Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

September 10, 2024

NASDAQ US Information Technology Communications Equipment conference_presentation 35 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Michael Ng

analyst
#1

Great. Well, thank you, everybody. Welcome to the Cisco fireside chat at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference. I have the privilege of introducing Scott Herren, who is the Executive Vice President and CFO of Cisco. Scott joined Cisco in 2020 from Autodesk, where he served as CFO for 6 years. My name is Mike Ng, and I cover Cisco and networking and hardware here at Goldman Sachs. We have about 35 minutes for today's presentation. So first, thank you so much, Scott, for being here with us today.

Richard Herren

executive
#2

Thanks, Mike. This is such a great event every year, and it's nice to have a chance to join it with you.

Michael Ng

analyst
#3

That's very kind of you to say.

Michael Ng

analyst
#4

Maybe we can start with a big picture question. Cisco, obviously, the leading networking technology company in the world with leading market share positions in nearly every market and product that it operates in. Could you just talk about some of the networking trends that are shaping technology demand today and how you think Cisco is positioned to address some of these trends?

Richard Herren

executive
#5

Sure, sure. Nice to start with an open-ended kind of question. So we are in the beginning of our next fiscal year. Our fiscal year ended at the end of July. So we had our fourth quarter conference call about a month ago now in mid-August. And what we saw is what we expected to see. We saw a return of product demand as customers really work through and digested the huge amount of product that we had shipped to them in 3 consecutive quarters, right, Q3 and Q4 of '23 and actually, the first quarter of our fiscal '24, which just ended, we shipped out a tremendous amount of excess backlog as the supply chain issue is cleared up. And so it moved from our bottleneck to their bottleneck. And we saw them working that down. And we knew once that finished working through that, that what we would see is a return of demand, that's exactly what we saw. And it was actually quite balanced demand, which was -- which is also a good sign balanced by geography. So it's our first full quarter of having Splunk. So let me give you the numbers without Splunk included. So it was -- we had product order growth in the mid-teens, inclusive of Splunk. The product order growth of 6%, which was 6% in the Americas, 6% in EMEA and 8% in APJC. And if you slice it the other way, so not by geo, but by customer market, it was good growth in enterprise, double-digit growth in public sector and actually good growth in service provider and cloud for us, which that customer market, the way we group customers together there includes cable and telco, which have one set of dynamics going on and hyperscaler, which has a very different set of dynamics going on inside there. So we saw good growth across customer markets, good growth across geos and good growth across product lines. You saw, for example, we had double-digit growth in our securities business, which -- you've been around us, Mike. You know that's a business we've really turned around over the last couple of years, and seeing double-digit growth again in the security business was quite encouraging. We actually had double-digit growth in our collaboration business as well during the quarter. And good strong growth across many of our networking segments. So it was good balanced growth. And I think the other sign that I think is a positive for us is campus networking actually had nice growth during the quarter. I think that's one that there's been a lot of what's going to happen. There's a vacant office space, are people really going to refresh their infrastructure, and we saw really nice growth across campus as well.

Michael Ng

analyst
#6

No, that's great to hear. And as you mentioned, we went through this period of inventory digestion and you're clearly seeing an inflection on a lot of your products, customer types and regions. Is it too early to say that we've inflected off the bottom, and we're back to a more normal level of growth? Or are there any nuances that you would call out as it relates to whatever the segment may be products, verticals, regions?

Richard Herren

executive
#7

Yes. No, I do feel like the trough is behind us at this point. And you've tracked and you've seen how product order growth have inflected over the last couple of quarters. So no, I think we're back on to a more -- we're getting back on to a more normalized demand pattern that you'd expect at our scale. And as I said, it's broad brush. I think one of the other interesting points inside that growth. I talked about seeing growth in service provider and cloud, which for us is cable and telco, which has one set of dynamics, hyperscaler, which we know are investing heavily right now. If you just looked at the hyperscaler piece of that, the second half of fiscal '24, we had north of 30% growth in hyperscaler. And I think that's a number that's not obvious. It's not easy for you to discern from the outside looking in. but it's more comparable to some of the people that you see that are more focused on that space. It's a more comparable growth rate.

