Ajay Shah
Analyst · Needham & Company. Your line is open
Thank you, Suzanne, and welcome to everyone on the call. Fiscal 2019 ending August 31st was an amazing year on the journey of transformation for SMART Global Holdings. We're making great progress since we started fiscal 2019 as a predominantly memory products company with 62% of fiscal 2018 revenue generated primarily from sales of standard memory products in Brazil. In contrast, today, we are more balanced company with 32% of revenue from Brazil, 30% of our revenues coming from a new vertical called specialty computing and storage systems, while 38% of our revenues are generated from our specialty memory products business during our fiscal Q4 that we just concluded. Along the way, we faced down a turbulent market, especially in the second half of fiscal 2019 as commodity memory component prices fell by over 60%, significantly affecting our Brazil memory products selling prices. We also faced other macro economic headwinds related to trade and capital spending affecting our overall business conditions in all business areas. Finally, changes in the way local manufacturing regulations are implemented in Brazil, created uncertainties for our customers early in calendar 2019. However, since then, we've been able to navigate through these and we emerged much stronger with a clear long-term business model. Outstanding efforts by our team at SMART have resulted by year end in a broad portfolio of businesses, much larger served markets, and a revenue decline of only 6% year-over-year, which is considerably better than the overall memory and semiconductor markets. We also completed two key acquisitions and are on our way to integrating them to drive growth, profitability, and diversification away from commodity memory products and from our business in Brazil. We accomplished all of this while reducing total debt, adding 67 million in cash to our balance sheet and having paid $75 million approximately in cash from operations towards both of these acquisitions that we made in the last quarter. During the fourth fiscal quarter of 2019, we completed the acquisitions of both Artesyn Embedded Computing and Inforce Computing. We achieved non-GAAP operating profit 36% higher than the previous quarter and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.50, which was 47% higher than the previous quarter. Importantly, we generated significant operating cash flow of almost 50 million, as we further reduced inventories by another 11% in the quarter and ended the quarter with 98 million in cash and short-term investments. Our balance sheet is strong, and we remain well positioned to continue to execute on our growth strategy. Let me now comment on the main factors impacting our financial results in the fourth fiscal quarter. Our supply chain services business, which we report under specialty memory products, came in well below expectations. Late in the quarter, we saw this business impacted because of the weakness in some of our OEM customers resulting from adjustments to their inventory positions. We believe that our supply chain businesses bottomed out and are currently anticipating a modest improvement in the first fiscal quarter. Now, let me turn to review each of our three main lines of business for the fourth quarter. Beginning with our specialty computing and storage business, which represented 30% of our net revenue in the quarter, up from 15% in the prior quarter and totaled approximately $84.6 million. Earlier in the quarter, as mentioned, we completed these two acquisitions of Artesyn and Inforce Computing. The Inforce business which we renamed as our wireless computing line of products had sales of roughly 15 million in the trailing 12 months pre-acquisition and is expected to more than double in fiscal 2020, benefiting from synergies in the SMART's OEM sales force and its operation strength. In addition, we saw our Penguin high performance computing business grow strongly from the prior quarter as the fourth fiscal quarter is the seasonally strongest quarter in the government segment. We are excited about the prospects for continued growth in this area driven by robust backlog and pipeline for new business across our targeted markets. We're making excellent progress with the integrations of both Artesyn Embedded Computing and Inforce Computing, improving margins and operating metrics. As we have previously said, these acquisitions will both be accretive immediately in the first full quarter of operation, which is Q1 the quarter we currently are in. Turning now to our specialty memory products business which represented 38% of net revenues and approximately 104.6 million in revenue. The business performed well as revenues were higher than prior quarter despite the weakness of our supply chain services business that I had referred to earlier. On a full year basis, net sales were 5% higher than the previous fiscal year, while the markets suffered significant price declines. In addition to our outstanding set of tier one customers, we've been investing in more channels through which to sell a greater variety of products and we continue to execute well on this strategy. Looking ahead, while the majority of the inventory corrections appear to be behind us, the overall environment is still cautious, and customers are trying to maintain minimum inventories and ordering with short lead times. Moving on finally to our Brazil line of business, which represented 32% of total company revenues in the Q4 period compared to 43% in the quarter prior and totaled approximately $89 million compared to a 101 million in the previous quarter due to memory component prices continuing to decline, although at a slower pace in the past quarter. As we indicated last quarter, falling memory prices impacted our business, while unit volumes have continued to increase. The new rules regarding local manufacturing based on a point system became effective on July 1 this year. And I would like to discuss our Brazil business in more detail and give you our perspective on the market dynamics in that region. Let me focus you on three key points. First, the Brazilian government remains very much in favor of local manufacturing given that it supports over a 100,000 jobs in the Brazilian IT industry and it's a long-term policy objective. Our Brazil business remains solid and we continue to maintain our leadership position in the memory market. As we said on our last quarterly announcement, there is no change in our business expectations in Brazil. And secondly, the new point system gives both our customers and ourselves flexibility in the way we run our businesses. While the old system required customers to purchase a fixed amount of each type of component locally, the new rules allow customers to mix and match different locally manufactured components to meet the minimum requirements for their tax benefits. Under the new rules, memory provides by far the highest amount of points to our customers in mobile phones, desktops, and notebooks, which are our largest target markets in Brazil. As we see it, these new rules are a positive that now allow us to run our Brazil business as we would any other line of business. And third, since the uncertainty over the new rules has been lifted, our customers are now giving us increased visibility into their requirements. We're seeing higher bookings, and for fiscal Q1, which is the first full quarter under the new regulations, we're confident our Brazil business will grow sequentially over Q4. As our customers evaluate their choices, our analysis shows that memory products offer some of the lowest cost per point towards meeting their local manufacturing requirements as compared to other locally sourced components. Jack will go into more details on our expectations going forward. So, let me turn this call over to Jack for review of our financials and our guidance. Jack?