Mtnlady take this!!lack of quality post.
I hear the death march.
At Cisco, Speaking Loudly and Carrying a Big Stick
By Scott Moritz
Senior Writer
11/6/00 7:04 PM ET
Updated from 4:26 p.m. EST:
Like vintage Larry Bird, Cisco (CSCO:Nasdaq - news) has hit so many in a row
that it can't help but talk trash.
The networker Monday beat Wall Street's first-quarter earnings and revenue
estimates and boosted financial guidance for the rest of the year. But Cisco,
never known for humility, used Monday's postearnings conference call as an
opportunity to badmouth rivals in the telecom-equipment field and renew its claim
to gearmaking supremacy. Unimpressed, Wall Street sent its shares slightly
lower in after-hours trading.
"We have been pleasantly surprised by the strategies" of Cisco's old-world
telecommunications-manufacturer competitors, CEO John Chambers told
analysts on the call. Referring obliquely to Lucent (LU:NYSE - news) and its
recent woes, Chambers said of Cisco's telecom gear rivals, "Their lines of
business and limited product strategies, combined with some of the major
financial disappointments, are leaving them very vulnerable to enterprise and
service provider customers.
"If we continue to execute effectively on our strategy, these large competitors
have clearly given Cisco the opportunity to repeat our breakaway in the enterprise
market in the service-provider market," Chambers said.
Taking his boss' lead, Cisco's chief of telecommunication sales, Kevin Kennedy,
went on to predict that Cisco will be the world's leading telecom-gear provider
within five years, surpassing outfits such as Lucent, Nortel (NT:NYSE - news),
Alcatel (ALA:NYSE ADR - news), NEC (NIPNY:Nasdaq ADR - news) and
Fujitsu.
Cisco said second-quarter sequential revenue growth would rise somewhere
between the high single digits to the low double digits percentagewise. With
first-quarter revenue coming in at $6.52 billion, just above Wall Street's target,
Cisco is targeting second-quarter revenue in a range as high as $7.38 billion. The
current consensus calls for second-quarter revenue of $7.06 billion.
Cisco told analysts on its postearnings conference call that it expects fiscal 2001
revenue to rise 50% to 60% from fiscal 2000's $18.87 billion. The First
Call/Thomson Financial analyst survey calls for 2001 revenue growth of 50%,
to $28.34 billion.
Meanwhile, Cisco guided earnings estimates for fiscal 2001 higher by 2 cents to
5 cents. The previous analyst consensus was 75 cents. |