Michael Ng

analyst
#8

That's great. As we kind of start at the onset, Cisco has a very strong market position in nearly every product that it participates in, that's an admirable position to be in, but there's also challenger companies and competitors that seek to gain some of that share. Maybe you can talk a little bit about Cisco's competitive moat, it's differentiation? How is it positioning itself to defend and continue to gain market share in some instances?

Richard Herren

executive
#9

Yes. So I'll start by saying innovation is the cornerstone of that. And we're investing at this point, a little more than $8 billion a year in R&D, driving that level of innovation. You've seen Hypershield come out, which is a really interesting melding of both security and networking. It builds the security into the fabric of the network. It's a tremendous opportunity. It's kind of the next wave of where we see the kind of not just selling security or selling networking selling secure networking, right? And I think that's a space that's going to be -- we're going to be extremely well positioned to do that. No one's got both the depth of security and the depth of networking that we have. So innovation is kind of the core of that moat. But the level of trust that we've built up, not just as a provider, but also in terms of the service that we provide to our customers is significant at this point. And it's -- with a massive global footprint, becomes a pretty significant buying or a buying criteria for people. We can support them wherever they are, 20,000-plus resellers worldwide. There's a huge amount of just the scale that we have and the footprint that we have that aligns very nicely to many of our customers. That's an advantage. But I think that -- the third, and we've just recently made some changes to further augment this is the breadth of our product portfolio. That's -- no one has the footprint that -- no one can match the footprint we have in networking plus security with Splunk in there now plus the core data infrastructure that you need and with our collaboration tools. And being able to bring that all together and leverage the advantage of the breadth of that portfolio instead of trying to sell piece parts individually against piece part providers is a significant opportunity for us and a significant advantage that I think only we have in that space. And so one of the things that we announced also in the fourth quarter earnings call, is Jeetu Patel taking over as our Chief Product Officer and bringing all of our product lines now under a single person. And not only is it having it all under one person make it much easier to drive those cross-architecture synergies, Jeetu is one of the most talented product people I've ever been around. I mean he before this was running our collaboration business and I think built by far, the best collaboration product out there, obviously, it's difficult to sell against the perception of free but built a great product there, has done a great job within collaboration on devices and with our contact and online cloud-based calling. He then took over our security business and has really turned that around, both by bringing the right level of talent in at the leadership level and being very innovative in things like Hypershield, building that into the fabric of the network. Our firewall line has been almost completely refreshed. The ultra high end is still to be refreshed. And we've seen really nice results. We've seen a couple of quarters now of double-digit growth in security. So he's very talented. He's got a very high sense of urgency. And I think having one person where it all comes together to drive the benefit of the breadth of our portfolio is going to be a significant advantage for us.

Michael Ng

analyst
#10

Yes. I mean that's a great segue to maybe just talk a little bit more about security. To your point, Scott, Cisco's security business has seen a lot of success in the last couple of quarters. The growth rates have certainly improved. Maybe you can provide a little bit of background of where we've been and where we are now, you started talking a little bit about that just earlier, but maybe you can just lay the groundwork for why security is doing so well now.

Richard Herren

executive
#11

Yes, I think it's a number of things that are driving that. The first is we had historically, and by that, I mean, go back to when I joined Cisco, our security strategy was really to more of a piece part strategy to sell against other piece part providers, which, I guess, made sense at the time. It was clear to me that, that wasn't playing to the advantage that we just talked about, about the breadth of our portfolio. So we made some changes in leadership there, brought in some really talented people to run that from that are security industry experts and then having a talented guy like Jeetu, who is one of the most innovative creative people have ever been around kind of drive that has led us on to a much more of a security platform approach. That's why the Splunk acquisition made perfect sense. The SNAP and as the SIM that's kind of the back end of our security infrastructure on top of that. We've launched some really innovative new offerings there, our XDR offering there. And less than a year has scaled to almost 600 customers there. And so we're seeing that our Secure Service Edge, SSE offering, which is also new, is also scaling quite nicely. And our cross security portfolio AI assistant is now being used by more than 2,000 customers around the world. So it's really going away from trying to be piece part competitive to saying, you know what, let's pull this together into a broader security strategy that our customers can implement. And by the way, open to having third-party products SNAP into that infrastructure, which I think you have to be in security.

