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Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI)

Q4 2011 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 3, 2011

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Super Micro Computer Incorporated fourth quarter and full fiscal 2011 Conference Call. We all know that today’s call is being recorded. The company’s news release issued earlier today is available from its Web site at www.supermicro.com. In addition, during today’s call, the company will refer to a slide presentation that it has made available to participants, which can be accessed in a downloadable PDF format on its Web site at www.supermicro.com in the Investor Relations section under the Events and Presentations tab. During the company’s presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, the securities analysts and institutional portfolio managers will be invited to participate in a question-and-answer session, but the entire call is open to all participants on a listen-only basis. As a reminder, this call is being recorded, Tuesday, August 2, 2011. A replay of the call will be accessible until midnight August 17th by dialing 1-877-870-5176 and entering conference ID number 509-1441. International callers should dial 1-858-384-5517. With us today are Charles Liang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Howard Hideshima, Chief Financial Officer; and Perry Hayes, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. And now, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Hayes. Please go ahead, sir.

Perry Hayes

Management

Good afternoon and thank you for attending Super Micro’s conference call on financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2011, which ended June 30, 2011. Before we begin, I’d like to advise you of upcoming investor conferences in which Super Micro will be participating. On August 31, we will attend the Midwest IDEAS Conference in Chicago and on September 14, we will attend ThinkEquity’s Annual Growth Conference in New York, where we will present and participate in one-on-one meetings. By now, you should have received a copy of today’s news release that was distributed at the close of regular trading and it’s available on the company’s Web site. As a reminder, during today’s call, the company will refer to a presentation that is available to participants in the Investor Relations section of the company’s Web site under the Events and Presentations tab. Please turn to Slide #2. Before we start, I’ll remind you that our remarks include forward-looking statements. There are a number of risk factors that could cause Super Micro’s future results to differ materially from our expectations. You can learn more about these risks in the press release we issued earlier this afternoon, our Form 10-K for fiscal 2010, and our other SEC filings. All of those documents are available from the Investor Relations page of Super Micro’s Web site at www.supermicro.com. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Most of today’s presentation will refer to non-GAAP financial results and outlooks. For an explanation of our non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to Slide #3 of this presentation, or to our press release published earlier today. In addition, our reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results is contained in today’s press release and in the supplemental information attached to today’s presentation. I’ll now turn the call over to Charles Liang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

Charles Liang

Chairman

Thank you, Perry, and good afternoon, everyone. Please turn to Slide #4. First, let me provide you with the highlights of our fourth quarter. We are pleased that our fourth quarter revenue was $260 million or 11.1% higher quarter-over-quarter and 29.1% higher year-over-year. This result is a record high for Super Micro. Non-GAAP net income was $13 million or 5.9% higher quarter-over-quarter and 43.1% higher compared to last year. Super Micro’s non-GAAP earnings per share was $0.29 per diluted share, compared to $0.28 last quarter or $0.21 last year. Slide #5, please. In my comments today, I will have to discuss our results last quarter, whereas our achievements during the past fiscal year before providing some insight on our plans for the upcoming year. Last quarter was our best ever quarter for revenue, achieving a record high. In addition, we reached the significant quarterly run rate for $1 billion of annual revenue. The strong revenue came from faster growing sales of Storage, Blades, GPU and the complete Rack. We also saw a significant amount of complete system that make our total system products contributed over 40% of our revenue. Furthermore, 49% of our business last quarter come from OEMs and direct customers, especially internet data center, which were 16% of sales. We are pleased to see that our strategy of increasing sales of complete system together with a higher volume OEM and direct customers has been achieved. Last quarter’s margin primarily were affected by decision we made in the March quarter after the Japan earthquake to keep a higher stock of component inventory as a memory and hard drive in order to prevent supply disruption for our customers. Unfortunately, this quarter we saw a big decline in price for those components, and the while we have been able to reduce…

