Cisco Earnings Miss Expectations
Tuesday February 6, 4:40 pm Eastern Time
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Computer networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. (NasdaqNM:CSCO - news) on Tuesday posted fiscal 2001 second-quarter earnings that were up 48 percent but missed Wall Street expectations, as the company sounded a note of caution.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company said its profit before one-time items rose to $1.33 billion, or 18 cents a share, for its fiscal second quarter ended Jan 27, from $897 million, or 12 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. Analysts had on average expected Cisco to report pro forma earnings of 19 cents a share, according to First Call/Thomson Financial.
Sales, which had been widely watched for a slowdown, rose 55 percent to $6.75 billion from $4.36 billion in 2000, falling short of Wall Street's expectations for $7 billion to $7.2 billion.
Cisco, which makes an estimated 70 percent of the world's routers that direct traffic on the Internet, also said it is ''cautious'' about the market pause.
``While we remain cautious about the implications of a brief pause in the current 10-year expansion of the U.S. economy, we believe that Cisco has never been better positioned to help our customers solve their two most important business issues: increasing productivity and creating new sources of revenue,'' Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers said in a statement.
``We remain confident about the market opportunity ahead of us over the next three to five years,'' he added. ``This confidence is based on the continued impact of the Internet on productivity, and just how much more work needs to be done before every company is an e-company and a majority of the world's countries are e-countries.
Chambers warned less than two weeks ago that January's business was ``more challenging than we anticipated,'' leading many analysts to question whether Cisco's and the telecommunications industry's growth are slowing.
Cisco's stock closed up $1-3/16, or 3.44 percent, at $35-3/4 a share in heavy trading on the Nasdaq market. In the past year, the Internet equipment infrastructure company's stock has underperformed the Nasdaq 100 Index by almost 6 percent. |
