By Supantha Mukherjee and Paul Sandle
BARCELONA (Reuters) – Cisco Systems Inc has helped about a quarter of its employees in Ukraine leave the country and is working to support those who had decided to remain following the invasion by Russia, chief executive Chuck Robbins said on Tuesday.
“Several weeks ago we engaged with them and gave them the opportunity for assistance to actually leave Ukraine,” he told Reuters in an interview at Mobile World Congress.
“And probably about a quarter of our employees made that decision.”
The U.S. networking company was working to help its workers still in the country, which made a relatively small but still meaningful contribution. For example helping them access cash, he said.
The West has imposed heavy restrictions on Russia to close off its economy and block it from the global financial system, prompting shipping, energy and tech companies to halt sales, cut ties or dump tens of billions of dollars worth of investments.
Swedish rival Ericsson has stopped supplying Russia while it assesses the impact of sanctions.
Robbins didn’t comment on what Cisco was doing specifically, but said the company would abide by the sanctions that the United States and other countries had put in place.
“We have a team of people that are working around the clock right now on employee issues, on anything associated with the conflict, including understanding the sanctions and what we need to do to actually implement those effectively,” he said.
Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a “special operation”.
Robbins said Cisco was confident about the opportunity in standalone 5G networks, particularly in enterprise services.
“I’m really confident about the strength of the business over the last four or five quarters relative to the demand, which is connected to these (5G) build-outs,” he said.
Cisco was helping build end-to-end architectures for its customers, which included partnering with other players in technologies such as radio, he said.
Cisco has been long rumoured as a possible acquirer of either Nokia or Ericsson to get into radio, but he said there was “no plan to get into radio”.
(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee and Paul Sandle; Writing by Paul Sandle; Editing by Josephine Mason)
