Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins Talks About Trade and the Wonders of 5G
The shift to the cloud, expected to hurt the company, has turned out to be a huge boost.
Robbins was hired in 1997 and has been CEO since July 2015. He previously worked at Bay Networks and Ascend Communications and graduated from the University of North Carolina with a bachelor’s in mathematics.
Photographer: Jason Alden/BloombergRobbins appeared on Businessweek Talks, where he addressed how the trade war is affecting Cisco Systems Inc. and the competitive challenges facing the $49.3 billion tech equipment maker.
Because we have a globally distributed supply chain, we have the capacity to move things around on a regular basis. Our teams did such an amazing job optimizing our supply chain over the last eight months that they actually put us in a position where the latest 25% [tariff] really had a pretty nominal effect from a pricing perspective. My bigger worry is not the impact it will have on us at Cisco, but more on the macro and what it does to customers’ overall sentiment.