China turmoil weakens data center switch market in second quarter - report

A slowdown in spending in China suppressed the overall growth of the data center switch market in Q2, according to research by Dell'Oro Group.

On the plus side, H3C gained more than three points of revenue share year over year in China. The report also said that Cisco was the new leader in 100GE revenue, while Arista continued to maintain its lead in 100GE shipments.

"Data center switch market revenue in China declined for the first time in more than five years, due to a slowdown in spending from both cloud service providers as well as enterprises," said Sameh Boujelbene, senior director at Dell'Oro Group, in a statement. "Also, the U.S. government's actions pertaining to Huawei have created some pause in China market demand.

“If you look at 100 Gbps shipments, Arista is the leader by far at more than a third of shipments,  followed by Cisco at about 22%, then white box vendors at 20%, then both Juniper and H3C at about 5%. So if you exclude white-box vendors and you look only at branded vendors Juniper is in the third place.”

Juniper Networks has moved some of its manufacturing out of China due to the Trump administration's tariffs, according to CEO Rami Rahim, while Cisco executives said on last month's fiscal fourth quarter earnings call that its revenue was down in part due to weakened revenue from China.

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"In contrast, data center switch market revenue in North America managed to grow despite a slowdown in spending by major cloud service providers," Boujelbene said. "Most of the slowdown was driven by reduced server purchases while data center switches performed well. Large enterprises also contributed to the growth in North America as they accelerated their 100GE adoption and helped Cisco emerge as the new leader in 100GE revenue in 2Q 2019."

Dell'Oro's report said that all speeds were down year over year in shipments and revenue except for 25GE, 50GE, 100GE and 400GE.