Opinions
Lorne Zeiler
Cisco
CSCO-Q
COMMENT
Apr 20, 2017
Stock price when the opinion was issued
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Splunk acquisition in cybersecurity segment has secured a lot more recurring revenue for the company. Steady eddy. Keeps making good acquisitions and integrating. Good management, balance sheet, and dividend yield.
Not cheap anymore, so he sold on the valuation call. Nothing wrong with the business per se if you have a very long horizon.
King of the networking stocks. Hit their stride, mainly because of NVDA selling out of Blackwell and H20 and so on. Started beating on top and bottom, raising guidance (even during the tariff time). Pretty fully priced, with a $70.75 price target within 12 months.
Another play in Edge AI. Kinetic for Cities is Edge AI that you can put on sensors around a city for water, traffic, air, everything. Poster child for this application is Singapore. King of routers and switches, but Edge AI will be very intriguing for them. His 12-month price target is $75.50. Yield is 2.44%.
(Analysts’ price target is $71.54)Historically, is a good allocator of capital (dividends, buybacks), but lacks growth. They partly returned to growth on the $30 billion purchase of Splunk to drive their cybersecurity business. In turn, this drives earnings and margins. Are a free cash flow machine.
If you include the cash, this is quite a cheap stock. It is basically trading at about 16-17X earnings and the market cap is about $165 billion. People forget that there is $60 billion plus in cash sitting on the balance sheet. Even if you net out the debt of about $30 billion, you are taking the valuation down to about 13 or 14 times. Not including the debt, it is about 10 times. The growth profile is going to be low. The dividend is about 3% and there is a strong potential that you could see some special dividends, or an acquisition to drive growth. An attractive investment.