Upbeat Cisco CEO: Economy having little impact on tech customers, spending

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Tech giant Cisco – one of the largest private sector employers in the Triangle , reporting earnings and revenues that topped Wall Street expectations on Wednesday. And in a conference call with analysts CEO Chuck Robbins was very upbeat.

Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) beat earnings expectations by a penny at 83 cents and revenues came in at $13.1 billion which was nearly $327 million above estimates. However, year over year revenues declined modestly by 0.2%, according to business news site SeekingAlpha.

In the conference call, Robbins responded positively to a question from analyst Amit Daryanani about economic concerns such as inflation among customers.

Robbins’ response:

Yes, it’s a good question. And we — what I would say is that, we are not immune to any significant change in the macro that would result in enterprise spending shifting up. My comments are just that, we haven’t seen a material demand signal change as we’ve entered into Q1. So that’s where we are.

I think on last call, I believe, I talked a lot about how I believe that post pandemic, the view of technology by our customers is much different than it would have been seven, eight, nine years ago there. I think if you ask our customers if they would pause spending during a crisis, they would probably respond, when is there not going to be a crisis, given what we’ve dealt with the last three years.

And so, in general, we don’t hear a lot of difference, relative to your question around have we seen any different buying behavior or what are they trying to buy from us. In some cases, customers are looking for a little shorter ROI, so that affects how they think about what products they’re buying in these kinds of times.

In some cases, customers are looking ahead to lead times to fiscal 2023 budgets and trying to better understand what their budgets are going to look like, because the shipments and the payments would be in the 2023 time frame. But other than that, we’re not seeing anything significantly different.

To read the full transcript, visit: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4535341-cisco-systems-inc-csco-ceo-chuck-robbins-on-q4-2022-results-earnings-call-transcript