Earnings Labs

Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO)

Q1 2014 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 13, 2013

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to Cisco Systems’ First Quarter and Fiscal Year 2014 Financial Results Conference Call. At the request of Cisco Systems today’s call is being recorded. If anyone has any objections you may disconnect. Now, I’d like to introduce Melissa Selcher, Senior Director, Analyst and Investor Relations. Ma’am, you may begin.

Melissa Selcher

Management

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to our 95th quarterly conference call. This is Melissa Selcher, and I’m joined by John Chambers, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Frank Calderoni, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Rob Lloyd, President of Development and Sales; and Gary Moore, President and Chief Operating Officer. I would like to remind you that we have corresponding webcast with slides on our website in the Investor Relations section. Income statements, full GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation information, balance sheets, cash flow statements and other financial information can also be found on the Investor Relations website. As it’s customary in Q1, we have made certain reclassification to prior period amounts to conform to the current periods presentation, the reclassified amount have been posted on our website. Click on the Financial Reporting section of the website to access these documents. Throughout this call, we will be referencing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results. The matters we will be discussing today include forward-looking statements and as such are subject to the risks and uncertainties that we discuss in detail in our documents filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports on the Form 10-K and any applicable amendments, which identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Unauthorized recording of this conference call is not permitted. All comparisons throughout this call will be on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise stated. I will now turn it over to John for his commentary on the quarter.

John Chambers

Chairman

Thanks, Mel. In Q1 FY ‘14 Cisco delivered record non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.53 per share and revenue growth of 2% year-over-year. This level of revenue growth in Q1, while not inconsistent with some of our large peers was below our expectations for the quarter. Over the last few quarters, I’ve shared with you what I’ve been seeing, a microenvironment that is inconsistent and very hard to read, with business leaders confidence slowing purchase decisions. The last month of our quarter was during the U.S. government shutdown. The impact on our federal business was approximately $50 million. Our team there did an exceptional good job managing through this challenging period. However the shutdown, debt feeling negotiations and delayed key decisions exasperated the lack of confidence among business leaders we had highlighted over the past few quarters. As we walk through our business in detail, you would hear many positives. Our strategy to solve our customers’ biggest technology and biggest business challenges is working. We delivered strong non-GAAP profitability. We are leading most of the major transitions in the market and our innovation engine is faring extremely well. That said, we are managing through several cycles in our business. First, emerging market weakness; second, the introduction of several new generation platforms in high end switching and routing; and third, our service provider of business evolution. Our intermediate long-term strategic view has not changed and we are continuing to lean forward and make investments that would drive our future growth. We are disrupting markets. Look at our Application Centric Infrastructure launch and Internet of Things and our NPS launch in just the last month to drive value to our customers and to our shareholders. From where I see it, I believe we are well-positioned at the center as the long-term transitions…

Frank Calderoni

Management

Thank you, John. In Q1 FY ‘14, we drove solid profitability despite our lower than expected revenue growth. Our business continues to operate in an inconsistent and mixed macroeconomic environment and we had specific challenges in the emerging markets and service provider. At the same time, we had relative strength in data center, wireless, security and our switching business. From a top line perspective, total revenue was $12.1 billion growing 2% year-over-year and non-GAAP EPS was $0.53 growing 10% year-to-year. In this quarter, we continue to execute consistently without portfolio approach to acquisition aligned to driving long-term returns. We announced the WHIPTAIL acquisition to celebrate our UCS strategy. WHIPTAIL is the market leader in high performance, scalable, solid state memory system and we also closed two acquisitions this quarter, Composite Software and Sourcefire. Sourcefire, a leader in intelligent cybersecurity solutions and brings industry-leading products, talent and an open-source approach to our security portfolio. Composite Software offers data virtualization software and services and will extend our next generation services offering. We also announced our intent to acquire the remaining interest in Insieme Networks as part of our application centric infrastructure-based data center and cloud solution. Total product from a geographic perspective grew 4% for the Americas, 3% for EMEA and decreased 9% for APJC. The overall product revenue increased 1% and total services revenue increased 4%. We delivered solid non-GAAP operating margins of 29.3% with consistent results in both gross margins and operating expenses with continued strong discipline in these areas. In Q1, our total non-GAAP gross margin was 63.0%, that compares to 62.7% a year ago and 62.1% last quarter. We continue to see good stability over multiple quarters and product gross margins, with non-GAAP gross -- product gross margins at 62.0% compared with the 61.5% year ago and 60.8%…

