Cisco announces record sales and 4,000 redundancies on the same day

Chief Executive Chuck Robbins announced that the company's latest round of layoffs began today, after a record quarterly revenue.

In a post yesterday, Robbins quickly boasted that Cisco's third quarter of 2026 had an increase of 12 per cent over the same period, to $15.8 billion. He told his staff that he and other members of Cisco's executive leadership “are so proud of the growth that Cisco brings”.

This sense of pride, however, clearly does not protect successful employees from unemployment.

He wrote, "We are making changes today, which will result in less than 4,000 of our total number of employees in the fourth quarter, or less than 5 per cent of our total." “Most of the notices will commence on 14 May and be published on a global basis in accordance with applicable local laws and regulations.”

Like many recent layoffs in technology companies, Cisco ' s layoffs are due to the development of artificial intelligence. Robbins' blog notes that companies “to win in the age of artificial intelligence” need to demonstrate “a focus, a sense of urgency and discipline, and a continuous shift in investment to areas where demand and long-term value creation are strongest”.

Chief Executive Officer Cisco said: “This means making difficult decisions — where we invest, how we organize and how our cost structure reflects the opportunities before us.”

According to Robbins, Cisco plans to convert staff reductions into investments in “silica, optical, security and the use of artificial intelligence by employees throughout the company”.

Cisco, in its report on returns issued on Wednesday, indicated that it had so far sold $5.3 billion worth of artificial intelligence infrastructure to mega-enterprises during the current fiscal year. It is currently projected that the current fiscal year order will increase from $5 billion to $9 billion and the collection will increase from $3 billion to $4 billion.