Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 10 of 11

Scott Herren: Here’s what I’d say, here’s the right way to think about it, David. Those orders — what we see is, within the broader hyperscaler world, which is where a lot of these AI sales are going, they’re obviously in digest mode. I think you’ve heard that from us and all of our peers or what they bought. We do see toward the end of this calendar year, so towards the midyear of our fiscal year, we see them beginning to place orders again for delivery of product that will happen in the second half. So while I don’t want to get into parsing the guide down to that level of granularity, I think what you should expect is it to be something that we’d begin to see show up in the P&L late in the second half.

Chuck Robbins: Yes. What I was going to add, David, is I think until we evolve some of the — get some of the Scheduled Fabric technologies built out, they’re certainly running — they’re running some of these on traditional Ethernet, which is what we’re deploying today. But as we get Scheduled Fabric out and these customers get more comfortable moving from InfiniBand to Ethernet, I think that’s when we’ll start to see the real impact of AI. And maybe it’s late ’24, but I would suspect into ’25 for sure.

David Vogt: Got it. And maybe just a quick follow-up. So Scott, were there orders from AI last quarter in the product order commentary? Are these basically new orders in this most recent fiscal quarter? Is that maybe the right way to think about it?

Scott Herren: Yes. Don’t think of the $500 million as all coming in, in the last quarter. Those are orders to date that we know are going into AI infrastructure. That’s not a Q4-specific comment.

Chuck Robbins: And by the way, a portion of that for sure is deployed. It’s in and running.

Scott Herren: Yes.

David Vogt: Got it. Okay. That’s helpful. Thanks, guys.

Marilyn Mora: All right. Thanks, David. We have time for one last question.

Operator: Thank you. Simon Leopold with Raymond James & Associates. You may go ahead, sir

Simon Leopold: Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about what your assumptions are for your campus-related business, and I’m including both switching and wireless LAN. I assume that’s roughly — almost $15 billion of trailing four-quarter sales, somewhere in that ballpark. And I’ve seen market research saying that business declines, some saying it’s growing. And Chuck, you highlighted that $1 billion renewal. Just trying to get my head around how material that is. What’s built into the full year forecast for campus? Thank you.

Chuck Robbins: I’ll make two comments and, Scott, I’ll let you add to it. First of all, as we said, we think that as you see the Q2 calendar year share numbers come out, you’ll continue to see us gain share in that space. And so we would expect to continue doing that. The renewal number that I threw out was close to $1 billion. And Scott, I’ll just let you comment on how you want to break down or if you want to?

Scott Herren: Yes. No, I don’t think there’s a whole lot else to add. We’re encouraged by what we’re seeing in campus. It’s one of the things that that we’ve said all along is as the supply — the backlog begins to be delivered, you’ll start to see more and more of those customer decisions that went to us actually show up in the numerator of those market share equation. That’s exactly what you’re seeing. So I think the concern over the several quarters while we had supply constraints that maybe impacted us more than some of our peers. You should see those unwind as we can now deliver that backlog. The $1 billion of renewal that Chuck — roughly $1 billion of renewal that Chuck talked about, that is a subset of our fiscal ’24 guide.

Page 10 of 11