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

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Joseph Cardoso: Hi, thanks. This is Joe Cardoso on for Samik. Just one question for me. You mentioned double-digit growth across all your customer verticals from an order perspective but also mentioned service provider continuing to be weak. I was just hoping you could touch on what you’re seeing under the hood in service provider. And specifically, if I split it up between telco AI and non-AI cloud, how did those track compared to 90 days ago? And then just quickly, a quick clarification on the $0.5 billion in orders in AI. Any way you can parse it out, like how many customers is reflected in that order number? And then just quickly clarify if that’s all hyperscale or if there’s any Tier 2 cloud or enterprise customers in that mix. Thanks for the question.

Chuck Robbins: Yes. Thank you. So on the service provider side, the first question you asked — let me write my notes down, hold on a second, so I don’t have to ask you for the question again. On SP, I think — I’d say Q4 for the telco side of it, the communications service provider was probably fairly consistent with what it was the quarter before. It’s just relatively weak right now. We see a lot of these customers have — are digesting a lot of the infrastructure that they bought over the next few months. We think that — our team believes that orders will stabilize on the telco side of the business in the second half of our fiscal year. On the cloud side, we believe that they’ll continue to invest. And they kind of invest in six-month cycles.

And we think that in the middle of our fiscal year, we’ll see growth in that investment for the first part of 2025. On the $500 million, it is definitely in the Tier 1 hyperscalers. So I’ll just leave it at that. On the opportunity that we see, we still see — we won three use cases last quarter. And I would say those were primarily non-AI. So there’s still — we’re still winning new use cases in the core infrastructure. And — but we’re in trials in different discussions with most all of them relative to AI fabric.

Joseph Cardoso: Thanks, Chuck. Appreciate the color

Chuck Robbins: Thank you.

Marilyn Mora: All right. Thank you. Next question.

Operator: David Vogt with UBS. You may go ahead.

David Vogt: Great. Thanks guys for squeezing me. I’m not going to belabor the point on orders, but I wanted to ask a question about AI order specifically in terms of your ability to ship to customers and where you are in trials. The reason why I ask is we’ve heard from a lot of companies in the industry that there’s some supply chain considerations that are maybe causing commercial deployments and revenue rec may be pushed out to 2025. So I just want to get a sense for that 500 orders that you referenced in your prepared remarks, how does that flow through? And then along with that, in the guidance Scott provided for fiscal ’24, how much, if any, is AI-related this year? And if not why? And when — going back to my first point, when do we start to see it in your P&L?

Chuck Robbins: Yes. We do not — Scott and I are both looking at each other. We don’t know of any supply chain issues we have around our AI. It’s our standard Ethernet portfolio based on the Silicon One ASIC, and we’re delivering it today. So I don’t think there’s any supply chain issue for us on that front.

Scott Herren: We might be at a bit of a better position than some because it is our own ASICs. It is ours.

Chuck Robbins: On the FY ’24 contribution of AI, I don’t have that information on top of my head.

Scott Herren: Yes. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you there.

Chuck Robbins: Go ahead.

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