Mark Adams
Analyst · Stifel
Thank you, Suzanne, and thank you to all who have joined us today. We delivered another strong operating quarter at SGH, with total second quarter revenues of $449 million, above the midpoint of our guidance range, non-GAAP gross margins at the high end of our guidance range at 26% and non-GAAP earnings of $0.87 per share which also came in well above the midpoint of our guidance. As a reminder, these per share results reflect the 2-for-1 share split that became effective at the beginning of February. In addition, we made progress in the following areas during the quarter. We strengthened our balance sheet with term loan refinancing, increasing our liquidity and extending our overall debt maturity. We announced a $75 million share repurchase authorization today, demonstrating confidence in our business and the growth opportunities that we see over the long-term, and we continue to improve our corporate governance with the appointment of Penny Herscher as Chair of our Board of Directors, and we now have a fully independent Board except for me in my role as a CEO. Each one of our businesses, Intelligent Platform Solutions, Memory Solutions and LED Solutions, delivered solid results despite the continuing macroeconomic challenges, including the supply chain constraints facing all companies, the impact of operating in COVID times and of course, the conflict in Eastern Europe. As many of our peers have also reported, supply chain challenges remain with us, and if anything, have heightened from a few months ago. That said, I am very proud of the operational focus and tireless work of our supply chain teams that set SGH apart and importantly, places us in a position to drive continued support for our customers as well as enabling us to deliver strong results for our shareholders. Let me turn to a review of each of our businesses, starting with Intelligent Platform Solutions Group, or IPS, where revenue came in at $82 million for the second quarter. As we've stated in the past, the quarterly level of business can vary due to the timing of deployments of various projects. And this was the case in Q2. That said, business is performing very well with the first half fiscal '22 IPS revenue of just over $200 million, which is up 33% compared with the first half of fiscal '21. An important part of this growth is our investment in services. Second quarter services revenue grew by 41% compared with Q2 of the prior fiscal year. Overall, services represented approximately 26% of IPS revenue in Q2. IPS continues to expand customer engagements across the ultra-scale, government and oil and gas market segments. Specific to the ultra-scale market, Penguin Computing announced its role in providing both AI optimized architecture and managed services for Meta’s cutting-edge AI supercomputer called the AI Research SuperCluster or RSC. In its final build-out expected for mid-2022, the RSC is expected to utilize more than 16,000 NVIDIA GPUs and 1 exabyte of storage, which Meta believes will make it the fastest and largest AI supercomputer in the world. The RSC platform was designed to ensure performance availability, data integrity and managed security, all critical elements of an AI optimized infrastructure. This engagement with Meta has been developed over several years, and is a testament to Penguin’s ability to address the unique needs of significant high-performance and AI compute application environments, highlighting our ability to provide a comprehensive solution of optimized hardware, software and ongoing services. We also continue to invest in the edge, a strategic segment of our business where we have experienced success in the telecommunication market as well as the government sector. We will continue to evolve and grow this business as part of our overall IPS strategy. As we think about our third quarter, component level supply constraints are moving a portion of our expected delivery date out from fiscal Q3 into fiscal Q4 and in certain cases, into our fiscal 2023. As these constraints are industry-wide, its revenue shift is more of a timing issue and not reflected by our customer demand or lost revenue. This will be contemplated as part of our guidance for Q3 that Ken will provide. We also recently announced a new umbrella brand for IPS called Penguin Solutions. Our customers will now identify all aspects of IPS under the single brand name, and we will leverage this new brand to showcase the full breadth of our capabilities. We will continue to use the name Penguin Computing when referring to current HPC products, including the servers, storage and our data center support. We will use the Penguin Edge name to refer to new edge-related solutions and legacy embedded and wireless products. The new Penguin Solutions brand also reflects the direction we are taking to innovate and scale our offerings, delivering solutions and services that span the continuum of edge, core to cloud. Overall, we see growth in our new business funnel, both in terms of commercial and federal business by expanding existing agents and focusing on new customer acquisitions. We are expecting a strong second half of fiscal 2022 and continued momentum as we head into 2023. Now turning to LED Solutions. Our LED Solutions Group, which operates under the Cree LED brand, had another strong quarter of operating performance. Revenues were $107 million in Q2, with product revenues up approximately 5% when compared with Q2 fiscal 2021 when this business was still part of Wolfspeed. Year-over-year revenue growth is being driven by customer wins with our high brightness products into the video, architectural and landscape specialty lighting markets. We continue to execute on our manufacturing transformation plan, which includes the transition from silicon carbide to sapphire wafers and from a captive manufacturing model to an outsourced capital-light model. We expect this transition to be largely completed by calendar fourth quarter. On the product front, the team is delivering innovative appetizing optimized LEDs, enabling a variety of lighting design while achieving the best overall system value. We are seeing good traction with our CV94D products in the video display market as well as new design wins for the horticulture market, indoor sports lighting and road signage applications, each representing specialty areas of focus where our technology and product offering differentiate us versus our competitors. It has now been 1 year since the acquisition of Cree LED, and I continue to be impressed with the team's focus and ability to drive improvements in our product roadmaps, customer engagement, and operational excellence. With Cree LED's long history of innovation and continuously improving technology and the focus of high-powered general lighting, mid-power general lighting, specialty and video, we believe the LED Solutions Group can deliver continued strong results in the coming year. In our Memory Solutions Group, operating under the SMART Modular brand name, revenues totaled $260 million, which was up 9% compared with the prior quarter and up 19% compared with Q2 of the prior fiscal year. This growth was driven by sales of our core specialty memory offerings such as DDR3, DDR4 and flash products to our customers in the networking telecom and storage end markets as well as a favorable mix of higher density products, such as our DDIMM product for the high-end server market. While we continue to support our customers with legacy DDR3 and DDR4-based products, we are positioning ourselves to offer next-generation products optimized for DDR5 and next-generation Flash-based controller-based memory solutions. We are working closely with our key customers in the development of new products for data center and cloud applications, such as NV-CXL and CXL Add-in Card solutions. We were recently selected as a validation partner for a CXL E3.S memory module by a major semiconductor company for their next-generation CPU, another proof point in the investments we are making in advanced memory solutions. For applications at the edge of the network, we are seeing opportunities for specialization in terms of readiness, low power, and smaller form factors, all of which play to our strength of high mix, low-volume differentiated solutions. Our custom encrypted SATA product in a USB form factor is expected to ramp from fiscal '23 and expand our Flash storage capabilities targeted for network infrastructure equipment and systems. In Brazil, we have completed the transition to our facility where we assemble our system-level products, including our new SSD product line, which we expect to ramp by the end of this fiscal year. Our results for the second quarter clearly demonstrate the benefits of our diversification strategy. And while we continue to see supply chain constraints similar to other businesses in the electronic supply chain, we continue to meet the expectations of our customers and are optimistic about our ability to not only expand our footprint with existing customers, but also to grow our business with new customers across all 3 lines of our business. At this time, I'll hand it over to Ken for a more detailed review of the financials and our guidance for the next quarter. Ken?