Cisco Systems, the world’s largest network equipment manufacturer, saw its revenues fall 18% year-on-year to $8.5 billion in its most recent financial quarter.

That decline was in line with the company’s prior forecasts. While Cisco’s quarterly profit fell even more precipitously – down 46.3% to $1.1 billion – it managed to beat analyst expectations.

When Cisco reported its previous quarter in May 2009, CEO John Chambers exuded a confidence for the future that was shared by few of his peers. This time around, his optimism was a little more muted, but Chambers nevertheless put a positive spin on the fact that the value of orders taken during the quarter rose sequentially compared with the preceding quarter.

“While it is too early to say that this is a definite trend, and therefore the much anticipated recovery,” he said in a conference call with investment analysts, “the sequential order numbers were very solid and more along the line of our normal seasonal quarterly results for the first time in the last four quarters.”

Chambers also said that Cisco has now completed a round of ‘restructuring’ (i.e. redundancies) that saw the company shed between 1,500 and 2,000 employees (Cisco employs over 60,000 people).