John Chambers

Chairman

Thanks, Frank. I will now provide some additional detail on the performance in Q1 and trends we are seeing in our business and in the market. I’ll first walk through our product portfolio in terms of year-over-year revenue growth, followed by discussing geographic and customer segments in terms of year-over-year orders. First, our switching business performed well with growth of 3%. Switching gross margins, including new products, continue to be very stable. We have introduced next-generation products across most of the entire portfolio, including the highly anticipated data center switching line in the Nexus family, the Nexus 9000. Developed by our recently acquired spin-in Insieme Networks. The Nexus 9000 began shipping in November and we will ramp over the coming quarters. Wireless delivered another solid quarter with gross [ph] revenues of 8% and stronger gross margin. The comparison to 802.11ac is in the beginning stages with support now across our product line. Cisco’s networking platform or Rocky continue to perform very, very well. NGN routing revenue was down 1% for the quarter. We saw declines in the quarter as we managed the product transitions in that business. We shipped a new NPS platform to our first customer this quarter and continue to manage the transition of our CRS platform to the CRS-X. On the AS -- ASR 9000 had another record revenue quarter with growth constantly about 20%. But our Edge performance was impacted by declines in our traditional products, in both the Core and Edge we are focused on migrating programs that will drive upgrades to the new platforms over the coming quarters. We saw decline in our ASR 5000 mobility revenues due primarily to timing of large orders. SP video revenues of $987 million declined 14% year-over-year. As we continue to focus on profitable growth, our set-top box…

Frank Calderoni

Management

Thank, John. Let me now provide a few comments on our outlook for the second quarter. Let me remind you again that our comments include forward-looking statements and you should review our recent SEC filings that identify important risk factors and understand that actual results could materially differ from those contained in the forward-looking statement. And that actual results could be above or below our guidance. The guidance we are providing is on a non-GAAP basis with a reconciliation to GAAP. As we look to Q2 FY’14, we do not anticipate material improvement in our order growth. This is impacting our revenue guidance for Q2. Given our orders performance in Q1, our backlog is significantly lower than we anticipated. As a point reference, approximately 70% of our product revenue is dependent on new orders each quarter. With that in mind, we expect total revenue to decline in the range of 8% to 10% on a year-over-year basis. For the second quarter we anticipate non-GAAP product gross margin – non-GAAP margin to be in the range of 61% to 62%. Our non-GAAP operating margin in Q2 is expected to be in the range of 27.5% to 28.5%. Our non-GAAP tax provision rate is expected to be approximately 21% in the second quarter. Our Q2 FY ‘14, non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to range from $0.45 to $0.47 per share. Given the guidance for Q2 ‘14 and the shift in momentum in our business, we thought it would be helpful to provide investors and share more detail on the full year of the fiscal year. We expect our FY ‘14 non-GAAP earnings per share to range from a $1.95 to $2.05. Within this, we suggest you model revenue conservatively. We have a strong handle on our gross margins, operating expenses and…

John Chambers

Chairman

Frank, thank you very much. There is no doubt that the pace have changed that we all feel and see is only accelerating. As I have been saying throughout this calendar year, things that used to occur in five years are happening in three. Things that used to happen in two to four quarters are occurring in one quarter. This is a new market reality. Let me be very clear, change has always been good for Cisco. We used these times to get closer to our customers, transform our business and drive new opportunities. I speak with many of you, our shareholders during the year and appreciate the investment you are making and understanding our business, including attending our launches and events, as many of you did in New York last week. I note from those meetings that you understand our strategy and where we can take this company. I also know that while we see these transitions as opportunities, these transitions can create unwelcome quarter-to-quarter volatility and can be frustrating for long-term shareholders. As we have always done, we’ll commit to you to be transparent, letting you, our shareholders see the challenges and the opportunities as we see them. We remain very confident in our long-term strategy and are committed to managing the business to ensure we drive the greatest long-term value for our customers, employees, partners and shareholders. What can you expect as we address the opportunities, cycles and challenges in our business and the market over the next several quarters? First, I realized many of you spend a lot of time speaking with our customers and channel partners. As you know, our relationship with the customers has never being stronger. We are winning and they know it. They have asked us to play a bigger role in…

