Tyler Crowe

For John, Matt, myself, thanks for listening, and we'll chat again soon.

We're talking earnings and investor questions on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

I'm your host, Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime contributors, Matt Frankel and John Quast.

So today we're getting lots of questions from members, and we thought this would be a really good time to combine some listener questions as well as earnings reports that we've seen coming out in the past couple of days as a little bit of a marriage of good ideas.

And so we're going to talk about Cisco's earnings, we're going to talk about Lumentum's earnings, and also we'll get into, hey, maybe we should talk about non-AI things for a little bit from our investor mailbag.

But as I said, we're going to start with Cisco.

And we got a question a little while ago from one of our listeners, I hope I get the name right, Ahilish Shankar.

And was asking about Cisco and what are our thoughts on it.

And I thought it would be a great time to start the conversation today because Cisco reported earnings and the stock is up 13.8% as we were recording because numbers were pretty good.

Revenue growth was up about 12% for the year earnings was up and obviously guidance was looking pretty good.

John, why don't you run us through the numbers and what you guys saw in this particular earnings that I would say defied expectations of what Cisco has been for a while?

Ahilish asked related to is like, is this a good idea?

And this is one of the things I've been struggling with with Cisco.

And we'll get into it with when we talk about Lumentum in the next section as well, is that these are businesses that have been notoriously cyclical for pretty much all of their life as well.

Publicly traded companies.

I mean, Cisco, like to John's point, was the poster child of, you know, massive build out during the dot com boom of everybody had to have Cisco systems equipment.

And then everyone was like, well, maybe we don't.

Maybe we can use other stuff.

And it was OK.