Cisco posts small revenue gain

IDG News Service - Cisco Systems has completed most of a major restructuring that began early this year, and on Wednesday posted revenue and profit for its fiscal first quarter that exceeded analysts' expectations.

For the quarter ended Oct. 29, Cisco reported revenue of US$11.3 billion, up 4.7 percent from a year earlier, and net income of $1.8 billion, or $0.33 per share. Earnings per share fell 2.9 percent from the year earlier.

Not counting certain one-time items, Cisco had net income of $2.3 billion, or $0.43. The results were in line with the consensus of expectations from analysts polled by Thomson Financial, who forecast earnings of $0.39 per share on revenue of $11.02 billion.

The report was the first since Cisco set a new long-term growth forecast at a financial analyst conference in September. The company now expects between 5 percent and 7 percent annual revenue gains over the next three years, following several quarters of disappointing results and a major reorganization. It expects earnings per share to increase between 7 percent and 9 percent per year.

In a press release on Wednesday, CEO John Chambers said a majority of the company's reorganization was complete.

In its fiscal fourth-quarter report released in August, Cisco had posted a drop of more than one-third in net income and an increase of only 3.3 percent in revenue from the year-earlier quarter.

Since early this year, the company has moved to sharpen its focus on five key areas of its business: core routing and switching, collaboration, data-center virtualization, video, and tying these elements together in an overall architecture.

For the current fiscal quarter, Cisco expects revenue to grow between 7 percent and 8 percent.

On a conference call with financial analysts after the report, Chambers painted the results as proof Cisco is executing well on the plans outlined at the September conference.

"Our strategy and vision outlined in our three-year plan is taking hold and off to a very good start," Chambers said. The company said it is on track to complete all the cost-cutting it has planned by the end of the third quarter of this fiscal year.

Asked about Huawei Technologies' recent move to establish sales channels for its enterprise-network equipment in the U.S., Chambers said China's largest networking vendor is a long-term threat here. Cisco already calls Huawei its biggest rival worldwide in the next few years.

"We're going to make it very hard on them in the U.S.," Chambers said. "They're going to be around four to five years from now."

Total switching orders grew 10 percent, with flat revenue, and routing orders went up 7 percent, with revenue down slightly. But Cisco's fledgling data-center business, built around its UCS (Unified Computing System) server platform, grew 122 percent in orders and 116 percent in revenue, Chambers said. In the first quarter, Cisco gained 1,572 new UCS customers, bringing the total to 8,983, he said.