Cisco Shares Finally Top Dot-Com Record After More Than 25 Years

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Cisco Shares Finally Top Dot-Com Record After More Than 25 Years.

stock :: 2025-12-11 :: source - bloomberg

By Ryan Vlastelica and Carmen Reinicke

(Bloomberg) -- Cisco Systems Inc., a bellwether stock of the dot-com technological revolution, has returned to a record after a quarter century, thanks in part to the artificial intelligence spending boom.

Shares rose 0.9% to $80.25 on Wednesday, taking out a peak that stood for more than 25 years. The stock’s March 27, 2000 high is viewed by many as the height of the dot-com bubble and marked the high-water mark for the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index until late 2015.

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“It’s a quaint reminder that a recovery from a bubble can take a long time. And a ready analogy would be the Japanese equity market that also took decades to recover from its bubble in the late 1980s,” said Dec Mullarkey, managing director at SLC Management. “Once you lose investor confidence through a painful selloff it can take years for investors to re-embrace.”

Wednesday’s gains were part of a broader rally by US stocks after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates for a third consecutive meeting. The S&P 500 Index rose 0.7%, while the Nasdaq 100 Index gained 0.4%.

Cisco’s rise to a fresh record comes at a time when investors and market prognosticators are drawing comparisons between today’s Magnificent Seven led rally and the last time it hit an all-time high. Back then, Cisco was one of the so-called “Four Horsemen of the Nasdaq” that attracted massive investor interest in the late 1990s, along with Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., and Dell.

In the two years leading up to its 2000 record, Cisco shares soared nearly 600%, pushing the firm’s value to more than $500 billion. When the dot-com bubble ultimately burst, Cisco lost about 90% of its value, bottoming out at about $60 billion in late 2002.

Since then, Cisco shares have risen more than 800%. Its market capitalization, however, remains more than 40% below its peak dot-com level.

The stock’s resurgence is “a sign of confidence,” Mullarkey said. “Although they became more of a ‘utility’ company rather than an innovator. Presumably that’s what their investors wanted to see.”

The latest leg of Cisco’s rally was driven by a strong revenue forecast last month, adding to optimism that AI spending could accelerate growth for the firm in the coming years. The San Jose, California-based company has been working to better position itself to benefit from the billions of dollars being spent on AI infrastructure by corporations around the world.

The company said it expects sales for its current fiscal year, which ends in July, to be as high as $61 billion, above Wall Street’s expectations and about $1 billion more than it had previously forecast.

Demand for AI infrastructure products was cited by UBS analyst David Vogt when he upgraded shares of Cisco to buy ahead of its fiscal first quarter earnings last month. Still, plenty on Wall Street remain skeptical that the broader AI spending boom can continue at such a furious pace and even if the accounting practices associated with it are being properly used.