Cisco Hits 52-Week High: Can AI Focus Further Drive the Stock?

Cisco Systems CSCO hit a 52-week high of $67.49 on Wednesday. The stock has rallied 14.7% year over year, indicating strong investor confidence in the company’s rising prospects.

Cisco’s rally has been supported by solid earnings results, strong gross and operating margin expansion and an upbeat outlook for the coming quarter. This momentum also reflects the company’s aggressive push into AI, a consistent rollout of innovative products and overall operational strength.

A major catalyst for Cisco’s stock performance is its deepening involvement in AI-focused infrastructure. In its third-quarter fiscal 2025 results, the company announced that AI-related infrastructure orders exceeded $600 million, pushing the year-to-date total beyond $1 billion. These orders are coming from some of the biggest players in cloud computing, including Meta, and reflect a growing demand for AI-optimized networks.

Beyond AI, Cisco is also seeing robust demand across its broader product portfolio. Networking product orders grew double-digits, driven by web-scale infrastructure, enterprise routing, switching and industrial IoT products. The company’s innovation pipeline continues to accelerate, with deeper integration of security into its networking products.

Security has become another key pillar of Cisco’s strategy. The $28 billion acquisition of Splunk is already paying off, highlighted by a landmark deal with a major financial institution like Nvidia and Microsoft. Cisco also launched new products like Secure Access, XDR and Hypershield, which gained traction by adding over 370 new customers in the third quarter of fiscal 2025.

Networking Rivals Step Up Against Cisco

Juniper Networks JNPR and Arista Networks ANET are intensifying competition in enterprise and cloud networking, challenging Cisco’s long-held dominance with AI-driven innovation and infrastructure solutions.

Juniper is unique in its high-performance routing, switching and integrated security, powered by its Junos OS and SDK for automation and extensibility. Juniper's Mist AI and Contrail platforms provide AI-powered, intent-based networking in multi-cloud environments. Competing directly with Cisco, Juniper serves the enterprise, cloud and service provider markets with a strong focus on agile, modular infrastructure and intelligent, scalable network solutions.

Arista leads in AI and cloud networking, supplying high-performance Ethernet switches to hyperscalers like Microsoft and Meta Platforms. Arista’s Linux-based EOS software offers advanced programmability and fault isolation, ideal for AI-intensive data centers. Backed by multi-hundred-gigabit innovations, Broadcom partnership and Ultra Ethernet Consortium involvement, Arista is projected to generate more than $750 million in backend AI networking revenues for 2025.

CSCO’s Price Performance, Valuation & Estimates

Shares of Cisco have gained 14.7% year to date compared with the Zacks Computer – Networking industry’s return of 13.5%.

From a valuation standpoint, CSCO appears overvalued, trading at a forward 12-month price-to-sales ratio of 4.56, higher than the industry’s 4.32X. Cisco carries a Value Score of D.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for CSCO’s fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2026 earnings is pegged at $3.79 and $4 per share, implying year-over-year growth of 1.61% and 5.63%, respectively. Earnings estimates for fiscal 2025 and 2026 have been revised upward by 1.6% and 1.3%, respectively, over the past 60 days.

CSCO currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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