On this page of StockholderLetter.com we present the latest annual shareholder letter from CISCO SYSTEMS, INC. — ticker symbol CSCO. Reading current and past CSCO letters to shareholders can bring important insights into the investment thesis.

 •  10/28/2025 Letter Continued (Full PDF)
 •  10/17/2023 CSCO Stockholder Letter
 •  10/18/2024 CSCO Stockholder Letter
 •  More "Manufacturing" Category Stockholder Letters
 •  CSCO Benford's Law Stock Score = 98

CSCO Shareholder/Stockholder Letter Transcript:

Providing the
critical infrastructure
for the AI era
2025 Annual Report

About Cisco
Our Strategy
We Securely Connect Everything to Make Anything Possible
Our Purpose
To Power an Inclusive Future for All
We can do good for the world and do good for business when we
combine our technology, our people and our broader networks.
Our Differentiation
Trusted brand, unrivalled go-to-market, and loyal customers
y 37,000+ trusted partners in global partner ecosystem
y 1M+ customers across 150 countries
y 99% of Fortune 500
y >82,000 government organizations
y 40+ years of customer trust
Broad portfolio and platform advantage
y >50% of customers buy both campus networking and data center networking platforms
y Unique ability to fuse security with networking
y Unmatched data and insights
y Agentic led customer experience
Favorable secular trends
y AI, Cybersecurity, Connectivity
Nasdaq: CSCO
Discover more at
thenetwork.cisco.com
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Contents
Letter to stockholders
2
Fiscal 2025 highlights
4
Cisco strategy and priorities
6
Leadership
7
Corporate governance
8
Our Purpose
12
Introduction to
summary report
This summary provides an overview
of Cisco. It does not contain all the
information you should consider. Please
refer to our latest Annual Report on
Form 10-K, our Proxy Statement for our
2025 Annual Meeting of Stockholders,
and our Purpose Report which are all
available on our website at
www.cisco.com
Forward-Looking Statements
This Summary Report and our Annual Report on Form 10-K (   Annual Report   ) contain projections and other
forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of Cisco, including future
operating results. These projections, goals and statements are only predictions. Actual events or results may differ
materially from those in the projections, goals or other forward-looking statements. See Cisco   s filing with the
Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report for a discussion of important risk
factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those in the projections, goals or other
forward-looking statements.
Cisco Annual Report 2025
1

Letter to stockholders
To our stockholders,
Fiscal 2025 represented a defining moment in Cisco   s
history. Against the backdrop of a complex environment,
we delivered strong financial results and completed the
successful integration of Splunk, while delivering worldclass innovation at unprecedented speed. Our teams
executed with precision, further deepening relationships
with customers and partners, while positioning Cisco at the
heart of the most significant technology transition of our
lifetime     Artificial Intelligence.
Having refreshed almost our entire product portfolio
with industry-leading networking systems powered
by Cisco Silicon One, AI-native security solutions, and
software operating systems, I am incredibly proud of our
accomplishments and more confident than ever in our ability
to provide the critical infrastructure needed for the AI era.
Strong business execution and
financial discipline
Our financial performance this past year reflects the strength
of our portfolio and the value we continue to deliver for
customers. We ended the year with revenue up 5% year
over year at $56.7 billion and solid growth in annualized
recurring revenue and remaining performance obligations
which provide the foundation for our future performance.
We also delivered strong profitability for the full fiscal
year, fueled by Splunk and the strength of our recurring
revenue streams which now make up more than half of our
total revenue.
Once again, we were able to return significant value to our
stockholders through dividends and share repurchases in
fiscal 2025, returning a total of $12.4 billion, or 94% of our
free cash flow.
Providing the critical infrastructure
for the AI era
AI is a tailwind for our business today as well as a multi-year
opportunity ahead. As a trusted partner for our customers
across every industry and geography, Cisco is ideally
positioned to lead this generational transition and provide
the valuable outcomes our customers need to succeed.
We received more than $2 billion of AI infrastructure orders
from webscale customers in fiscal 2025, more than double
our initial target. Our momentum is a testament to the agility
of our teams and demonstrates the undeniable capability
and relevance of our technology, particularly our Silicon One
2
Cisco Annual Report 2025
architecture, for multiple back-end use cases with the most
technologically advanced customers.
While Enterprises are still in early stages of AI deployment,
our expanding collaboration with NVIDIA enables us to
deliver simple, scalable and secure solutions needed
for their environments. Together, we are committed to
combining Cisco   s and NVIDIA   s respective strengths in
networking and AI computing to provide customers with a
holistic solution to implement and scale AI technologies.
In fiscal 2025, we forged new alliances with global partners,
including HUMAIN in Saudi Arabia, G42 in the UAE, and the
AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), further positioning Cisco
as a preferred technology partner for the development of
sovereign AI clouds worldwide. We believe Cisco will be a
core system provider for these significant AI training and
inference cluster buildouts and integral to their development
and eventual hyper-scaling.
Laser-focused on security
While AI remains one of the largest opportunities, it cannot
be at the expense of security. As we move into the next
phase of AI, with agents autonomously conducting tasks
alongside humans, the capacity requirements of the
network will be compounded to accommodate increased
network traffic, bringing with it new vulnerabilities and more
sophisticated threats.
By combining Splunk   s powerful data analytics and Security
Information and Event Management (SIEM) capabilities with
Cisco   s extensive networking and security portfolio, we
are creating a unified platform for enhanced visibility and