Michael Ng

analyst
#12

Right. And that's a good place to start talking about Splunk. Splunk naturally I believe, as part of the security and observability segments within Cisco. So could you just recap the strategic rationale for Splunk. Now that we're 5 to 6 months in provide a mark-to-market on where we are today, things that may have been better than expectations, things that may need a little bit of work.

Richard Herren

executive
#13

Sure, yes. Sure. Yes, the Splunk integration, as you said, we're in probably a month or 6 at this point on the Splunk integration. If I step back to the thought process behind that, we've been building out a much more recurring revenue model at Cisco, which brings the advantage of predictability and more than 50% post Splunk, about 56% of our reported revenues are now on a subscription basis, right? So as we're continuing to build that out. So it made sense from that standpoint. It fits perfectly into our security platform strategy with the SIM back-end. As a company on its own, it's extremely sticky, right? It gets deeply embedded into customers' environments, and it's extremely sticky, and that continued post acquisition. They've continued the momentum that they had when we acquired them. But it also fits really well from a cultural standpoint, which is really important. Not only did we get good product, we got a cultural fit and some great leadership talent. The CEO, Gary Steele, who's a guy I've known a long time. Gary, before coming to Splunk was the CEO of a company called Proofpoint, if you know security, you know Proofpoint. And I served on his board before I joined Cisco, I served on this Board for 4 years. I've known Gary a long time. He's a very focused operational exec. He's now President of our go-to-market worldwide. So the entire Cisco go-to-market engine reports to Gary, and he is an extremely talented person to start to drive that. So we've got good leadership. We got a very sticky product. It's growing very quickly. It's accretive to our gross margins in year 1. It will be accretive bottom line in year 2, which is our fiscal '26. It's cash flow accretive outside of the cost of the transaction, cash flow accretive from the start, even with the cost of servicing the debt or the foregone interest from cash on the balance sheet. So it's a nice fit financially, it's a nice fit culturally, and it's a great fit strategically.

Michael Ng

analyst
#14

Yes. I didn't cover Splunk or look at Proofpoint, but the investor feedback that I've got on Gary has only been positive. So maybe you can talk about Gary's expanded role as head of go-to-market. Like what's the secret sauce that Gary is going to bring to the rest of the organization?

Richard Herren

executive
#15

It's a handful of things. He's a very focused operational roll up the sleeves, get into the detail and with a company at our scale, that's not an easy task. He is absolutely tireless. Like I said, I've known him for a long time and I've watched him. He scaled Proofpoint. He's unique in the way he can scale. When he became the CEO at Proofpoint, they were running around a $15 million annual, revenue rate scaled that to $1 billion. While he was there over the course of time, quickly turned around Splunk in about 2 years from a company that was not profitable and that was seeing some stagnation in their growth rates to growing in the mid-teens again and very profitable. What he brings is besides obviously having great experience as a sales leader, right, which is what he was earlier in his career. He brings a fresh set of eyes to look at like, why are we doing it this way? And it's been absolutely terrific working with him as he looked at things and kind of said, "You know what, we could do this differently. We could do this in a better way." I think that it's hard to find people that can come in at that level of scale and still have what I call fresh eyes to look across it and come up with things that need to be done. But He's also a no nonsense kind of a person. He's very direct, which I love. I tend to be fairly direct as well, and I appreciate that style. He's fitting extremely well with the rest of the executives team.

Michael Ng

analyst
#16

And he's got the track record of success to prove it all.

Richard Herren

executive
#17

True.

