Cisco Conference Call Highlights

Cisco CSCO reported its fourth quarter earnings Wednesday. Shares of the company are down 2.7 percent.

Below are some key takeaways from its conference call:

• We generated over $3.6 billion in operating cash flow and returned approximately $2.5 billion to our shareholders through share buybacks and dividends.
• Our fiscal year began with a number of external headwinds including the federal government shutdown and the possibility of a U.S. default combined with significant slowdown in emerging markets.
• FY 2014 ended with revenues of $47.1 billion representing the second strongest year in our history
• Record non-GAAP earnings per share of $2.06 per share.
• We finished the quarter with product orders up 1 percent, product book-to-bill comfortably above 1, and a product backlog of $5.4 billion.
• Services revenue grew 5 percent, up from 3 percent last quarter and it is trending very well.

Guidance:

• The results over the past three years represent significant forward progress and you should expect that we will continue to take actions to transform Cisco.
• Looking specifically at FY 2015 we executed well in Q4 and expect our revenues for Q1 of FY 2015 to range from flat to up 1 percent.
• We have navigated this industry successfully for almost three decades while nearly every competitor we faced 10 to 20 years ago has either exited our part of the market, stalled in terms of market share or has gone out of business.

International:

• Our business in Americas grew 2 percent, U.S. grew 5 percent, with U.S. commercial and U.S. enterprise continuing their strong growth, up 17 percent and 16 percent.
• As an example, looking at deals in our U.S. Enterprise pipeline, the number of deals over $1 million increased by 22 percent.