Howard Hideshima

Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Charles, and good afternoon, everyone. I’ll focus my remarks on earnings, gross margin, operating expenses and similar items on non-GAAP basis, which reflects adjustments to exclude stock compensation expense and include custom fees for prior periods. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP is included in the financial statements of the company in today’s earnings release and in the supplemental detail in the slide presentation accompanying this conference call. Let me begin with a review of the fourth quarter income statement. Please turn to Slide #8. Revenue was a record $216.3 million, up 29.1% from the same quarter a year ago, and up 11.1% sequentially. The revenue for the fiscal year was a record $942.6 million, up 30.7% for the same 12-month period a year ago. The increase in revenue from last year was fairly widespread among our customer base and product lines. On a percentage basis Blade, Storage and GPUs were the fastest growing product lines which has been gaining traction for the last few quarters. The sequential increase in revenue from last quarter was primarily due to an increase in Internet data center sale. Our percentage basis storage and blade solutions were the fastest growing product line from the prior quarter. We continue to see traction in these products, which we invested in a few years ago and expect to see additional strong success from the new products such as the switch, software and for rack. Turning to product mix, proportion of revenues from server system was 40.4% of total revenue, which was an increase from 32.2% a year ago, and 31.8% last quarter. ASPs for servers was $1,800 per unit, which is up from $1,400 last year and last quarter. We shipped approximately 57,000 servers in the fourth quarter and 1,540,000 subsystems and accessories. While we continue…

Charles Liang

Operator

Thanks, Howard. Well, we are pleased that 2011 was another year of success and growth for Super Micro. We now look forward to a strong fiscal year 2012. Our product line had never been better than they are today. With strong offering in Storage, Blade, GPU, Twin family and our new MicroCloud, we are continuing to invest in product development to extend our technology leadership. With the new potential architecture of Sandy Bridge, will be launched in a few months, and with our switch product lines as well as our server management software solutions, we are well prepared to continue our strong growth. Finally, we will be moving into our new Taiwan facility in a few months, which will begin new chapter for Super Micro, both in Asia and global. Therefore, we begin fiscal 2012, we are well-positioned to execute our strategy to grow our revenue, opportunity and sales and to improve our profitability in the upcoming years. Operator, at this time we are ready for questions.

Operator

Operator

(Operator instructions) We’ll go first to Mark Kelleher with Dougherty & Company.

Mark Kelleher

Analyst

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Is it possible to split out the effect of the gross margins between the inventory pricing and the data center product mix? Is that possible with the effect of each?

Howard Hideshima

Chief Financial Officer

Yes, the majority of that came out of the inventory.

Mark Kelleher

Analyst

Okay. This is my follow-up question. As we look forward on the gross margins, how much of that inventory effective going to continue if we assume the prices are in components where they are? What’s the effect going to the next few quarters?

Howard Hideshima

Chief Financial Officer

They will more likely we did most of it during the quarter than last quarter, but there’s still some and they’ve been very dependent upon the pricing that comes.

Charles Liang

Operator

Some influence for September quarter, but not as much as last quarter hopefully.

Mark Kelleher

Analyst

Okay, that’s good and thanks, bye.

Operator

Operator

And next we will go to Glenn Hanus with Needham & Co.

Glenn Hanus

Analyst

Good afternoon. You gave a pretty fairly wide range on the revenue. Could you maybe discuss, if you were to be sort of in the lower half of the range, what would be the circumstances that would be, and then kind of the upper half of the range, what would be some of the assumptions underlying that outcome?

Charles Liang

Operator

Yes, Glenn, I mean that meanwhile we give out the wider range because there are some uncertainty of Sandy Bridge route because we didn’t know exactly how soon that product will be in high volume. So we try to be more conservative in offering a big range. So it was available earlier for sure our number where we paid over September.

Glenn Hanus

Analyst

So just my follow-up then on the Sandy Bridge launch, are you thinking that it has versus what you are expecting a couple months ago has it slipped out, and can you sort of quantify the slip?

Charles Liang

Operator

At this moment, we heard us there Q4, but how did Q4 will be (inaudible) at this moment. But our product had been pretty ready though. So once the CPU chips are ready, we are ready to go.

Glenn Hanus

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And from Stifel Nicolaus we’ll go to Aaron Rakers.

