Cisco 2003 Annual Report Download - page 4

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2CISCO SYSTEMS, INC.
TO OUR SHAREHOLDERS
JOHN T. CHAMBERS
PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
During the last fiscal year, Cisco used this period of market
transitions to drive innovation through the introduction of
new technologies, products, and solutions while imple-
menting price and performance improvements in almost
all of our top-selling products. We improved our leadership
ranking by achieving the number-one position in the
majority of the markets we serve, and we sustained our
sound financial position by increasing our profitability
and ending the year with more than $20 billion in cash
and investments.
We also strengthened our commitment to deliver differ-
entiated value to customers and partners through our
unique product and service offerings, while mapping
them to their stated needs and priorities—productivity,
cost savings, return on investment, and standard of living
improvements. We are very proud of the progress we
made in the area of customer satisfaction, achieving a
4.78 rating on a scale of one to five in our annual survey
this year. As always, customer and partner success are
the foundation of the Cisco culture. Throughout this
Annual Report you will read stories from customers and
partners describing how the power of the network has
changed the way they work, live, play, and learn.
Overall, we are very proud of our achievements in fiscal
2003, and in terms of our financial metrics, with the
obvious exception of revenue growth, we continued to
achieve some of the best results in our company’s history
while maintaining a passionate focus on meeting the needs
of our customers, partners, investors, and employees.
FISCAL 2003 PERFORMANCE
For fiscal 2003, we showed consistent improvement in
almost all categories of our operational and financial
results. Fiscal 2003 revenue was $18.9 billion, the same
as in fiscal 2002. Fiscal 2003 net income on a generally
accepted accounting principles (GAAP) basis was $3.6
billion and earnings per share was $0.50, as compared
to fiscal 2002 GAAP net income of $1.9 billion and earnings
per share of $0.25.
In a time period where profits are extremely important,
we are very pleased with our year-over-year increase in
GAAP net income of 89 percent for fiscal 2003. Cisco
generated more than $5.2 billion in cash from operations
during fiscal 2003, as compared to our GAAP net income
of $3.6 billion, which illustrates the continued quality of
our earnings.