COVID-19 took a $1 billion bite out of the ethernet switch and router market in the first-quarter of 2020, pushing vendor revenues to their lowest level since the first-quarter of 2013, according to a new report from the Synergy Research Group (SRG). Despite the financial hit, Cisco continues to dominate the space.

Vendor revenues from ethernet switch and router markets hit $9.1 billion in Q1, dropping 14% relative to the first-quarter of last year.

Taking into account the anticipated seasonality of lower Q1 vendor revenues following a peak during the fourth quarter, the sequential decline of 23% was “unusually sharp,” for a market “usually characterized by relative stability and predictability" that was “clearly a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at SRG.

Had it not been for the health crisis, Dinsdale added, SRG would have expected total vendor revenues to have been $1 billion higher.

“On balance, the Q1 hit was driven more by supply chain issues rather than by soft demand," Dinsdale explained. "We’d expect supply-chain problems to be resolved reasonably quickly, but demand is a different story. On the service provider side, demand remains robust as network traffic continues to grow, but enterprise demand will be a much spottier picture and some sectors will take several months before returning to some form of normality.”

As customers and industry sectors return to some new form of normalcy at different speeds, some of the demand-side problems will take several months to resolve, he added.

Meanwhile, Cisco continued to keep on keeping on, devouring 51% of the market share in ethernet switches (57%), enterprise routers (65%), and service provider routers (53%) during the first-quarter. Over the last sixteen quarters Cisco’s worldwide market share has consistently remained in the 48% to 53% range, according to the report. 

Behind Cisco, the ranking of vendors was different in each of the three markets, but in aggregate Cisco was followed by Huawei, Nokia, Juniper, Arista Networks, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.