Melissa Selcher

Management

Thanks, John. I wanted to clarify one comment John made during his product statement. We are not quite yet number one in blade server market. We are number two in that blade server market. All right. We'll now open the floor to Q&A. We still request that sell side analysts please ask only one question. Operator please open the floor to questions.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our first question comes from Tal Liani with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Tal Liani - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Hi guys. Your guidance is very low if I got the numbers right, it’s about 11% sequentially – 11% down sequentially for revenue. Then I went back to 2000 -- October 2000 and I've never seen such a low number outside of 2008 or 2009, I am looking at it January 2009, and at that time the world was about to collapse, January 2009. That’s when all the problems hit the financial system. And I am wondering why are you guiding so low for next quarter? It looks like the environment may continue to be weak but it's not as bad as it was in ‘09 and certainly not as bad as it was in October 2000 etc. So what are the components of the weakness for the next quarter?

John Chambers

Chairman

Okay. Let me do both. Let me talk about the component of the weakness and the areas we feel the strongest, so on. There are no comparisons in a measured way to 2009 or 2001. You basically look at our business and let me answer that very crisply [ph], because I know it’s a thought on many people's minds given what we’ve just guided to. The U.S. enterprise and commercial, which are the areas that I watch for a long term U.S. economic growth, both are in high single digits. And we feel pretty good about their pipeline going forward. Our federal team executed well in a tough environment, so our state and local government and federal government is solid. Service provider, we need to make improvement on and we have a multiple step approach to how we are going to do that in terms of direction. You look around the world, the emerging markets, I have never seen that fast a move in emerging markets and that is something that when I talk with our industry peers, while there are exceptions, most of my CEO counterparts can almost finish my sentence in terms of what's occurring. It's also occurring with many of our customers where if you were to talk about Brazil as an example, they can finish each other's comments to CIOs about their business whether it’s the consumer business or whether it's the manufacturing segment in terms of the direction. We're very comfortable with our leadership and our share of spin gains in the marketplace. We do have to work in three areas. In terms of the focus on the emerging marketplaces, we are modeling for a challenging next couple of quarters. We believe that more than half the world’s GDP occurs there. But we’ve put in…

Frank Calderoni

Management

No. I think you covered it, John. I mean, it includes the key things what you said, material shortfall and orders in the back half of Q1 and specifically as we saw in October. This immediately hits not only affected our Q1 performance with the revenue being shorter than what we had provided in our guidance. So you are looking at the mid range of our guidance but it also ended up with a significant shortfall in the backlog at the end of Q1 and that affects the business opportunity that we have going into Q2. And then overall if you look at the business momentum now in Q2, specifically in emerging markets and service provider as you articulated earlier, those businesses as well the most challenged in Q2, when you look at that offset by the related impact that we have with the services business that ties to that as well that results in the guidance that we provided.

Melissa Selcher

Management

Yeah. Thanks, Tal. Next question, operator.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ben Reitzes with Barclays.

Ben Reitzes - Barclays

Analyst · Barclays

Hey. Good afternoon.

John Chambers

Chairman

Hi, Ben.

Ben Reitzes - Barclays

Analyst · Barclays

Thank you. Hi. Couple of things that you didn’t mention but I was wondering in emerging markets especially there’s been a lot of concern out there about the NSA snooping and the impact that’s had on global IT and global IT brands like yourself? And you maybe alluded to this with regard to your comments on China and the political situation? But I noticed Russia was perhaps down even more than China and what not? Do you feel that there’s something more going on, this -- we’re all floored by your guidance here? But is there something a little more to this that with customers outside of the U.S. thinking a little bit more about U.S. IT brands and is that impacting your business and if so or if not, then what do you do in the future? Thanks a lot, John.

