Cisco's $80.06 peak: 25-year wait for buyers

Cisco sold the routers and switches that carried dot-com traffic, and its stock vaulted roughly 4,000% from the end of 1994 to March 2000. By the peak, investors were paying in advance for decades of perfect growth, with a price-to-earnings ratio above 200 and an enterprise value-to-sales ratio of 31.

When the Nasdaq came apart, Cisco fell 87.11% from the March 27, 2000 close to the Oct. 11, 2002 close, and Bloomberg reported it lost approximately 90% of its market value. The company kept compounding the whole time: the Financial Times wrote that revenues nearly quintupled since 1999, profits quadrupled, and earnings per share grew eightfold. The price paid in March 2000 had already counted most of that success before it happened.

Today Cisco supplies AI infrastructure itself, with fiscal 2026 revenue of $63.3 billion and $9.3 billion in AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers. The Financial Times drew obvious comparisons to Nvidia, today's dominant picks-and-shovels supplier, which has a market value near $4.556 trillion and trades at roughly 37 times earnings — far below Cisco's peak multiple, though its shares have fallen 21.14% over the past month.