Cisco Systems posted fiscal fourth-quarter revenue and earnings that were roughly flat from a year earlier as the company works through what Chairman and CEO John Chambers called “a tough environment.”
One big result of that tough environment is that Cisco is going to lay off up to 6,000 employees, or about 8% of its workforce, and reallocate resources to growth areas such as cloud, data center, Internet of Things, security and SDN. Cisco has announced job cuts in the thousands each of the past few summers.
As for the financial numbers, the dominant networking company brought in $12.4 billion in revenue for the quarter ended July 26, equal to the figure it logged in last year’s fourth quarter. Its net income dipped slightly, to $2.2 billion from $2.3 billion a year earlier, but earnings per share were up by $.01, reaching $0.43 per share.
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Cisco’s revenue surpassed the consensus forecast of $12.14 billion from analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. Its earnings, excluding certain one-time items, matched the analysts’ expectations.
The fourth-quarter report closes out a difficult year for Cisco, which began with a first quarter when the company missed its own revenue forecast and posted lower earnings. Chambers blamed slow demand in developing countries and difficult product transitions. Last December, the company cut its long-term revenue growth forecast.