As Adam spoke about earlier two of the most reliable equities forex traders can look to for economic guidance are Cisco and Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart releases earnings pre-market tomorrow but Cisco did about an hour ago and are wrapping up their conference call now.
Cisco is forecasting a quarterly decline of 1% to 3% in revenue, year over year, which is better than the Street’s projected year-over-year decline of 5% to $11.797 billion.
Earning came in at .51 cents above Wall Street’s .48 expectations.
The company pointed to improving conditions in its fourth quarter, driven by increased orders for high-end routing equipment and other factors. On a sequential basis, compared with the just-ended period, revenue is expected to grow 4% to 6%, which Chief Executive John Chambers said is higher than Cisco’s recent average seasonal growth of about 3.2%.
But the company signaled last year that it expected business to slow and said it was moving to trim some 4,000 jobs, or 5% of its workforce. They also said that they’ve seen weaker demand in China, Brazil, Mexico, India and Russia.
UPDATE: Chambers elaborated a bit on his worries about the emerging markets. In the “emerging countries with ugly markets where if you’ve got to win some strategic deals you’re going to discount pretty aggressively.” It sounds more to me like he sees opportunity (not without challenges, as he always reminds us) in emerging markets but is more concerned with competition from IBM, HP, and Dell (did he really say Dell?).
