Cisco to continue investment in India; seeks clarity on tariff from White House: Chuck Robbins
AI infrastructure
and networking gear provider
Cisco
Systems said that it would continue to invest in India, following the ongoing geopolitical situation, and is in active discussions with Washington around tariff uncertainty.
'We have obviously been continuing our investments here (India), and have been here for 30 years,' Cisco Systems Chairman and CEO
Chuck Robbins
said, adding that the country presents "one of the biggest opportunities" in the world for the US multinational.
'If you look out over the next five to ten years, I am sure, there's no other place on the planet where you would expect the growth that we should see here.'
Cisco said that the current state of affairs would have no impact on the company's spending initiatives in India, and it is currently engaged in conversation with the US President
Donald Trump
administration over tariff stalemate.
'We have been in deep communication with the White House about the uncertainty, and we just need to get to clarity so we can respond. I think from an overall investment perspective, I don't think the current state is having a meaningful impact on overall investments for companies,' Robbins added.
The top executive, however, said that the company would strategise its supply chain once the tariff situation becomes clear.
'I think most companies are probably in the same mode as we are, which is waiting to understand where this tariff stuff lands before we can adapt our supply chain very much.'
On the backdrop of Trump's administration imposing a new set of reciprocal tariffs on countries, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry officials are likely to initiate another round of discussions with Washington even as India finalises a trade agreement with the US.
The top executive further said that the technology major waded through multiple critical situations in the past, and is mindful of ongoing geopolitics and sovereignty requirements worldwide.
In the fiscal year ending July 27, 2024, Cisco's annual revenue stood at $53.80 billion, and it has raised its sales outlook after posting higher-than-expected profit in the third quarter with an income of $14.15 billion.
It has $615,299 revenue per employee, outpacing rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), Nokia, Huawei and Juniper.
'We started manufacturing here (India). We had a single product then. We have added two more products, and are also doing PCB assemblies there. So, it's moving ahead of schedule relative to our expectations,' the top executive said.
READ MORE | Cisco partners Flex to open manufacturing facility in Chennai, aims to create 1200 jobs
Last year, Cisco kicked off its localised manufacturing operations in line with the government's "
Make in India
" ambition, targeting to produce $1.3 billion worth of products for domestic consumption and exports.
The US multinational also said that it wanted to play a key role in enabling next-generation data centre centres in India.
'Cisco wants to play a big role. We feel really good overall about where we are today in the data center. It's one of our key businesses, especially around data center infrastructure and building out stacks and conditional workloads. Cisco is a strong brand there,' Cisco President & Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said.
The company has lately extended its portfolio to include artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure-as-a-service (AI-IaaS), and is eying to capitalise on massive AI-centric data centre build-outs by hyperscalers, neocloud providers and enterprises.
'We want to play an incredibly important role in helping them make that shift and helping them manage their business-as-usual workloads as well as their AI workloads,' Patel added.
In June this year, a collaboration and infrastructure behemoth unveiled new tools and hardware in a bid to "future-proof" data centers for AI workloads, offering GPU-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
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