ARISTA NETWORKS INC
ANET
Financials
2
exclusion reasons
1 theme
This page is part of our public exclusion list — a transparency tool that shows which companies we screen out and why. It is not investment advice, and it is not an accusation. But it is subject to change as our understanding of the facts evolves.
Arista Networks paid Cisco $400M (Aug 2018) to settle a four-year patent infringement dispute involving networking technology, with Arista dropping its antitrust counterclaims as part of the deal. The FTC separately reviewed Broadcom's $5.9B acquisition of Brocade (2017), a competitor in fibre channel switches where Arista operates, issuing a consent order with firewall requirements and a five-year monitor to protect confidential competitive information in the duopoly market.
In March 2024, the SEC charged Arista Networks co-founder and former chairman Andy Bechtolsheim with insider trading and reached a settlement requiring him to pay a $923,740 civil penalty and accept a five-year bar from serving as an officer or director of any public company. The SEC alleged that Bechtolsheim learned confidentially on July 8, 2019 about Cisco's planned acquisition of Acacia Communications and immediately traded Acacia options, netting more than $415,000 in illegal profits when the deal was announced the following day (SEC Litigation Release No. 25955).
Bechtolsheim served as Arista's chairman at the time of the trading and had previously co-founded Sun Microsystems. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California approved the final judgment on May 30, 2024. While this was an individual action rather than a corporate one, Bechtolsheim was the company's chairman and a controlling insider — the failure of corporate governance controls to prevent a sitting chairman from trading on material nonpublic information raises questions about the compliance culture at the board level.
Research Sources
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Companies appear on our exclusion list based on our investment judgment — not because they've done anything illegal. This is a difference of values and opinion, not an accusation of wrongdoing. Exclusion does not constitute a recommendation against investing in any company, and absence from the list does not constitute a recommendation to invest.
This information is provided for educational and transparency purposes only and should not be relied upon as investment advice. Data is drawn from independent watchdogs, NGOs, government registries, and Ethical Capital's ongoing research — see Research Sources for the full list.
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