brean Murray analyst Joanna Makris cut her rating on the stock to Sell from Buy. She is one of several analysts who commented on the stock this morning following the completion this week of the company’s acquisition of Packeteer.

“Given our expectation that the U.S. enterprise market is unlikely to see significant growth this year, coupled with our lack of visibility into combined company financials, we are downgrading our rating to Sell until we can see evidence of integration synergies,” she wrote. Markis slashed her price target on the stock to $11 from $26.

By contrast, Lazard Capital analyst Ryan Hutchinson this morning repeated his Buy rating on the stock and raised his price target on the stock to $33 from $27. Hutchinson says given the potential for business disruption due to the merger and the impact of purchase accounting, “it is prudent to take a conservative approach to the near-term outlook.” He says the shares will likely be range-bound for now, but that the stock has already priced in “a significant amoung of bad news,” and that  “numbers will have an upward bias toward the end of the year and beyond.”

Also weighing in this morning was Alex Kurtz, an analyst at Merriman Curhan Ford. He maintains a Neutral rating on the stock. “With the Packeteer acquisition now complete, we believe Blue Coat must work to assuage Packeteer customer and partner concerns over product and salesforce transitions, both factors that we believe add risk to near-term operating results,” he writes, adding that “economic headwinds in the enterprise markets and related merger risks keep us cautious in the near-term.”