Cisco Systems has completed most of a major restructuring that began early this year, and on Wednesday posted revenue and profit for its fiscal first quarter that exceeded analysts’ expectations.
For the quarter ended Oct. 29, Cisco reported revenue of US$11.3 billion, up 4.7 percent from a year earlier, and net income of $1.8 billion or $0.33 per share. Earnings per share fell 2.9 percent from the year earlier.
Not counting certain one-time items, Cisco had net income of $2.3 billion or $0.43. The results were in line with the consensus of expectations from analysts polled by Thomson Financial, who forecast earnings of $0.39 per share on revenue of $11.02 billion.
The report was the first since Cisco set a new long-term growth forecast at a financial analyst conference in September. The company now expects between 5 percent and 7 percent annual revenue gains over the next three years, following several quarters of disappointing results and a major reorganization. It expects earnings per share to increase between 7 percent and 9 percent per year.
In a press release on Wednesday, CEO John Chambers said a majority of the company’s reorganization was complete.
In its fiscal fourth-quarter report released in August, Cisco had posted a drop of more than one third in net income and an increase of only 3.3 percent in revenue from the year-earlier quarter.
Since early this year, the company has moved to sharpen its focus on five key areas of its business; core routing and switching, collaboration, data-center virtualization, video, and tying these elements together in an overall architecture.
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen’s e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com