HP Enterprise upgraded to Buy at BofA as Juniper deal gets ready to close

BofA upgraded HP Enterprise (HPE) to Buy from Neutral with a price target of $24, up from $21. The firm views shares as attractive as it sees the opportunity for significant cost cuts, driven by new CFO Marie Myers with a proven track record at HP Inc. (HPQ); a cyclical recovery across servers, storage and particularly networking; revenue and increased cost synergies with the upcoming Juniper (JNPR) acquisition; a High Performance Compute, or HPC, margin recovery; and Enterprise/Sovereign demand increases from AI. HP will soon close the Juniper acquisition, which will lower the company’s reliance on compute and shift focus to the higher margin networking business, added the analyst.