Michael Ng

analyst
#18

Maybe one last one on Security. To your point, Cisco is pursuing Security with more of a platform-based approach. It feels like that's a little bit different than what's been in the market in terms of best of breed working with like most multiple security products. And I think that's led to some customer frustration, managing so many different vendors in Security. So is your view we're moving towards a platform world and is Cisco the leading vendor to be able to deliver that?

Richard Herren

executive
#19

Yes, absolutely. I mean you will never talk to a CIO, I don't think who will say, I wish I had more vendors to work with, right? What they would all love to see is consolidation. Security is a space where consolidation cannot lead to less efficacy at the same time. And so what we've done is as we've built out that security platform, and obviously, Splunk becoming one of the foundational elements of that is really built it with an eye toward more bundled product sales across our security line, but also keeping it open with a very robust layer of APIs around it, for third-party product integration into that platform. But if you think of what drives a more proactive security strategy is data and then the ability to apply AI, various AI techniques, to that data. And the data we already have, the networking telemetry we have from the breadth of our footprint in networking with the huge amount of telemetry we have from our Security products. from still continuing to have one of the most robust Security endpoint products that's out there and then with the Splunk log data at the same time, being able to pull that together and put AI techniques on top of it, gives the Security team and ability to not only consolidate vendors. But then to very seamlessly say of the 1,000 5,000, 10,000 security incidents that I have today, what are the 5 that I have to get on immediately? What are the 5 that are the most important? That's an AI opportunity. And that's what we've already started to build into our security products because of the breadth of the telemetry we have that we can feed into that AI engine. There's an ability to do dialogue with a security op center. You've been in a security op center like a wall of screens and each one has a different like demand control for the Lunar launch. And you look at that and go like, how do I know really where I need to focus in. And so there's a huge opportunity. But not only to say here's the most important to say, "Hey, with this incident, here's what I see. Here's what I recommend as the next step, would you like me to take it." And the security ops person can say, yes. And the system will often take that step and it'll say, here's the next thing we could do. If it's an incident on an end point, do you want me to isolate it for the network. We pretty much do [indiscernible]. Do you want me to dispatch a new device to that person whose endpoint is, so they can continue to get their job done, probably a good idea. You want me to run forensics now on that device and see where -- was there any exfiltration or was there any movement laterally across the network, Yes, I want you to do that as well. So you can build this kind of dialogue capability. We've already demoed some of that, that you can build into it. So it's a -- I think it's a pretty significant opportunity for us there's not many that have the breadth that we have to be able to build it out with that level of capability.

Michael Ng

analyst
#20

Great. One product category I wanted to touch on also is wireless LAN. Obviously, there's a lot happening in the space from some of the M&A that's in process right now, but also AI and cloud innovation to support wireless LAN. Could you talk a little bit about Cisco's positioning here? Are you seeing opportunities because of HPE and Juniper.

Richard Herren

executive
#21

I think, for sure, that's created. Just a degree of uncertainty and a question of, hey, should I consider if I was previously a vendor or a customer of either of those, now it's the time to kind of open up and look at our opportunities. And we've seen our wireless business, our orders greater than $1 million grew more than 20% in the fourth quarter. So we're seeing scale in that wireless space. We're also pulling together our own -- our catalyst and Meraki lines under a single cloud platform, a back-end plane to drive that. So we're seeing pretty significant opportunities there in the wireless space. Some of it could be generated by the M&A that's in the background. I think that's opened a lot of people's eyes. It's also generated by some of the innovation that we've built into that space.

Michael Ng

analyst
#22

Great. I wanted to ask about some of the financial guidance points before talking about AI, but it's encouraging to hear Cisco's fiscal '25 revenue guidance of $55.5 billion to $56.2 billion, which is about 3% to 4% revenue growth. Could you talk about some of the trends that you're seeing and Cisco's business and the industry at large that give you confidence in this fiscal '25 outlook?

Richard Herren

executive
#23

Yes. And it's $55 billion to $56 billion, top line.

