John Chambers Almost Taking Cisco Systems Private (CSCO)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) is seeing a pop in pre-market trading.  The network and data communications equipment giant announced that at its board of directors meeting, the board authorized up to $10 Billion more to be used for additional share repurchases of its common stock with an indefinite time period.  This will have increased the total authorized amount under the program to $62 Billion if this is fully completed.

This is only one part of the reasoning 24/7 Wall St. used in its assessment that Cisco stock shouldn’t have sold off to under $30.00 for a longer-term when you compare the stock at $30.00 in early 2004.
You can also look over the conference call commentary and see the John Chambers Q&A to see additional information.

Cisco shares are up 1.8% in pre-market trading at $29.85.  Cisco’s market cap is $178.5 Billion, so if it will have retired $62 Billion when it’s all said and done it’s almost like taking themselves partly private.  Cisco needs to remain a public company because markets change through time.  But how many companies have spent that much buying back stock that have seen the steady success that this company has?

24/7 Wall St. has not issued its price targets for 2008 for Cisco and other key technology stocks.  We’ll be issuing a summary of these  in the coming weeks to our open distribution list before a more detailed posting of each target individually on the site here.  Early in 2007 we issued a $34 price target for Cisco and that was hit right before the last earnings call.   

Jon C. Ogg
November 16, 2007

Jon Ogg produces the 24/7 Wall St. Special Situation Investing Newsletter; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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