John Chambers

Chairman

Sure. Ben, I think, if you look at it, it is an impact in China. I think we’re all aware of that. I think it’s totally impact on the total emerging country business, however, is fairly nominal. I do think we are seeing a slowdown in these emerging markets both in the decision making and their economies. And so I do not think it is a major factor across all of emerging. I do think it is a factor however in China. Rob, would you add anything to that?

Rob Lloyd

Analyst · Barclays

I would just add, John, that this issue has caused increasingly customers to pause and another issue for them to evaluate, in all of those complexities that you've already discussed. So it's not having material impact but it's certainly causing people to stop and then rethink decisions and that is I think reflected in our results.

Frank Calderoni

Management

I think then what you articulate and we're trying to do too, the amount of inconsistent data is just causing customers to hesitate including at the country level.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Simona Jankowski with Goldman Sachs & Co. Simona Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Hi, thanks very much. So it sounds like one of the issues you're dealing with is the transition on the routing side of the business and obviously you just introduced some fairly large platforms on the switching side, which is even larger than your routing business. Would you expect to see a similar top haul [ph] basically in the switching business in the next couple of quarters as you work through that?

John Chambers

Chairman

That's what we have modeled into it. It won't be a haul, but the growth will not be what we would normally experience. Once again, the sales teams have set up our products by individual areas, but you combine with just a very slow spending environment. Simona, let me back for a second. When I talked to CIOs on the issues of Business Council, as an example. Half the CEOs that they surveyed, Chief Executive Officer they surveyed believed the economy is going to grow between 0% and 2%. They are modeling their budgets conservatively and as they think through this the CIOs will hesitate as they have product choices, doesn't mean they won't continue to buy our Core 7000s and other products, they will but they are going to strike a balance of what do they want to do in terms of the mix and as they commit through. So, yes, we had modeled this in Q2 and Q3. And yes, to the indirect part of your question, as you come into Q4 and come up to Q1 of next year with all the appropriate caveats because of where we are on product cycles, where we are in terms of what we're going to double down on in some of the things that we need to address, my goal for our company is to get back to positive revenue growth in Q1 and ideally in Q4. But that's a stretch goal with all the appropriate caveats associated with it. So, you will have product cycles working towards that. You will have our momentum in the market working to it and I think that is kind of what our expectations are. You saw Frank's bookends on the earnings. We did it deliberately so that you could understand the areas that we are operating in, Simona.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Amitabh Passi with UBS Securities. Amitabh Passi – UBS: I was just trying to understand your guidance again in the context of your deferred revenue growth. I mean, it seems like you got pretty strong growth both sequentially and year-over-year in product revenue growth – product deferred revenue growth. So just want to understand again, I'm really perplexed by the guidance here. I understand some of the pain points you identified, but maybe if you could just shed some light there.

Frank Calderoni

Management

So, if you look at the deferred revenue, Amitabh, the deferred revenue was up around 11%. If you look at underneath what that is, that shows a lot of the business that we have on collaboration side, which is moving to more of the recurring. So we have more deferral associated with some of the offerings that we have there. That's a majority of where that is. So that’s the good news from the perspective, it starts to show some of the momentum that we have in the collaboration businesses, is one of the businesses John mentioned earlier that we have been really investing in on the product portfolio over the past year and we're looking at this product set over longer period of time and also looking at some of the model that our customers are looking to purchase. And some of that is going to be more of a recurring revenue model which is kind of improving the deferred revenue.

John Chambers

Chairman

An example on that, Amitabh, would be security and with the movements on Sourcefire. It was an area that really began to take hold this quarter. I think our customers realize we are very serious about moving to be the number one security player. You will see us expanding consultancy in this area, and as we did that, even our network security grew 12% which had not grown as you all know for a very long time. But in the security, if you look at this next year's reported, we'll report – Mel, I want to make sure we deliver on the commitments. We will report a booking growth and revenue growth. And it would not surprise me in these areas to see booking growth in the low 20s and revenue growth in the low – in 10%, 11%, 12% because of the conversion to future deferred revenues and licensing. So we are moving as fast as we can because Gary is kind of hunting this model for us, it is a juggling act in terms of how do we move to recurring revenues to more applications, so that more and more of our business is a given each quarter and we can be more where most of our peers are, where they get the majority of their business already done before they enter a quarter. But it takes you a while to get there and that is also built into our factors, Amitabh.

