Cisco Systems Inc. increased its already dominant share of the worldwide router market in the first calendar quarter of this year, as the market shrank from the previous quarter and from a year earlier, market research company Dell'Oro Group Inc. reported Thursday.
Worldwide revenue from sales of routers fell to US$1.62 billion in the first quarter, down slightly from $1.67 billion in the fourth quarter of 2001 but off about 21 percent from a year earlier, according to Karolin Di Cristina, senior manager of marketing and sales at Dell'Oro, in Redwood City, California. Router revenue in the first quarter of 2001 reached $2.05 billion. Dell'Oro's research results are closely watched in the network equipment industry as barometers of the health of market sectors and of vendors' competitiveness.
Cisco bolstered its market share in the quarter, moving up to 85.5 percent of router revenue from 84.4 percent in the previous quarter. The leading vendor showed an even bigger gain from a year earlier, when it captured about 78 percent of the market.
Cisco's closest competitor, Juniper Networks Inc., saw its market share in the first quarter dip to 6.4 percent from about 8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2001.