Michael Ng

analyst
#24

Sorry.

Richard Herren

executive
#25

That's okay. So yes, we do see a number of dynamics. And we talked about the -- obviously, you need to see order growth ahead of seeing revenue growth. And for us, by the way, the statistic that's not part of that guide, but that you see in our results is our RPO. A lot of those product sales for us, are subscription-based products that first have to go through deferred revenue before they accrete to the revenue stream. We've built up right at $40 billion of RPO at this point, roughly half of that will accrete to revenue in the next 12 months, right? So there's not just the revenue that you see there is the revenue that's built up that will be future revenues for us sitting in the RPO balance. There's a couple of factors inside there. Obviously, adding Splunk to the portfolio, there's a degree of inorganic. We in fiscal '24, I had Splunk on board for about 4.5 quarters. So a little more than 1/3 of the year. So there's going to be some organic growth in there driven by Splunk. The compare point, if you remember, our first quarter of fiscal '24 was actually very strong. And it was really the last quarter where we shipped out a fair amount of excess backlog that we have built up because of the supply constraints. So that becomes a tough compare point for us in this current -- we're in our first quarter of fiscal '25 becomes a bit of a tough compare point for us. And that number was not insignificant. The amount that we shipped out in Q1 of '24 was in the $4 billion range. So those 2 kind of counteract each other. I think as we look ahead, seeing the trend that we've seen in product orders and the inventory digestion behind us now and seeing it be balanced across geos and across customer sets. It's fairly encouraging. I think it's also a time to be prudent. The economic -- the world economic events elections around the world. It's a good time for us to be prudent. And I think you see some of that built into our guide as well.

Michael Ng

analyst
#26

Yes. And the trajectory seems interesting where we'll have one more quarter of tough comps because of backlog...

Richard Herren

executive
#27

The quarter that we're in. That's right.

Michael Ng

analyst
#28

We'll see revenue growth accelerate. Okay. At Cisco Live earlier this year, Cisco outlined fiscal '26 and fiscal '27 revenue growth targets of 4% to 6%. And you gave a lot of detail at the segments as well. Could you talk about why 4% to 6% was the right growth outlook for those 2 years?

Richard Herren

executive
#29

Sure. Yes. Well, within that product is growing 5% to 7%. And then we gave you a little bit of a breakdown what was happening within network inside that, what was -- what is happening in security and observability and affect collab. There's a few other things in there that affect collab. And obviously, you see significantly faster growth within security observability. Networking business will continue to grow, but there's such a blend with the breadth of our portfolio, there's such a blend of different products inside there. And I think that's -- again, it's easy to get confused when you try to compare our networking growth rate to some of our peers who are kind of focused on a single segment. And that's why I think it's important that the stat that I gave you earlier, which is, if you just break down that networking growth rate over the last 6 months, our growth in the hyperscaler space has been a little north of 30% over those last 6 months of the year. So seeing really nice growth in that space. But there's a whole blend of products inside there, and it's a very large number for us sitting in that space. So I think the other thing that factored into that guide, obviously, fiscal '24 is a tough year for us. There was a lot of change that we didn't see coming necessarily. So it pays to be a little bit prudent at this point as I'm giving projections and there's a little bit of that built in as well.

Michael Ng

analyst
#30

Great. And just to follow-up on that hyperscale point. Maybe we can talk about AI. During last quarter's earnings, Cisco talked about achieving $1 billion of AI orders from web scalers to date. And they -- and you reiterated the additional $1 billion of AI orders in fiscal '25. Maybe you could just clarify, like what are you doing with AI orders? Is it primarily back-end networking? Is it mostly web scale?

