Ajay Shah
Analyst · Stifel. Your line is open
Thank you, Suzanne, and welcome to everyone on the call. In the third fiscal quarter, our team has performed very well under difficult circumstances. While the business environment was challenging, our focus on operational excellence and areas that are under our control led to non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.34, which is within the range of the guidance we provided last quarter. Additionally, we were able to improve our cash generation from operations by almost 20% sequentially to reach $46 million in the last quarter alone, as we reduced inventories significantly in each of our businesses to be able to take advantage of lower component prices. In addition, we were able to maintain our gross margins even while average selling prices dropped significantly. We ended the quarter with cash and equivalents at $126 million, which positions us well to execute on our strategies around growth and acquisitions to build our growth. Let me first comment on the main factors impacting our results in the third fiscal quarter. It's been very well publicized that the memory industry continues to see pricing declines in both DRAM and Flash over the past several months. In addition, as we've heard from other technology companies, inventory corrections at our major OEM customers were a factor in our business results for our specialty memory and for our Brazil businesses. The biggest impact quarter-to-quarter was a nearly 33% revenue decline in Brazil, which as many of you know is the only part of our business where we sell memory products into high volume end uses such as smartphones and PCs. This decline was primarily due to declines in memory component prices, and as a result, our declining average selling prices. Brazil now makes up 43% of our total company sales, compared with 69% in the year-ago quarter, so we have made some progress in reducing that exposure. I'll now review each of our three areas of business in more detail for the third quarter and then turn the call over to Jack for a review of the numbers as well as our guidance going forward. Turning first to our Specialty Memory business, which represented about 42% of net sales in the quarter and totaled roughly $99 million. Net revenues were lower than the prior quarter due to continued inventory corrections at a few customers. On a year-to-date basis, net sales for the first three quarters of fiscal 2019 were still 12% higher than the same period in fiscal 2018, in spite of significant headwinds in the overall market and price reductions. And we continue to believe that fiscal year 2019 overall will grow in the low double-digit percentage range over fiscal 2018. We are seeing some signs that the majority of the inventory corrections are behind us and that should lead to unit volumes recovering in the periods ahead. We remain very optimistic about growth prospects in our Specialty Memory business. We are introducing new product families, adding new customers, and benefiting from our focus on long-life products. In addition to our broad portfolio of products – and in the last quarter, we shipped over 600 unique products just in that period, we are also seeing many new opportunities, and we've been expanding our product portfolio to address these prospects. For example, earlier in the quarter, we announced two new additions to our SMART RUGGED product family. The first is a small form factor 32-gigabyte industrial-grade SODIMM module. There is a growing need for ruggedized mobile computing devices in the field and this product is ideally suited for robust and resilient computing applications used in industrial, defense, transportation, public safety, and other similar markets. Another addition to this product family is the T5E, which is a NAND-based SATA SSD that has up to four terabytes of storage capacity. The product is ideal for high throughput applications such as flight data recorders and sensor data capture, as well as high reliability, telemetry, surveillance, and other mission-critical storage applications. With a custom Flash controller, the T5E is a very flexible configuration and has multiple optional security features. Moving on, our Brazil line of business represented about 43% of total company net sales for the quarter as I mentioned before, and was approximately $101 million, which is down substantially from $147 million in just the previous quarter. Consistent with what we indicated on last quarter's call, we have been impacted by falling memory prices and we did take actions during the quarter to reduce headcount and adjust expenses. We continue to see memory prices declining in our fiscal Q4, but in Brazil we are also seeing significant increases in unit volumes, which are helping to stabilize the performance of that business. We will talk some more about the look of that business going forward. Also, recently the Brazilian government agencies have published changes in the method of determining local manufacturing, also known as PPB requirements going forward. We had mentioned on the previous call that there were changes coming. Our assessment of these changes is that they will not materially change our current business profile. We are working with our major customers in Brazil to put together our joint go-forward plans to support their business and needs for both memory products, as well as for battery products under the new rules. Finally moving on to our Specialty Computing and Storage business, which represented 15% of our net sales in the quarter, approximately $36 million. We saw continued strong interest in our solutions, particularly from the government and aerospace end markets. But due to the timing of orders during the quarter, revenue was below our expectations in Q3. However, we are entering fiscal Q4 with a strong backlog and a pipeline, particularly during this period for government customers due in part to the federal fiscal year-end. We have strong expectations for this business in Q4. Separately through our team's efforts, we've been able to improve gross margins and reduce inventories in this business. Our focus on solutions targeted at the AI vertical is resulting in important new opportunities as the industry increasingly looks to AI to solve the most challenging technology and business problems. Penguin is offering the latest technology capabilities with customized services and support. These offerings are finding a lot of interest in a variety of sectors as varied as aerospace and retail automation. Earlier in this quarter, we announced that Penguin's Relion family of Linux-based servers is now available with the latest generation of Intel Xeon processor, enabling Penguin to optimize performance for data center, high performance computing, and AI customers. And as of last week, customers can now take part in an early validation program to benchmark their applications. We also announced a collaboration, WekaIO, a private company that provides some of the most scalable and fastest file storage for AI and compute applications. Our new integrated solution in partnership with Weka has broken eight records on the STAC-M3 Benchmark, the industry standard for testing solutions for high-speed analytics used in applications such as algorithmic trading and quantitative analysis workloads, these being common kind of workloads in the financial services industry. We achieved this performance benchmark by running in distributed mode of a network versus a traditional block storage, which then provides the ability to simultaneously support other applications on the same platform. A big leap in application acceleration for financial services. Also, in the specialty computing area, particularly related to high performance computing, Hewlett-Packard or HPE announced an agreement to acquire Cray computing in May. As a result of this acquisition, our company Penguin Computing would become the second-largest dedicated HPC provider in North America. It's been a very interesting quarter and a lot of highlights going positively into the future. Now, let me turn the call over to Jack for a review of our financials and our guidance going forward. Jack?