Frank Calderoni

Management

And the number I gave, that's 11% year-on-year for product and then the services was up about 2%, total deferred revenue up about 5%.

Melissa Selcher

Management

Thanks, Amitabh. Operator, next question please.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Next question comes from Kulbinder Garcha with Credit Suisse.

Kulbinder Garcha - Credit Suisse

Analyst · Credit Suisse

The question, I just want to clarify on the guidance again and this is for John and Frank, I think. It sounds like, I understand the set-top box issues and how that’s impacting revenue growth. I understand the emerging market and macro issue in China is more than just a macros issue it sounds like. So I’m curious John how you fix that, it seems that’s a very complicated, highly political subject then? And on the service provider side, did the actual product transition impact on your revenues or did it actually surprise you, I would have thought you would have known about that going into this period of time? Thanks.

John Chambers

Chairman

Okay. So in reverse order, a series of questions but I think all very fair. I understand the way that we do our revenue and booking forecast is, we have a very good sales team and they roll up the forecast and we do it by regions and by countries and by products. We then based upon that forecast determine what our revenue guidance is for a quarter. Now, they take into consideration what they see in the product pipeline, what percentage of the pipeline they expect to fill out very, very detailed approach to it. The field, of course, however, almost never get sale burst, up or down. And the pace of change that you’re really seeing in this, Kulbinder is that, it’s almost what occurs in a quarter just a year ago will now be two or three quarters worth and it was almost, if you were to a pick a quarter, you didn’t want to end up here, it was in early October this year doing the uncertainties in terms of the balance on that. But no, in terms of the product transitions just 120 days ago when we reported the last quarter, none of us anticipated the change in Washington, the uncertainties, the business confidence that would occur from this and I’m not making excuses, this is what the customers are telling us. And in terms of their going into next year, their expectations are down for the year, their budgets are down for the year, they are not taking as much risk. Now the good news is this can turnaround just as quickly as it slows. But in terms of the overall approach there were positives and there were negatives in the groups and it was a quarter of very inconsistent data, much like we articulated that our customers see in terms of the economics and other issues.

Melissa Selcher

Management

Okay. Thanks Kulbinder. Operator, next question.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brian Modoff with Deutsche Bank.

Brian Modoff - Deutsche Bank

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

Hi. Hi, John.

John Chambers

Chairman

Hey, Brian.

Brian Modoff - Deutsche Bank

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

Couple of questions for you, first, can you just run down on switching in terms of how you see that capital versus data center switching how you see both of those doing over the next couple of quarters? And then with regard to your guidance you do talk about gross margin still being kind of in the 60%, 62% range even with revenues down like this just mix, lower set-top box sales or is it something else with regard to what you are doing to manage the margins in that range? Thanks.

John Chambers

Chairman

Sure. So a number of questions and I want the first one and I’m going to ask the gross margin question. Gary, we have done very good job on gross margins. We are focusing on that across the Board. Our guidance has been very consistent 61%, 62% gross margins for a long time, Frank. And we don’t see things material in the market that that cause us uncomfortable with that. We have done a very good job of value engineering, a very good job of modeling this path, a very good job of designing our new products and it might have slipped by some people, when we say we design then for the current gross margin level, we’ve never been able to do that before and we did that following some of our experiences back in 2011 and 2009. So, we learn, we do it different in terms of the direction. We are continuing to anticipate set-top boxes falling and that is built into our next several quarter phenomena. Now I missed the first part of the question, I apologize.

Brian Modoff - Deutsche Bank

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

It was switching mix?

