Re: Cisco's 99Q4 Conference Call
Thread,
Well I just listened in on Cisco's latest quarterly results. And wanted to post info I thought would be of interest to last mile investors. As usual, it was a fact filled 1-1/2 hours.
Chambers did his normal Lucent and Nortel (see post this message is linked to) bashing. It amazes me how blunt Chambers is in his appraisal of his major competitors. I can't remember exactly what he said, but this is close. He said, "We believe that the merger between the old line telecom equipment companies and the data networkers will fail." And he said it three different times during the CC. He strongly implied he was referring to NT/BAY and LU/ASND.
CSCO rattled off tons of figures and I hope I didn't jot them down incorrectly. But I believe they said that Asia has grown 60% year over year. IMHO this is significant because CSCO is one of the few high tech companies that never gave up on Asia. As a matter of fact, during the Asian crisis, CSCO increased their presence. Now that Asia is on a path to recovery, I believe CSCO will benefit greatly.
Now the majority of the analysts tended to focus on what most believe to believe to be CSCO's bread and butter markets, the Enterprise and Small to Medium Business. But as a last mile investor, I'm most interested in CSCO's ability to grow their Service Provider business.
Now if I don't have this wrong, they said they grew Service Provider segment a whooping 80% year over year! IMHO, this is most significant as we transition to the new world networks. CSCO is definitely going to tough competition for both NT and LU.
Now more specifically for last mile investors, they reiterated some figures from Q3 CC. They said they see the fiscal year 2000, bringing in $500 million from the broadband groups, cable and DSL. For quick reference, this is about an entire years worth of revenues for my favorite MSO specialist, Antec Corporation. Also they said this will be double from this years figure of $250 million. The $500 million for 2000 was estimated to be, "at least $1/2 billion." Proves their is a lot of last mile infrastructure spending going on.
They also said they were pretty excited about AT&T's plans to deliver voice/video/data over their cable network. But in what I believe may have been spoken in a slightly sour grapes tone, they said AT&T's testing of circuit-switched voice over cable was not going well (as most know CSCO is leading the charge in VoIP). But it just didn't strike me as a factual statement. Plus, it's a proven fact voice over circuit-switched cable works. So the problems CSCO referred to, must be relatively minor(When compared to VoIP <VBG>).
CSCO said they introduced 11 new DSL products. And said they have some VoIP cable trials going with Comcast (but what else is new<G>). They characterized their foothold in the cable market as, "Strong." And in the DSL market as, "Fighting." But who doesn't fight in the DSL market? Every vendor I'm aware of struggles in the DSL quagmire.
Here's a link to their DSL Products:
cisco.com
And here's a link to their Cable Products:
cisco.com
And finally, for another last mile (which IMHO is many years off), CSCO announced they did a partnership with Motorola. Together they purchased the fixed wireless broadband product division from Bosch. They are naming it, "SpectraPoint." That should be interesting, for last mile investors, to keep an eye on.
MikeM(From Florida) |