Richard Herren

executive
#31

Yes. So those numbers are almost exclusively web scale. It's very little historically, it's all web scale. As we look ahead, it's almost -- the overwhelming majority is also web scale there. Historically, it's been kind of 3 things that drove the $1 billion of orders, and those are inception to date. Those weren't just in fiscal '24. It's the top of rack, the 8K for us, the 8,000. It's the optics and optical are a piece of that. And Silicon One is a small piece of that. There are some of the large web scalers that just want to buy the Silicon One chipset from us. As we look ahead, it's going to be much more -- so that's what's in the $1 billion inception to date. As we look ahead, and again, it's web-scale focused. It's going to be a little bit more heavier on the system side, on the 8K side with also some optics built into that. That when you sell AI capabilities into these large hyperscalers, it's a design win, right? They each have slightly different designs that affect both the underlying chipset, but of course, how you build that into a system. And so what we've been in the process of, it's an engineering-to-engineering process. working with them and understanding what their needs are exactly, designing that product for them, going through the process of having it certified and then you've got a design win. And then what they look to do is buy off of that design win. So we've got multiple. We gave some of the stats at our Investor Day, design wins in that space, that's what fuels the $1 billion that we have line of sight to the next billion, that we have line of sight to in fiscal '25 is understanding exactly what those design wins are. What's not in there is what we see selling into the enterprise, one of the interesting slides that we had on our last call laid out just 4 of the large transactions that we got done during the quarter, each of them greater than $100 million sales. And when you looked at what they were buying inside there, it was the thing that people always think of buying from Cisco switches and routers and WiFi and security and collaboration. But when you looked at why they bought that it's really refreshing in the enterprise, refreshing their core infrastructure to be ready for AI. When they're ready to actually start implementing AI at scale they all know that they need to refresh that infrastructure. And that's one of the things that's driving longer-term demand. That is not part of the $1 billion that we talk about of AI. Think of that as hyperscaler. That's a significant opportunity that drives the core business over the next several years.

Michael Ng

analyst
#32

Yes. There's a pull-along effect that people make infrastructure investments. Just on the hyperscaler piece. I mean, Cisco has been very candid that it's a customer segment that they had not done much with in the last several years. And this is a notable change, right, and an improving of that customer relationship. Maybe you can speak to a little bit about that and where we are in the hyperscale opportunity.

Richard Herren

executive
#33

Right. Yes, if you look historically at the hyperscaler space, go back a decade plus when the big compute and storage capabilities are being set up. We didn't play very much in that space. And part of it was we didn't really recognize this whole design. It's a design win. You have to design separately. Chuck came in as the CEO and quickly said, look, this is a space that we need to be more effective in. That's when we started the Silicon One strategy, the Silicon One chipset strategy. But it's when we also went back to the hyperscales and said, "Look, we'll meet you where you are." If you want to buy completed systems from us, we'll sell you that. If you want to buy white box from us, we'll sell you that and put your own software on it. If you want to buy just the chipset from us, we'll sell you that. And what that led to is us even before the AI infrastructure build-out building a pretty robust business in that hyperscaler space. So clearly, we gained a fair amount of share from 0. It's easy to gain share when you're at 0, right? We gained a fair amount of share in that space. Now as the AI infrastructure build is being built out on those. That same set of customers, we've got relationships with them. We've got the -- they'll meet you where you are kind of a mindset. We understand how to build out those design wins. We recorded round numbers 20 of those already. So we're much better positioned for the build-out of the AI infrastructure there. As I said, second half of last year, that business grew a little bit north of 30% for us. So I think we're very well positioned as that builds out in the future.

Michael Ng

analyst
#34

And could you talk about AI infrastructure demand among enterprise customers? Cisco has a partnership with NVIDIA to help service some of these customers. I think there's a little bit of a debate in the market whether or not that enterprise AI infrastructure demand will materialize and win. Obviously, Cisco is going to be in a very good position to service those customers because of the channel footprint, the sales footprint and everything like that.

