Two days before officially taking office area, Chuck Robbins sold TV-Cisco Technicolor business based in Paris, for $ 600 million.In doing, he has held the biggest mistakes and more expensive than the outgoing CEO John Chambers.
Cisco bought the company in 2005 with the acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta for $ 6.9 billion, its largest acquisition ever. (PR Cisco said that the final cost of the deal was $ 5.3 billion, net of cash of Scientific-Atlanta.)
The plan was to put Cisco in the epicenter of what Chambers saw as the next big thing, the merger of the Internet and television, an interactive world where you want to discuss on the TV screen with your friends while watching the game, and Advertisers can send personalized ads.
Scientific-Atlanta has been a leader in the set-top box TV, the device that connects to the TV via cable or satellite. The grand plan was then marry that other consumer products important from Cisco, Linksys wireless router. The new "connected device" combined voice, video and data.
As part of its long reboot year Cisco saved consumer wireless business in 2013, selling Belkin Linksys. Coupled with killing the Flip video camera business in 2011, which ended Chambers aspirations of becoming a consumer society technology once and for all.
Meanwhile, service provider video business unit of Cisco, that these decoders have an important role, was Achilles for the company for a long time.
For example, revenues declined quarter on 5% and total orders were down 20%, Chambers told analysts on Wall Street. The service provider quarter, the previous video is decreased by 19%, Chambers said. And the neighborhood before video provider decreased by 12%, with the set-top box business, in particular, a decline of about 20%, he said.
Despite these data, the new Cisco M and a boy in Robbins, Hilton Romanski, tried to make a happy face on the situation.In a blog post announcing the sale, he said that these "connected devices are shipped $ 27 billion of total sales" for the company in 10 years of Cisco was slogging in this business.
He also said that "the company will end devices connected to Cisco 2015 sales of approximately $ 1.8 billion." Cisco's fiscal year ends in July.
This connected world imagined Chambers is coming, but it seems that will be owned by Microsoft Xbox or Apple TV. And the side of service providers, Cisco was losing sales to companies like Arris Group and Home Systems.
So Robbins, still in office CEO nodded and soon-to-be executive chairman Chambers, tore the bandage off and sold for $ 600 million.In a blog post explaining the change, incoming CEO Robbins said: "We will continue to make decisions to prioritize our portfolio and investments to accelerate our business."
