Networking giant Cisco’s India profits grew 340 per cent in FY 2016 supported by smart-city deployments and partnership with Reliance Jio.
Cisco’s revenue for the financial year ended March 2016 grew 41 per cent to touch ₹6,696 crore from ₹4,720 crore in the previous year. However, the biggest jump was seen in the company’s profits that were at ₹234 crore in the year 2014-15 and shot up to ₹1,030 crore in fiscal 2016, according to Cisco’s latest filing with the Registrar of Companies.
The high growth in profitability also translated into fat bonuses for the employees. Some of the employees saw their salaries jump four-fold in the financial year. Cisco had 189 employees earning over ₹1 crore in pay packages. The highest earning employee bagged ₹16.17 crore salary.
The aggregate salary of the top ten employees in the country stood at ₹77.45 crore for the year.
The growth was backed by several large deals the company won in the telecom space. For example, Cisco was responsible for building the entire IP network for Reliance Jio across the country. The company was also worked with all other telecom operators to upgrade their networks to IP networks.
Betting big on IndiaIndia is one of the fastest growing markets for Cisco. The company is also betting big in the country by investing about $1.8 billion a year to fund its research here and pay for its 30,000-odd employees that include about 18,000 contract employees working with IT services companies such as TCS and Infosys.
“India is a tremendous source of talented employees across our business functions. It is a country that has a leader who believes in the power of what technology can do for the future. That is a great opportunity for us. And now with manufacturing, we’re going to start manufacturing here but over time we'd love to use it as a hub to deliver products in other countries as well,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins recently told BusinessLine in an interview.
Cisco has also seen a lot of early success in the smart city arena by winning projects in over a dozen cities, including Jaipur, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Lucknow, Nagpur, GIFT city.