Richard Herren

executive
#35

That's right. Yes. It's a partnership that I would say it's still in the very early stages. We've spent an enormous amount of time working with the NVIDIA team. And that's the -- we recently launched this HyperFabric capability. Here's what that is. Think of that as if you're an enterprise and you want to train a model, you're likely because of the scale of training, you're likely to do that in the public cloud. But when you want to run the inferencing on a regular basis because of the sensitivity of the data, both in and out of those models, the enterprises are largely, we hear this pretty frequently from our customers. They want to build that out within their own data center, move away from the public cloud for the inferencing phase. That's the opportunity that HyperFabric will go after. And what that is, is inferencing in a box, right? It's a single purchase that will -- it will be a rack. It will have servers inside there with NVIDIA GPUs on it. Our control plane on the back end and our top of rack, Ethernet on the top end of that. But it's the easy way for enterprises to kind of within one purchase, get a single rack, the HyperFabric rack that will support their own internal inferencing needs. And we hear repeatedly that, that's -- while that market is somewhat nascent right now, and what we see from enterprises is they're building out the rest of their infrastructure to support AI. That opportunity for HyperFabric is going to be fairly significant over the next few years.

Michael Ng

analyst
#36

Great. Let's talk about capital allocation. Cisco returned, I think, over $12 billion of cash to investors last year through repurchases and dividends, more than 100% of free cash flow what is Cisco's shareholder capital return and other capital allocation strategies. The company has historically operated at a net cash position. You've got some net debt because of Splunk. Does that kind of preclude you from doing any additional M&A at this point?

Richard Herren

executive
#37

Yes, not at all. So we did move from a net cash position through the Splunk acquisition to a net debt position. Our ratings, by the way, our balance sheet is very robust, as I'm sure you know, Mike. So AA-, A1 rated didn't change. through the course of that. We -- at our scale and with our margins, we generate a lot of cash each year. So the cap allocation strategy has not changed. And just to recap it, support the growth of the business has got to be job 1. But job 1A is to continue to support the dividend and grow the dividend. You see us grow that every year, grow that dividend. Right now, that consumes about $6.5 billion of cash per year. We've also, for the last several quarters that our target is $1.25 billion per quarter to $5 billion a year of share buybacks, which is slightly more than offsetting it's actually materially more than offsetting the dilution of our equity plans. And on top of that, with an opportunistic overlay. And you just saw in the last quarter, in the fourth quarter, there was some market dislocation on our price relative to the rest of the market. There's a number of factors that go into that. But we actually instead of just doing $1.25 billion in the quarter we just closed, we did about $2 billion of share buybacks. And so there will always be an opportunistic overlay where we see the number of factors that lead us to believe that there's a dislocation in our share price. So our cap allocation strategy is unchanged. Our robust balance sheet has the same ratings that it did before. There's no change in the -- not on a watch list or anything like that. We continue to generate a lot of cash and continue to use it to both return capital to shareholders but also drive the growth of our business.

Michael Ng

analyst
#38

Great. In the last minute that we have, maybe you can talk a little bit about your vision for Cisco over the next 3 years. But could you also just touch on efficiencies, cost savings, which has been something that you guys have done a good job of.

Richard Herren

executive
#39

Yes, I'd say part of what we announced in the fourth quarter, and I'll try and do this in the 30 seconds that we have left, it's not going to be easy. You've seen us be very disciplined financially in the way that we both invest in the business but also return good margins across the board. Expect that to continue. The most recent earnings call where we announced the restructuring was really about pivoting more of the resources. Our OpEx run rate at this point is somewhere between $19 billion and $20 billion a year. We're spending enough money. What we need to do is make sure that we're prioritizing the fastest growth areas that we serve. And that's AI, of course, that's cybersecurity across the board, and that's cloud and networking. So that -- what that was about is finding efficiencies across the company and doing it in a very, I'd say, single tough-minded way of finding those efficiencies, so that we can pull those efficiencies out and staying within our spending envelope, be able to invest more in the fastest growth areas that we have. So I continue to see us doing that, continuing to be disciplined on pricing, continuing to be disciplined across the board financially so that we can drive the right level of return but also drive growth at the same time.

Michael Ng

analyst
#40

That's a great place to cap it off. Scott Herren, everybody.

Richard Herren

executive
#41

Thank you.

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