Ajay Shah
Analyst · Jefferies. Your line is now open
Thank you, Suzanne, and welcome to everyone on the call. I'm very pleased to report that we finished our fiscal 2018, which was our first full year as a public company. We went public in May 2017. We finished the year with record net sales and non-GAAP earnings of $1.3 billion in revenue and at $6.36 per share in EPS. These exceptional results reflect the ongoing dedication and hard work of our employees around the world, and of course, the trust and support of our customers. We also delivered strong fiscal Q4 results with net sales of $374 million, which was 68% higher than the year ago quarter and the non-GAAP gross profit of $84.4 million or 73% higher than last year's fourth quarter, which I think demonstrates the operating leverage we've been able to derive from our business model and from our execution. Non-GAAP earnings for the quarter totaled $1.72 per share, which was meaningfully ahead of expectations. Importantly, we have completed the acquisition and begun the integration of Penguin Computing, which represents the cornerstone of our new business unit, Specialty Compute and Storage, which I will review in more detail later in this presentation. Turning first to our Specialty Memory business, we had a great quarter. Net sales grew by over 20% sequentially to reach $122.8 million. We continue to be a key supplier to our major OEM customers that require application-specific DRAM and flash-based memory products. The proliferation of all-flash arrays within server and storage applications continues to be a strong driver for this business. Behind this growth, our application such as artificial intelligence that utilize in-memory compute and all-flash arrays for data access, flash is also becoming more prominent in industrial applications, which require more application-specific solutions. It's estimated by Gartner that the worldwide market for industrial applications for flash-based storage or SSDs will be over $2 billion by 2021. In the case of SMART Global Holdings, in the last fiscal year, we introduced 25 products targeted at the industrial and defense market segments. And this represents a strong growth opportunity for us as customers are replacing hard drive based solutions, legacy solutions with flash-based SSD drives. Regarding the memory market overall, we are a significant buyer of memory components and, in general, we are seeing improved availability, pricing, and fewer shortages. This is allowing us to accelerate our new product introductions and we have a significant initiative to broaden our customer base with the improved availability of components that we're now seeing. Our Specialty Memory DRAM business still utilizes DRAM technology such as DDR3, which were lagging technologies for around 70% of its business and for these components, pricing has been more stable. With regards to NAND, in our Specialty Memory business, our customers typically do not require the densities that come with the newer 3D NAND devices. And what we are shipping today continues to be based on SLC and MLC technologies where pricing has been far more stable than the 3D NAND. We do have new designs that utilize 3D NAND that we have just started shipping and the rapid price reductions are very stimulative to new design wins. Turning now to our new Specialty Compute and Storage business segment led by, as I was saying, our Penguin Computing acquisition. This was the first quarter in this business and so I'd like to spend a little bit more time to review the business with you. At a high level, Penguin Computing partners with a variety of core technology providers to design and supply application-specific and sometimes designed to order solutions to customers. Penguin partners with leading companies such as NVIDIA and Intel to offer artificial intelligence as well as high-performance computing also known as HPC systems. We market these system solutions primarily to end users and also to some OEM customers. So, together with Penguin, we're now putting in place initiatives to generate synergies in terms of supply chain management and in terms of operations and production. But we're also engaging our engineering teams to define and design memory solutions to integrate into Penguin's platforms, addressing the ever-increasing need for specialized memory and solid-state storage solutions in applications such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, two of the fastest-growing markets in the electronics industry today. So, in this new business segment, during our fiscal Q4, we had significant design wins in both our government and enterprise segments. We won a number of significant new programs for high-performance computing artificial intelligence within federal agencies, government labs, contractors to the DoD and to the DoE, Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, and in the enterprise segment, with large oil and gas as well as social media customers. During the past year, Penguin has introduced 10 new server products and five new Ethernet switch products for these large HPC and AI clusters. Turning to Brazil, we had another solid quarter. While revenues in Q4 were lower coming off the stronger than expected fiscal Q3 results, as we expected, by the way, we remain optimistic about our business prospects in Brazil. During the past fiscal year, we introduced some very significant new memory products and we have set up a new business producing polymer cell-based batteries for smartphones. We estimate that the market available for batteries for smartphones in Brazil alone to be over $400 million in 2018. So, while currency issues as many of you may have noted that the real has been weakening and an upcoming election have created headwinds that continued to be some concern, we continue to forecast growth in our plans over the next year for our Brazilian business compared to fiscal 2018. With that review, I'll now hand you over to Jack to discuss the financials in more detail.