Cisco, the networking equipment maker, is a good economic bell-weather. Some telling comments from the Q3 call (h/t The Transcript).
“So, you heard Chairman Powell yesterday talking about his concern over business investment. And I think that’s the issue that we’re facing. The consumer in the U.S., as you see from Walmart and from others, has remained very strong.“
“What we see, when we see our customers pause, there are a few things that are just – that are usually signatures of that. First of all, our close rate on our funnel or our pipeline goes down, which we saw. We see deals getting pushed down, and we see some deals that start out bigger and then get smaller. And we saw all of those things occur. And it’s just a classic signal that we’ve seen historically. I have been doing this a long time. And I mean, it looks exactly like what we’ve seen in the past. Now the thing that I would point out is, some of these large customers that, you know, when they start saying, ‘I need one more signature. Let’s add another step into the procurement process,’ they’re just expressing caution that they’re concerned about what’s going on in the macroenvironment.“ CEO Cisco
