For the full year, revenues topped $44 billion, up 4% from 2017. Broken into sectors, Ethernet switches, enterprise routers and service provider routers all experienced double digit growth in Q4 relative to 2017. While spending on Ethernet switches grew 8%.
“When you look at the overall Ethernet switch and router market the most notable feature is actually its stability. Despite a variety of challenges this large market keeps expanding slowly year after year. Moreover, we are not expecting this trend to change any time soon,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.
Cisco came out on top as having the biggest market share in switches and routers, with roughly 51% in Q4, meaning that for ten of the last twelve quarters it has held over the 50% mark. Across the three main markets, Cisco’s Q4 share was 57% for Ethernet switches, 60% for enterprise routers and 37% for service provider routers.
“One other notable feature is Cisco’s ability to keep its market share at or above the 50% mark,” added Dinsdale. “Huawei’s market share keeps on nudging upwards and Arista has posed a big threat in large, high-speed switches, but Cisco is not being shifted from its market leadership position.”
Behind Cisco the ranking of various vendors was different across each of the three markets but in total Cisco is closely followed by Huawei, Nokia, Juniper, Arista Networks and HPE. Outside of these other active vendors include Ericsson, Extreme, H3C and ZTE.
Ethernet switching remains the largest of the three segments accounting for 59% of the total Q4 market, it has also seen the highest growth rate. Revenues for enterprise routers and service provider routers saw upward growth in Q4, helping to even out the declines it saw in the first three quarters.
Regionally, North America accounted for almost 40% of global revenues, followed by Asia-Pacific, EMEA, and Latin America. In terms of growth, Asia-Pacific has seen the fastest increase but in Q4 both EMEA and North America had a marginally higher growth rate.
