Cisco FQ1 27 Preview: Read-across looks healthy, but can non-AI businesses re-accelerate?

Cisco will report FQ1 27 (October quarter) earnings on Thursday, November 12th after the close. This note summarizes our views heading into the print. For the quarter, we land at $18.1B in revenues and $1.32 in EPS, in-line with guidance and consensus. Read-across generally looks healthy, with especially strong results from Arista, although Fortinet earnings raises concerns. However, we don't see signals strong enough to raise our numbers, and our estimates are generally in line with guidance. The combination of Cisco's Q1 and full year guidance points to seasonality in line with the 5-year historical average, which we see as slightly conservative. We believe that accelerated growth and a greater contribution of revenues from hyperscalar could suggest that the business becomes more back-loaded, in line with Cisco's FY26. We believe investors focus will be on Cisco's progress in AI cloud networking. We would watch carefully for continued program wins for Cisco's AI networking, to see if