John Chambers

Chairman

Oh! Switching, Mel, won’t let me talk about a specific quarter in terms of the guidance. So let me fast forward to summer this next year. Summer this next year we will have the best switching architectures in the industry by ourselves. We basically would take all of the advantages, merchant silicon and custom silicon and put them together. We will bring the promises of SDN to life literally in an open and simplistic way. It won’t be slideware. This will be complete production and it will literally accomplish the separation of applications from the infrastructure with a common policy. So if you looked across all of our switching lines for the Nexus in 5000, 7000, you begin to look in terms of what we’re doing with the 9000 within semi and you begin to look at Rob Soderbery’s product group, which I think he’s completely refreshed Rob Lloyd, if I remember right. Our switching portfolio is the strongest it’s ever been in the marketplace and looks really solid. To the indirect part of your question, on the routing side we feel equally as good. I like where we are with the high-end products. And remember, NCS is an architecture. It's kind of the nervous system of making all this work. And with the CRS-X, it has the new capabilities that the same chip designs, et cetera we put on NCS. So high-end, we're never going to let that get taken away from us again. It happened 10 years ago, never going to let it happen. But now we need to move the resources to be able to address the access level, where it’s an area at the low end we have to do better than couple of our competitors are doing well. At the high-end VPN capability, ASR 9000 actually is growing comfortably over 20%. But as other legacy products we have to do better. So in terms of product portfolio, it really looks good. Our ability to bring them together looks good. We got to I think pick up our game in a couple of areas in service provider to think of solution selling as opposed to box-type of selling and that we are going to have Pankaj Patel, who is our Head of Engineering and Nick Adamo, who is the Head of the Americas two together with myself and Pankaj flying cover for them to be able to address this. And when we started on this on enterprise, Gary, a year ago, enterprise at this time did not really have the pieces together, because the business entities are great on products but not combining them and you combine that with, Gary and as to our services you can certainly provide a solution service provider the same way. I have run this strategy off of several of the top CEOs in the country and in the world on the service provider side, they will buy into it if we can execute.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Paul Silverstein, Cowen. Paul Silverstein - Cowen & Co.: John, I apologize, I know this question has been asked ten ways till Sunday. But I am trying to parse --

John Chambers

Chairman

Okay. We knew it would be asked again. Paul Silverstein - Cowen & Co.: In trying to parse out your commentary about emerging market, service provider is a general proposition in terms of as being the bulk of the weakness. In your commentary from a timing standpoint regarding the last two weeks of the quarter, two questions here. One, I know – assuming what you saw in the last two weeks of the quarter has extended into the first two weeks of November; and secondly, can you give some additional color on top of what you have already said in terms of those two different issues that collapsed in the last two weeks, the very recent Vantage collapse and the more generic commentary about emerging markets and service provider?

John Chambers

Chairman

So the first two weeks of the new quarter are not really indicative of where you go. But the last two weeks of last quarter was really tough. So, no it did not carry over in that type of format. I think you deserve a fair answer to that. Not deserve. We want to be very transparent on it and I think it's the right way to answer your question in terms of the direction. The second part of the question was -- Paul Silverstein - Cowen & Co.: Mainly around the last two weeks of the collapse and I don't think you characterized it as a collapse. It was more around the last month being slower and normally we pick it up and we didn't.

John Chambers

Chairman

Yes, Paul, if you look at it, just using Q4 as an example, we went into the last month a little bit off the numbers we expected. The forecast came down and the last two weeks of the quarter, they actually came up $300 million over their forecast. That did not happen. This sales team is really good and so, the fact that we missed it that much in the last month and that much during the last two weeks, we clearly factored in assuming that we're going to continue to see challenges in this quarter and the next quarter. So we did build that in. Hopefully, it'll be conservative, but we always believe when you see trends on this broader basis, especially in the emerging, you have to adjust to it and say it'll last for a couple of quarters. What we saw in emerging was very consistent across the board. Every one of our top 10 emerging countries missed their forecast and was off by a fair amount. So it wasn't just that it was down, the last couple of weeks, they kept dropping and dropping. I think, Rob, if I remember right, it was over half of our shortfall, the last couple of weeks versus forecast.

Rob Lloyd

Analyst · Barclays

Yes, it was John, and our top five emerging countries all had negative performance in the quarter between – I think it was a low of 18% to a high of 30% down. So it was -- those are the big ones that really contribute to the numbers and it was consistent across all of those major countries.

