This is What Cisco Executives are Saying About Trump’s Tariffs

Top Cisco executives have chimed in with their thoughts about President Trump’s Chinese tariffs.

According to Cisco’s CEO Chuck Robbins, who spoke to CNBC, he had already anticipated Trump’s tariff hike to 25% from 10% last week.

Cisco’s CFO Kelly Kramer remarked, “If it goes to all China imports it’s not only going to impact us, but it’s going to impact every industry.”

The executives of the network equipment maker believe the tariffs would affect American industries as a whole.
Robbins said the increase was “relatively immaterial at this point and built in to our guidance.”

It was after-hours on Wednesday that Cisco reported first quarter earnings that were better than expected as well as better than anticipated guidance.

Robbins said on the call, “In the quarter, we delivered strong revenue, margins, non-GAAP earnings growth and operating cash flow. As we continue to help our customers achieve their business objectives, I’m confident about the future of Cisco and the growth opportunities ahead of us.”

“New technologies like cloud, AI, IoT, 5G and WiFi 6, among others, are coming together to revolutionize the way we operate our businesses and deliver new experiences for our customers and teams. We are fundamentally changing the way our customers approach their technology infrastructure to address the rising complexity in their IT environments. We are building the only integrated multi-domain intent-based architecture with security at the foundation. This is designed to allow our customers to securely connect their users and devices over any network to any application, no matter where they are.”

“We are integrating capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning across the entire portfolio. So, customers have greater insights, resulting in better and faster business outcomes.”

This week China had announced that it planned to raise tariff rates on $60 billion worth of U.S. goods.
“The reason we’ve been able to mitigate … is it’s only it’s a portion of the business,” Kramer said. “We’ll adjust” if that changes, she added.

Robins also said on the call, “Cisco is in a unique position to deliver this for our customers. We recently announced several new platforms, expanding our enterprise networking portfolio with the launch of our subscription-based WiFi 6 access points and Catalyst 9600 campus core switches, purpose-built for cloud skilled networking. By combining our automation and analytics software with our broad portfolio of switches, access points and controllers, we are creating a seamless end-to-end wireless first architecture for our customers. We also expanded our open roaming partnership ecosystem to now include Apple, Intel, Samsung and others to make WiFi on-boarding
simple.”

Walmart CFO Brett Biggs said this week that, “Increased tariffs will increase prices for customers.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) and have not been compensated for this article.