UPDATED 23:45 EST / FEBRUARY 10 2016

NEWS

Cisco beats Wall Street estimates but bemoans stock market jitters

Cisco Systems Ltd. managed to beat analyst’s estimates with better-than-expected second quarter profits and $15 billion in new buybacks that saw its share price rocket in after-hours trading.

Cisco reported net income of $3.1 billion for the quarter, equating to $0.62 per share. Non-GAAP earnings were $0.57 per share on $11.8 billion in revenues, a two percent increase year-over-year.

This compares to Wall Street’s expected earnings of $0.54 per share and $11.76 billion in revenues. For the next quarter, Wall Street analysts said they’re looking for Non-GAAP earnings of $0.55 per share on revenues of $12.02 billion. Cisco responded by saying it expects revenues to grow between one and four percent year-over-year for the next quarter.

However, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in the earnings call that the quarter would have been even better if not for the poor state of the world’s financial markets this year, which led many enterprises to freeze plans to upgrade their campus networks.

Robbins said the recent plunge in global oil prices and stock markets caused a slowdown in spending during the last month of the quarter that had a negative impact on Cisco’s bottom line, and also hurt its forecast for the current quarter.

“You see customers say, ‘I want to just wait, see what’s going on,'” Robbins said in the call. “Where they had the option to wait, they chose to wait a bit.”

As such, that meant many enterprises decided to wait rather than spend on campus networking gear, Robbins said.

Luckily for Cisco, while its switching revenues slumped by four percent in the quarter, it was buoyed by an 11 percent rise in its security system’s revenues. That will come as a relief to Robbins, who is presiding over a transition that’s seeing Cisco expand its portfolio from its traditional switches and routers business to provide things like software, services and security.

Cisco closed on a number of acquisitions in the last quarter aimed at bolstering its data analytics, video and security offerings. They included its takeover of UK-based consultancy firm Portcullis, ParStream, a German firm that offers a database for storing and analyzing large datasets in real-time, and Lancope, a cybersecurity startup.

In the last week, Cisco agreed to make yet another acquisition in the shape of Internet of Things startup Jasper Technologies for an agreed price of $1.4 billion cash. Once that deal goes through, expected in the next quarter, Cisco will acquire a solid IoT stack as well as a recurring revenue cloud business model that’s displaying some solid growth.

Image credit: Marcel via flickr.com

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