交换机要涨价，地主家也没有余粮啊！

Cisco和Arista本月相继发布最新季度财报，从中我们可以略窥大厂如何应对蔓延全球的芯片缺货潮。

思科

上周思科的财报让分析师感到吃惊，老大哥显示出在应对关键行业需求和挑战方面的意外优势。

在2021财年第三季度报告中，思科季度收入达到128亿美元，同比增长7%，也是近几个季度以来的首次增长。按照 non-GAAP计算，总体毛利率为66%，同比持平。

思科预计，良好的营收将会持续，下一季度的销售额将增长6%至8%。思科对下一季度的毛利率进行了下调，预计在64%到65%之间。

在财报大会上，供应链短缺是重头戏。Chuck Robbins的应对措施包括：

• 携大厂优势加大采购

On the supply chain front, we continue to manage through the constraints seeing industrywide and continue to incur additional costs. We are partnering with our key suppliers, leveraging our volume purchasing and extending supply commitments as we address the supply chain challenges, which we expect will continue.

• 牺牲毛利确保产品出货

It is driven by supply chain, and it comes in a couple of flavors. Having done the work that we've done to protect shipment to our customers, there are unit price increases, unit cost increases on certain components that's built into it. There's also increased expedite fees, again, to ensure that we get the components in and we can get the product back out the door and a slight increase in freight. So it really is all tied to supply chain.

• 提高产品价格

Number one, what we do know is that if we come to the conclusion that any of these cost increases or these -- this inflation, as you mentioned it, are going to be more sustained then we will look at strategic price increases where we have to. And that work is already under way.

就在思科发布财报的当天，Gartner报告评选思科供应链团队为全球No.1，这支排名第一的团队认为供应链问题至少要到2021年末才可能结束。

Arista

思科发财报股价必然下跌，Arista发财报股价必然飞起。 一夜暴涨！Arista做对了什么？

面对长达52周的原材料交期，Arista的库存自Q320开始大幅增加。

• 同在泥潭但自我感觉良好

I guess if we were the only vendor with supply constraint issues, we would be in more trouble quickly because they'd have alternatives. But because this is an industrywide shortage, I think we're all in deep trouble, including our customers who are trying to do the planning. So I would tell you we're on an equal footing, and we're all in bad shape. On the supply constraints side, but not every one of us is in good shape on the demand side. So we feel good about that..

• 备货备货备货

Yeah. So I think if you look at the inventory balance kind of let's say start at the beginning of the year and look at it kind of the beginning of last year, all the way through Q1 of this year I mean it has been growing each quarter. And if you look at the mix of that, as you'd expect, the growth has been more in the components and the raw materials side. And then we've been using the finished goods pretty much as fast as we can, right? The other place that you'll see when we file the Q, you'll see purchase commitments are up to like $750 million at the end of Q1 which is as high as it's been significantly higher than what it's been historically.

• 客户永远正确但未雨绸缪

To put this in perspective, we now have to plan for many components with 52-week lead times. COVID has resulted in substrate and wafer shortages and reduced assembly capacity. Our contract manufacturers have experienced significant volatility due to country-specific COVID orders. Naturally, we're working more closely with our strategic suppliers to improve planning and delivery. Customer demand and visibility, though, has improved in the past few months. We are working with our customers to understand the timing of their deployment needs. We do not believe at this time that our customers are pre-ordering. However, we do think they're exercising prudent planning for second half of 2021 and even into 2022.