Before You Think of Shorting Cisco, Think of HP

In some of my spheres of discussion “HP” jokingly represents an acronym for “Higher Power,” whereas in other crowds of mine that acronym tweaks out as “Higher Price.” The company has been going through some tough times as of late, yet its stock is still doing well. Last week’s earnings from Cisco, though, had a few people comparing the company to Lucent and its tragic stock demise. 

Naturally, trying to determine a time and rationale for shorting a stock is best left to Wall Street rumor-mongers. 

One of the reasons Cisco offered for its poor results was the increasing nationalism in China, supposedly provoked by NSA overreach. In the past, the U.S. has cited security breaches by China, and Israel’s security arm Mossad is thought to have connections to some Israeli companies.

From a moral standpoint, I can be another outraged citizen that wants to think I am protected, even though I regularly click on the Terms of Use on websites without reading the fine print. From a business standpoint, though, I think sovereign nations demanding control of the Internet is a boon. After all, a government looking to put a gateway on the Internet is going to need a lot of routers and a lot of servers, particularly if they want to give the impression that their citizens can surf the Web with impunity and/or anonymity. 

Even if HP and Cisco fail to find a mobile strategy that can make them the darlings of Wall Street, their core business of routers and servers should keep numbers good for quite some time to come. In non US-centric experiences, however, the devil you don’t know may be more appealing. Chinese firms are doing very well in the rest of the world these days, and while the US claims to worry about spying at this time, any mention of that concern only brings contempt for its own practices.

If these concerns continue to grow, we may very well see strategies that rival how such multinationals as Bayer AG dealt with World War II, meaning that companies could split portions of themselves off into localized brands. That seems far-fetched, of course, but history does have a history of repeating itself … and if you believe that, you are being short-sighted.