{"id":2833,"date":"2026-02-03T18:17:39","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T18:17:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/cisco-has-finally-surpassed-its-dotcom-bubble-high-is-the-reinvented-stock-a-buy-from-here\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T18:17:39","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T18:17:39","slug":"cisco-has-finally-surpassed-its-dotcom-bubble-high-is-the-reinvented-stock-a-buy-from-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/cisco-has-finally-surpassed-its-dotcom-bubble-high-is-the-reinvented-stock-a-buy-from-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Cisco has finally surpassed its dotcom bubble high. Is the reinvented stock a buy from here?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div>\n<div data-test=\"articleBody-2\" data-analytics=\"RegularArticle-articleBody-5-2\">\n<p><span hidden=\"\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"ArticleBody-extraData\"><span hidden=\"\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"ArticleBody-extraData\"><span hidden=\"\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"xyz-data\">If you bought Cisco Systems on March 27, 2000, you&#8217;re finally whole. After nearly 26 years in the wilderness, shares of Cisco have climbed above their dotcom bubble intraday peak, closing a long chapter for what was once the era&#8217;s ultimate poster child for internet excess. The stock eclipsed the record close it reached last year. The recovery has been a long one. After peaking in March 2000, Cisco&#8217;s shares tanked nearly 90% as the dot-com bubble burst, eventually closing at a split-adjusted $8.60 on Oct. 8, 2002. Today&#8217;s Cisco looks little like the hardware-centric growth engine that briefly became the world&#8217;s most valuable company at the height of the internet mania. Cisco is now a cash-generative company, increasingly oriented toward software and services and tying itself closely to the artificially intelligence boom. While networking hardware remains its foundation, the company now sells a growing suite of software and services spanning cybersecurity, observability and cloud management. That shift was reinforced by its roughly $28 billion acquisition of Splunk, which Cisco has positioned as a cornerstone of its push into data monitoring and security analytics. Cisco has also been working to embed itself deeper into AI data-center architectures. It recently introduced a new Ethernet switch built on silicon from Nvidia , a move aimed at making its networking gear more integral to large-scale AI systems. In November, Cisco said AI-infrastructure orders from hyperscaler customers reached $1.3 billion, &#8221; reflecting a significant acceleration in growth.&#8221; Expensive? Still, some investors are wary of how much optimism is already priced into the stock. &#8220;I give the company credit for reasserting itself in the AI era, but I think the stock is expensive,&#8221; said Paul Meeks, a veteran technology investor and head of tech research at Freedom Capital Markets. At roughly 20 times this year&#8217;s earnings and 18 times next year&#8217;s, Meeks said the stock already prices in more growth than Cisco is expected to deliver, with earnings projected to rise about just 8% annually, below the S &amp; P 500&#8217;s expected pace. Investors stepping in now are effectively betting on Cisco crushing Wall Street estimates in its next two quarterly reports, starting Feb. 11, he said. To be sure, Cisco&#8217;s multiple remains a fraction of the roughly 126 times forward earnings investors were willing to pay when Cisco last hit an all-time high in the first quarter of 2000, according to data compiled by FactSet. &#8216;Defensive tech&#8217; Analysts at UBS recently named Cisco an &#8220;out-of-consensus top pick,&#8221; arguing the market still treats the company as an &#8220;AI loser&#8221; with only mid-single-digit revenue growth. UBS&#8217;s supply-chain checks point to more than $4 billion in AI-related orders in fiscal 2026, up from about $2 billion in fiscal 2025. That demand could lead to earnings beats and upward revisions to Cisco&#8217;s fiscal-2026 guidance, with revenue growth approaching the high single digits and double-digit EPS growth, UBS said. Evercore ISI upgraded Cisco to outperform last week and lifted its price target to $100 from $80, saying a resurgence in core networking alongside accelerating AI demand should allow the company to sustain high-single-digit revenue growth and low-teens EPS growth over multiple years. The $100 price target represents a 22% upside from the current level around $82. The Wall Street firm called Cisco an attractive &#8220;defensive tech,&#8221; with the potential for EPS to exceed $5 and the valuation to migrate toward a 20x multiple. \u2014 With assistance from CNBC&#8217;s Nick Wells.<\/span><\/span><\/span><span class=\"HighlightShare-hidden\" style=\"top:0;left:0\"\/><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you bought Cisco Systems on March 27, 2000, you&#8217;re finally whole. After nearly 26 years in the wilderness, shares of Cisco have climbed above their dotcom bubble intraday peak, closing a long chapter for what was once the era&#8217;s ultimate poster child for internet excess. The stock eclipsed the record close it reached last [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2834,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1895,660,2177,2750,1426,972,2751,563,2749],"class_list":["post-2833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-loan","tag-bubble","tag-buy","tag-cisco","tag-dotcom","tag-finally","tag-high","tag-reinvented","tag-stock","tag-surpassed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finzexpert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}