   The next phase of AI, driven
by autonomous agents in
constant interaction, will create
unprecedented demand for faster,
more intelligent, and more secure
networks. With the powerful and
unique combination of silicon,
networking and security, Cisco
is ideally positioned and fully
equipped to meet this demand.   
security across an organization   s entire digital footprint. To
date, we have completed over a dozen data integrations,
helping organizations move beyond threat detection to
prediction and prevention and enabling them to leverage AI
for innovation while protecting critical assets.
Our new and refreshed security products, including Secure
Access, XDR, Hypershield, Firewalls, and AI Defense,
continued to ramp in fiscal 2025, ending the year with over
2,000 customers collectively. The vast majority of our new
Hypershield Enterprise customers are bundling with our new
N9300 Smart Switch, embedding security directly into the
fabric of the network     a necessary capability for Agentic AI,
and one that only Cisco can deliver.
Accelerated pace of innovation
We also delivered our largest innovation payload to date
in fiscal 2025, announcing more than 20 new offerings
to help customers build AI-ready data centers and
future-proof their workplaces with a foundational layer of
digital resilience.
We introduced new Smart Switches for the data center and
campus powered by Silicon One, which deliver enhanced
performance, quantum-secure networking and simplified
cloud-native and AI-driven operations. The launch of these
switches, along with highly secure routers, wireless access
points, and IoT devices, marks the beginning of a major,
multi-year product refresh opportunity for Cisco.
To help organizations confidently develop, deploy and
secure AI applications, we introduced Cisco AI Defense,
a powerful tool to identify AI assets being used across
customer environments and detect misconfigurations and
vulnerabilities, while protecting applications against evolving
threats. We also launched Cisco AI Canvas, a revolutionary,
generative user interface for real-time collaboration between
network and security operations teams. Powered by Cisco   s
advanced Deep Network Model, AI Canvas unifies real-time
telemetry across various platforms to simplify IT operations
and accelerate troubleshooting.
All our new offerings, spanning core networking products,
advanced security solutions, and unified management tools,
are designed with a foundation of AI, further strengthening
Cisco   s platform advantage, where every added technology
compounds the value of a customer   s existing investment.
I   m also proud of how our teams continue to lead by
example, with nearly every organization using AI to enhance
productivity and collaboration internally and with customers.
For example, Cisco Customer Experience has deployed AI
agents for in-product support, adoption and renewals, with
over two-thirds of support cases now addressed using AI.
Additionally, we saw increased usage of our proprietary AI
application, Circuit. Launched this past year, Circuit is now
adopted by over 85,000 employees with nearly 100,000
interactions per workday.
Confidence in our future
Overall, our strong performance in fiscal 2025 has
established a solid foundation for durable, profitable growth
as we turn our focus to delivering Cisco   s strongest year yet
in fiscal 2026. The next phase of AI, driven by autonomous
agents in constant interaction, will create unprecedented
demand for faster, more intelligent, and more secure
networks. With the powerful and unique combination of
silicon, networking and security, Cisco is ideally positioned
and fully equipped to meet this demand.
I   d like to close by extending my deepest gratitude to our
teams. Their dedication to our business and unwavering
commitment to our Purpose   to Power an Inclusive Future
for All   paired with urgency in execution, are what fuel all
our achievements. Additionally, the unparalleled strength
and reach of our partner ecosystem amplifies our success
and allows us to continue delivering greater value for our
customers in the AI era.
Finally, to you, our stockholders, thank you for your
continued support and belief in Cisco. We are excited about
the journey ahead and are committed to building on our
achievements in fiscal year 2026 to create even greater
long-term value for you.
Chuck Robbins
Chair and Chief Executive Officer
Cisco Annual Report 2025
3



 10/28/2025 Letter Continued (Full PDF)