At Cisco, Speaking Loudly and Carrying a Big Stick

Updated from 4:26 p.m. EST:

Like vintage Larry Bird, Cisco (CSCO Quote - Cramer on CSCO - Stock Picks) has hit so many in a row that it can't help but talk trash.

The networker Monday beat Wall Street's first-quarter earnings and revenue estimates and boosted financial guidance for the rest of the year. But Cisco, never known for humility, used Monday's postearnings conference call as an opportunity to badmouth rivals in the telecom-equipment field and renew its claim to gearmaking supremacy. Unimpressed, Wall Street sent its shares slightly lower in after-hours trading. (See also All Fund Eyes Are on Cisco's Earnings.)

"We have been pleasantly surprised by the strategies" of Cisco's old-world telecommunications-manufacturer competitors, CEO John Chambers told analysts on the call. Referring obliquely to Lucent (LU Quote - Cramer on LU - Stock Picks) and its recent woes, Chambers said of Cisco's telecom gear rivals, "Their lines of business and limited product strategies, combined with some of the major financial disappointments, are leaving them very vulnerable to enterprise and service provider customers.

"If we continue to execute effectively on our strategy, these large competitors have clearly given Cisco the opportunity to repeat our breakaway in the enterprise market in the service-provider market," Chambers said.

Taking his boss' lead, Cisco's chief of telecommunication sales, Kevin Kennedy, went on to predict that Cisco will be the world's leading telecom-gear provider within five years, surpassing outfits such as Lucent, Nortel (NT Quote - Cramer on NT - Stock Picks), Alcatel (ALA Quote - Cramer on ALA - Stock Picks), NEC (NIPNY Quote - Cramer on NIPNY - Stock Picks) and Fujitsu.

Cisco said second-quarter sequential revenue growth would rise somewhere between the high single digits to the low double digits percentagewise. With first-quarter revenue coming in at $6.52 billion, just above Wall Street's target, Cisco is targeting second-quarter revenue in a range as high as $7.38 billion. The current consensus calls for second-quarter revenue of $7.06 billion.

Cisco told analysts on its postearnings conference call that it expects fiscal 2001 revenue to rise 50% to 60% from fiscal 2000's $18.87 billion. The First Call/Thomson Financial analyst survey calls for 2001 revenue growth of 50%, to $28.34 billion.

Meanwhile, Cisco guided earnings estimates for fiscal 2001 higher by 2 cents to 5 cents. The previous analyst consensus was 75 cents.