Needham & Company LLC Increases Arista Networks (NYSE:ANET) Price Target to $185.00

Arista Networks (NYSE:ANET) had its target price lifted by stock analysts at Needham & Company LLC from $165.00 to $185.00 in a report issued on Friday, MarketBeat Ratings reports. The brokerage currently has a “buy” rating on the technology company’s stock. Needham & Company LLC’s price target would suggest a potential upside of 30.78% from the company’s current price.

A number of other equities research analysts have also recently weighed in on the company. Weiss Ratings reaffirmed a “hold (c+)” rating on shares of Arista Networks in a report on Monday, December 29th. Erste Group Bank lowered shares of Arista Networks from a “buy” rating to a “hold” rating in a research note on Monday, November 10th. Barclays reissued an “overweight” rating and set a $184.00 price target (up from $183.00) on shares of Arista Networks in a research report on Friday. Morgan Stanley cut their price objective on Arista Networks from $171.00 to $159.00 and set an “overweight” rating for the company in a research report on Wednesday, December 17th. Finally, Piper Sandler reaffirmed an “overweight” rating and issued a $175.00 price objective (up from $159.00) on shares of Arista Networks in a report on Friday. Eighteen analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating and five have issued a Hold rating to the company. According to MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $175.41.

Arista Networks Price Performance

NYSE:ANET opened at $141.46 on Friday. Arista Networks has a fifty-two week low of $59.43 and a fifty-two week high of $164.94. The stock has a market cap of $178.13 billion, a PE ratio of 51.25, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.39 and a beta of 1.42. The stock’s 50-day moving average is $133.05 and its two-hundred day moving average is $137.00.

Arista Networks (NYSE:ANET) last posted its earnings results on Thursday, February 12th. The technology company reported $0.82 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.75 by $0.07. Arista Networks had a return on equity of 31.34% and a net margin of 38.99%.The company had revenue of $2.49 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $2.38 billion. During the same period last year, the company earned $0.66 earnings per share. The business’s revenue was up 28.9% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, equities research analysts anticipate that Arista Networks will post 2.2 earnings per share for the current year.

Insider Buying and Selling at Arista Networks

In other Arista Networks news, Director Charles H. Giancarlo sold 8,000 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction dated Monday, February 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $140.43, for a total value of $1,123,440.00. Following the transaction, the director directly owned 9,784 shares in the company, valued at $1,373,967.12. The trade was a 44.98% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. Also, CEO Jayshree Ullal sold 24,042 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, November 25th. The shares were sold at an average price of $124.55, for a total transaction of $2,994,431.10. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer directly owned 9,917 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $1,235,162.35. This represents a 70.80% decrease in their ownership of the stock. Additional details regarding this sale are available in the official SEC disclosure. Insiders sold 216,464 shares of company stock worth $27,553,548 in the last quarter. 3.39% of the stock is currently owned by company insiders.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Arista Networks

Several institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of ANET. Vanguard Group Inc. grew its stake in Arista Networks by 1.2% in the 4th quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 101,189,629 shares of the technology company’s stock worth $13,258,877,000 after buying an additional 1,188,799 shares in the last quarter. State Street Corp increased its stake in shares of Arista Networks by 1.4% in the 4th quarter. State Street Corp now owns 46,970,697 shares of the technology company’s stock worth $6,154,570,000 after acquiring an additional 628,146 shares in the last quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC boosted its holdings in Arista Networks by 1.8% in the fourth quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 26,447,629 shares of the technology company’s stock worth $3,455,095,000 after acquiring an additional 477,625 shares in the last quarter. Cresset Asset Management LLC raised its holdings in Arista Networks by 1.0% in the 2nd quarter. Cresset Asset Management LLC now owns 26,374,373 shares of the technology company’s stock worth $2,698,362,000 after acquiring an additional 263,272 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Norges Bank purchased a new stake in shares of Arista Networks during the 2nd quarter valued at about $1,228,177,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 82.47% of the company’s stock.

Key Stories Impacting Arista Networks

Here are the key news stories impacting Arista Networks this week:

• Positive Sentiment: Reported stronger-than-expected Q4 results: EPS $0.82 vs. $0.75 est., revenue $2.49B (+28.9% YoY) and record net income; company raised AI revenue targets and issued revenue guidance above Street estimates, supporting the AI-driven growth narrative. Read More.
• Positive Sentiment: Analysts are lifting price targets and turning more bullish (Wells Fargo, Needham, Rosenblatt among those raising targets/ratings), giving additional analyst-driven momentum to the stock. Read More.
• Positive Sentiment: Market views Arista as outperforming peers (notably Cisco) by managing supply-chain pressures and capturing hyperscaler AI capex, which supports margin resilience and share gains. Read More.
• Neutral Sentiment: Management said Arista is diversifying accelerator support: deployments that were ~99% Nvidia a year ago now include ~20–25% AMD — a strategic shift that increases customer options but alters vendor dynamics. Traders note this may be weighing on GPU vendor stocks while benefiting Arista’s flexibility. Read More.
• Neutral Sentiment: Unusually high options activity is signaling elevated trader interest/positioning ahead of and after earnings. Read More.
• Negative Sentiment: Valuation is rich (ANET trades at a high P/E), and some commentary asks whether the recent run (one-year gains) leaves less margin for error if growth slows. This could temper longer-term upside. Read More.
• Negative Sentiment: Rising component/memory costs are a sector-wide headwind; management says it’s mitigating impacts via purchase commitments, but cost pressure remains a watch item for margins. Read More.

About Arista Networks

Arista Networks, Inc is a technology company that designs and sells cloud networking solutions for large-scale data centers and enterprise environments. The company is best known for its high-performance switching and routing platforms, which are used to build scalable, low-latency networks for cloud service providers, internet companies, financial services, telecommunications, and enterprise IT. Arista’s offerings emphasize programmability, automation and telemetry to support modern, software-driven network architectures.

Central to Arista’s product portfolio is its Extensible Operating System (EOS), a modular network operating system that provides consistent programmability, stateful control and advanced visibility across the company’s hardware platforms.