Fernando Gil de Bernabe is the Chief Operating Officer for Cisco in the Asia Pacific, Japan, and China region. His scope encompasses both central and market teams responsible for identifying business growth, defining strategy and investments, innovating go-to-market and running sales operations to best service Cisco customers. He is also responsible for non-linear growth opportunities that cut across the region. He is based in Singapore and reports to the President of APJC.


Fernando has over 25 years of business experience with a unique, international blend of entrepreneurship, management consulting, high-touch sales, and business strategy and operations. He has lived and worked in the USA, Europe, and Asia. During his career, he has consistently defined the charter, built to scale, and led geographically dispersed teams, attracting, developing, and rotating top talent within each of his roles.


He joined Cisco in 1999 in London to form and lead the consultative selling team serving telecom customers in EMEAR. In 2008 he was selected to join the China 3.0 corporate development team, and in 2014 became lead of strategy and planning in APJC. While in China, he was a member of the Board of Directors and of the Audit Committee at eLong (LONG). Prior to Cisco, he was a Partner at Arthur D. Little offices in San Francisco and Palo Alto, and before that he coded in two software startups in Barcelona, Spain.


Fernando holds an MBA & Management of Technologies from Berkeley Haas and the College of Engineering at Berkeley and is a Telecom Engineer (BScEE + MSc) from BarcelonaTech.