Cisco is truly a magnificent marketing machine, particularly in the enterprise segment. Enterprise networking is still about 85% of Cisco's sales (N.B. about half of the carrier sales reported by Cisco are actually premises equipment resold by carriers to enterprises, Also, a substantial portion of the carrier class gear - Stratacom stuff, GSRs, etc. are sold to enterprises. Best estimate carrier equipment sold to carriers - ~15%)
For every $1 spent world wide on routers, hubs and switches, more than 40 cents goes to Cisco. However, this is not only because of their marketing. Cisco has good products. Not necessarily the best products but very good products in most categories. More importantly, Cisco services their customers like no other company - a much bigger deal than simple sales and marketing. Furthermore, its IOS operating system contains many hooks, so for those customers who choose to go with proprietary solutions, they are locked in to Cisco. Because of this unmatched customer service and the lock-in, Cisco has been able to justify a substantial price premium over every other company in the market.
To highlight just how successful Cisco has been in the enterprise market, I point to the LAN switching market. Cisco was a little late to this party, but made up for it in a big way. In its fiscal 1998, Cisco entered the year with 36% market share and ended with 49% market share. This one product category accounted for 57% of Cisco's growth for the year.
A couple things to think about for 1999:
1 - Will enterprise spending growth (~14% in 1998) accelerate or decelerate? I'm betting for a slight deceleration due to Y2K, increasing price competition, etc.
2 - Can Cisco duplicate its awesome market share gains in 1999? I think it will be very difficult due to its already large share and again, increasing price based competition enabled by the growing deployment of IP-only networks (no need for the multi-protocol bells and whistles of IOS)
3 - Can Cisco sustain its 65% + Gross margins on this equipment? Again very difficult given Cisco itself cut prices on Cat5000 switches by 25 to 40% depending on the configuration and semiconductor prices have stabilized from 1998's freefall.
The real big question that I have is whether Cisco will be able to grow the Carrier business fast enough to make up for what I believe to be deceleration in its core enterprise business (may I add which was through no fault of Cisco's). A couple of points here:
1 - Where are the contracts? Long deployment cycles mean carrier revenues for the rest of FY1999 should already be in contract. Sprint has not committed to actual deployment as far as I know, USWest has 3 vendors in house, AT&T did their big frame relay upgrade last year. Only WorldCom has committed to a major deployment.
2 - Who are the end-to-end customers? GTE is buying ASND racs and ATM, USWest is buying ATM/frame from Cisco, Ascend and NN simultaneously, Sprint appears to have promised business to everyone without actually signing a contract.
3 - Just how much Cable modem/xDSL will Cisco deploy this year and what kind of margins can it make? AT&T and the rest of the cable industry will eventually deploy millions of these things. Cisco has a non-exclusive contract with T. T tells me that they are insisting on absolute adherence to standards and that the rest of the cable industry will hold firm on that. Sounds like possible low margins to me.
4 - Who is buying all of this remote access Cisco claims to be selling? I suspect that it is enterprises, and that alot of the reported sales of dial access are dial ports on routers.
5 - How much of the 85% share of internet class routers can Cisco maintain against the onslaught of new competition in a category that has been blissfully uncompetitive for years? I think alot ~75-80% but that prices will have to come down alot - I think Cisco makes 80% gross margins here.
Looking back at my post, I think it sounds too negative. Lets be clear, I am only concerned about Cisco's ability to please an investor base that is expecting 35-40% top line growth based on consensus earnings estimates. It did 31.3% last year. In the long run, I think Cisco will emerge as a big winner. As will Lucent. Even Nortel. It is not a zero sum game amongst these three. I am just looking for a much better entry point. |
