Cisco (CSCO)

(Market Call Minute.) A slow growth business and not doing well on their main business of routers and switches.

(A Top Pick Aug 7/13. Down 3.59%.) Recently cut 6,000 jobs and, unfortunately, this is the way this company is going to grow. His model price is $37.33, a 52% premium. Yielding 3.1%. If this could go in any way, and it hasn’t done so for years, there could be tremendous upside.

Not bad at this price. Trading at 12X earnings. Great cash flow. You are looking at something like 5% growth. Has a cheap multiple because people were worried about new technologies coming in and replacing the bulk of their historic markets and switching to routing.

(A Top Pick Sept 6/13. Up 10.48%.) Still likes this very much. Trades at a below market multiple. They still are building big, big parts of the backbone for the Internet. The Internet is going to continue to grow. There is some discussion out there as to whether this company should be broken up into a growth company and a sort of, grow slow company. Still thinks it has good growth potential in front of it. 3% plus dividend.

(Market Call Minute.) Thinks they are reinventing themselves in the router market to some degree. On the hardware side they are still one of the great long term stories. They generate cash and have good profit margins.

Topped out in 2000 at about 18X its Book Value and then has spent 10 years in the wilderness. Gradually all that equipment that was installed back then is getting technologically old and is needing to be replaced. In the meantime we have Cloud computing coming on strong, and this company is superb in the hardware area there. Yield of 2.96%.

(A Top Pick Aug 21/13. Up 8.99%.) Balance sheet is in fantastic shape. His view here is infrastructure. Whether you are on a PC on the Internet or mobile, the backend infrastructure of the Internet needs to be built out. This is a company that builds the switches and the routers.

A 54% upside to get to his model price of $38.54. It just needs a catalyst to get it moving.

They have so much cash that if you take it out they are trading sub-10 times earnings. It is quite a discount. They last beat incredibly low expectations. Analysts talked positively and recently you saw a bit of a move.

(Market Call Minute.) Likes this and is actively looking at it. Looks really, really cheap, and he is getting closer to perhaps making it a Buy.

(Market Call Minute.) This is old tech, and we are seeing some spending being done by corporations. Thinks you will do okay here.

(A Top Pick May 31/13. Up 5.53%.) Still likes this. His model price is $37, a 49% increase.

Chart shows a downtrend from last August to December, followed by a bit of base building and then it broke out to the upside this month. Good volume.

This is a value manager’s dream because Wall Street hates this company. All analysts have downgraded it. When he looks at it, he sees a company with about 30% of the market cap in net cash. Earnings will have flattened this year at around $1.95-$2 level. This company remains #1 in the world in all of their businesses. Have tremendous scale. Great management team. Earnings are poised to rebound in 2015, partly due to just general tech spending increases especially in their area. Yield of 3.25%.

Just doesn’t see major growth for a company like this. Margins are being attacked from a variety of different fronts. There is a lot of disruptive technology coming out that will affect them. Good company, but not a growth company.