John Chambers

Chairman

I would rather there have been a couple of countries, Paul, because then you can say let's go fix them, and there are always a couple of countries that we'll either have issues on, some we create ourselves, some of them are done to us, some of them are way beyond our control. But the consistency of that number is what concerned me. And we usually unfortunately see things couple of quarters ahead of our peers. This time we were little bit surprised. We saw the softening in Q4 and we were very upfront with it to every one about what happened in our top five emerging countries in Q4 where we said they went from 13% growth the quarter before to flat in Q4. The other 15 countries continue to grow in low teens. This time all of them came down and so out of our top 10, it was pretty brutal on that. The fact that a player like IBM saw -- too has probably 60% of their business given in the quarter and saw that this extreme indicates what we think is going to be more of an industry phenomenon, not affecting everyone but currently affecting lot of people.

Melissa Selcher

Management

Thank you, Operator. Next question.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mark Sue with RBC Capital Markets.

Mark Sue - RBC Capital Markets

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets

Thank you. Frank, just a quick one, does the guidance include Sourcefire and -- a question for you, John. If I think about Cisco as a company has a lot of product, a lot of regional breadth and your portfolio approach typically gets you balanced, so if one region or segment underperforms, that’s usually offset by some -- another region or segment that is outperforming. So we’re not getting that historic offset and instead we’re getting this deterioration. So just wondering if you feel that this is maybe a structural change to the switching and routing in data networking market. And it does sound as if it will take several quarters at least to refill the drained backlog, was there some consideration to reset your 5 to 7 long-term top line growth rate and should we also plan for some more OpEx cuts as you protect your earnings?

John Chambers

Chairman

I’m going to have Frank comment about overall view on OpEx. I’m going to address first the structural change. It’s actually reverse. If you watch what we’re doing, the architectures take time to sell, our customers buy into it. Mark, if you had been at the CIO conference and I encourage you to go watch it, now it’s up on the website. In that, we had 95 of the top CIOs around the world in the session. We asked them about every major high-tech player. Now, we delivered into their hands because that would’ve been fair. But we asked them where they were out of the whole room and it shocked me because I knew it was a couple critics. When I asked them how many of you are going to be more committed to Cisco and we’re going to be your key partner, more of a key partner, year from now than you were a year ago. The whole room raised their hand and I walked out to the audience and a couple of people asked and they said, John, we’re a believer and when we asked about other IT players on that, no one more than 10 raise their hand on any of the other top six IT players in terms of that type of commitment. Mark, what that says is we got our vision and strategy right. We mailed it, they know we mailed it and they said now let’s see you execute and then they said by the way, security would be one you ought to go after much more aggressively because we can’t solve on it and it’s our top issue in terms of the direction. So the structural change, the answer is no. We got it right in terms of the products. Our customers…

Frank Calderoni

Management

There were two questions. One, Mark asked if Sourcefire is included in the guidance and the answer is yes. And secondly, as far as looking at, you were asking about op expense and restructuring. We talked last quarter about the portfolio that we were carrying into FY’14 making the adjustments to ensure that we're making the investments and being able to afford the acquisitions that we did like Sourcefire, like Composite Software to make sure that we are emphasizing areas in the portfolio [indiscernible] growth opportunities like security, like mobility, like cloud, like services. And we put plans in place to be able to do that. We feel right now we've got to continue to execute to that. We do have more just continuing on what we announced on the restructuring, we did some this past quarter, with some another quarter, outside the United States which was part of the plan. And then the other important thing is to make sure that as we go through the fiscal year, that we continue to make sure that we follow through on those investments both the acquisitions as well as the internal investments. So that we can see the ability for a long term growth.

John Chambers

Chairman

Mel, I know we ran a little bit over versus our goal being through about 2.30, but thank you for that [ph]. Let me turn it back to you.

Melissa Selcher

Management

Yes, absolutely. Thanks John. Cisco's next quarterly call, which will reflect our FY’14 second quarter results will be on Wednesday, February 12, 2014 at 1.30 p.m. Pacific Time, 4.30 p.m. Eastern Time. Again, I would like to remind you that in light of Regulation FD, Cisco plans to retain its longstanding policy to not comment on its financial guidance during the quarter unless it's done through an explicit public disclosure. Please call the Investor Relations department with any follow-up questions from this call. Thank you for your participation and continued support. This concludes our call.

Operator

Operator

Thank you for participating on today's conference call.