The "paper" of record makes its official:
Dow Jones Newswires -- February 9, 2000
Cisco Becomes Second Most-Valuable Company In The World
By NICOLE RIDGWAY
NEW YORK- -- Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) is now the second most-valuable company in the world, usurping the number two spot from conglomerate General Electric Co. (GE).
Cisco's market capitalization, which is calculated by multiplying a company's stock price by the number of outstanding shares, is about $485 billion - second only to that of Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT), which has a market cap of about $557 billion.
Cisco's market value inched past GE's approximate $446 billion market cap after reporting better-than-anticipated fiscal second quarter earnings Tuesday night, beating Wall Street's bottom and top-line growth expectations. Also helping to boost the value of Cisco's shares was a positive outlook from the San Jose company's executives, who were upbeat about business prospects, especially abroad.
That outlook spurred several analysts to raise their price targets and earnings outlooks on the company's shares. Warburg Dillon Read analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos, for example, hiked his 12-month price target to 163, up from 140, and PaineWebber Inc. analyst Walter Piecyk upped his 12-month target to 200 from 138.
After establishing a 6-12 month price target of 160, Credit Suisse First Boston analyst Paul Weinstein projected in a research report that Cisco could potentially be the "first trillion-dollar market cap company."
The San Jose company's shares recently traded at 132 5/8, up 6 13/16, or 5.4%, on Nasdaq volume of 27.5 million shares, compared with average daily volume of 22.7 million.
Started by a husband and wife team at Stanford University in 1984, Cisco has become a leader in the computer networking industry, with sales in its latest quarter hitting the $4.4 billion mark. The company also just announced a two-for-one stock split, its ninth split since it went public a decade ago.
Cisco reached its tenth anniversary as a public company last quarter, marking 40 consecutive quarters of revenue and earnings "improvements" and an average of 100% stock appreciation each year, said Weinstein. "While we would be overconfident to predict ten more years of this, we think this quarter puts the exclamation point on why Cisco should be a core holding," he said.
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