Aaron Rakers

Analyst

Yes, tanks, guys. Two questions I guess. I want to go back to the gross margin number, just so I’m clear, can you help me understand the sequential change in your systems gross margin, because I think you guys have made a comment that the incremental mix 16% coming from Internet data center clearly drove gross margin down. So I’m curious are you telling us that the systems gross margin was essentially flat sequentially, or was that down a couple hundred basis points? Any clarity there would be helpful?

Howard Hideshima

Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Aaron, this is Howard. With regard to the gross margin, yes, the several gross margin themselves generally higher than our overall subsystems and accessories. As I talked about the memory and hard disc drives again that, that kind of permit both the server margins and the accessories and subsystems, because obviously either sell it separately to some of our partners or you put it into the system, so that effect on both. The second point we brought up was basically the Internet data center. That’s a very competitive area of the market. I think if you go back historically there are times when we’ve had higher percentages of our sales in that vertical and that we have taken some margin hit because of that.

Aaron Rakers

Analyst

And kind of keeping with that at 16% of revenue clearly, that’s on a significant growth trajectory, albeit lumpy in project-driven. How do we think about the contribution as we move forward and kind of thinking about that as well on a gross margin line? I mean do we expect to continue growth from here, what’s your assumption for this next quarter and looking forward as far as contribution?

Charles Liang

Operator

I believe it’s our interest to continue to grow. There are (inaudible) business. However, our Asian operation, kind of our Taiwan facility will be ready in next few months. Once that ready for sure that will lower our cost and we are obviously making that happen.

Aaron Rakers

Analyst

Okay, thank you.

Operator

Operator

Next we’ll go to Rajesh Ghai with ThinkEquity.

Rajesh Ghai

Analyst

Yes, thanks. On the Internet data centers, are you selling systems or is that subsystems and how much lower is the gross margin for work systems, subsystems or the Internet data centers?

Howard Hideshima

Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Rajesh, this is Howard. Again, Internet data centers are primarily our full servers. Okay, we use to put the boxes in for them and then ship them out to. With regard to servers versus subsystems and accessories, on an overall basis, we sense there it could be as much as a 5%-10% gross margin differential between the two categories.

Rajesh Ghai

Analyst

Okay. And can you update us on the specific timing of the Taiwan facility coming on stream, and when it’ll be fully ramped and also if you could talk about the utilization rate of the Netherlands facility and when you expect that to be fully ramped? Thank you.

Charles Liang

Operator

Yes, we start our Netherlands facility about 18 months ago. However, European markets will be solved in another six months, so that kind of slower our utilization of our Netherlands facility. And also Asia, again Asia market is growing quickly but our Taiwan facility won’t be fully ready in about four to five months to go. So after that for sure, once our utilization becomes higher in both Europe and Asia the growth margin will improve.

Rajesh Ghai

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

From Sterne, Agee we’ll go to Alex Kurtz.

Emily

Analyst

Good afternoon. This is Emily in for Alex today. Thanks for taking the question. In terms of your gross margin line outside of structural changes you are making to the supply chain to improve the margin, which new products are you seeing that will help drive margin outside the most in the next year or so?

Charles Liang

Operator

I guess, GPU we continue to have slide, and storage, we continue to have a storage part of that going quickly and switch is relatively a new product line and that product line which you have a much better margin.

Emily

Analyst

Okay, great. And then I have my follow-up, could you give us some color on your expectations of OpEx growth quarter-over-quarter from June to September, are you seeing that is roughly flat or growing? Thank you.

Howard Hideshima

Chief Financial Officer

We can keep in good control of our OpEx expenses, we go to annual review cycle for employee base in September and we will see some expenses for payroll, but generally, we kept it fairly close to what our percentage of revenue has been in the past.

Emily

Analyst

Okay, great, thank you.

Operator

Operator

It appears at this time there is no further questions. I’d like to turn the call back over to Mr. Liang for any additional or closing comments.

Charles Liang

Operator

Thank you for joining us today, and we look forward to talking to you again at the end of this quarter. Thank you, everyone. Have a great day.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does concludes the Super Micro fourth quarter fiscal year 2011 conference call. We do appreciate your participation. You may now disconnect at this time.