Stephen J. Luczo
Analyst · Cross Research
Thank you, Kate. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As Kate mentioned, we are in 2 locations today. Pat and I are in Cupertino, and Dave is in Singapore. We've just celebrated the 30th anniversary of Seagate's Singapore operations. It's been an honor to be such an important part of the business transformation of this leading industrial country, and we thank all the employees, community members and government officials who have played such an important role in Seagate's overall success. Seagate's fourth quarter and year-end results reflect the overall strong operational performance by the company and our commitment to returning value to our shareholders. In the June quarter, we achieved record revenues of $4.5 billion and record shipments of 66 million units, which represented an approximately 42% market share. We had very strong profitability with non-GAAP net income of $1 billion and diluted earnings per share of $2.41. Non-GAAP gross margin was 33.6%. Fiscal 2012 revenues were $14.9 billion, with non-GAAP net income of $3 billion and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $6.75 and non-GAAP gross margins of 31.7%. We also achieved record operating cash flow of $1.4 billion in the June quarter, and we returned over 90% of our operating cash flow for the quarter to shareholders in the form of dividends and share redemptions. As further evidence of our commitment to returning value to our shareholders and as a reflection of our confidence in the company's future, we announced today that we have raised our quarterly dividend payout 28% to $0.32 per share. For the fiscal year, Seagate generated over $3.2 billion in operating cash flow, of which we returned over 85% to shareholders through dividends and share redemptions. We ended the quarter and the fiscal year with approximately $2.2 billion in cash, restricted cash and short-term investments. We are on plan to reduce our share count to 350 million ordinary shares outstanding by calendar year-end 2012. Assuming market and macroeconomic conditions and the company's performance and valuation metrics are similar to what they are today, we plan to reduce our share count to 250 million ordinary shares by calendar year-end 2014. Given the assumptions stated above, we expect that we will continue to increase our dividend payments in a meaningful manner while continuing our redemption plan over the course of the next several years. We achieved many of our goals in the June quarter and set records in revenue and unit shipments. There were, however, a few areas where we did not perform as expected, which we highlighted in our preliminary results announcement a few weeks ago. I'll discuss the dynamics of the quarter and our thoughts on the business outlook for the September quarter and fiscal year 2013. Looking at our overall business activity in the quarter, we executed on our OEM agreements, and we resumed more typical volume shipments to the channel and retail markets. Overall unconstrained demand was lower than we expected going into the quarter. Against this demand profile, industry shipments have ramped to the point where supply and demand have come back into balance earlier than we had believed at the start of the quarter. The company is encouraged by its performance in transitioning to the next-generation technology across its entire portfolio. We believe Seagate is leading in technology transitions in all product categories. As a result, our inventory is comprised primarily of the newest generation products. In our enterprise business, we had a strong year-over-year growth, reflecting demand for cloud infrastructure build-outs and enterprise storage. Our shipments to cloud applications grew faster than the market, increasing 70% year-over-year. Offsetting some of this strength in the quarter was an isolated supplier issue in one of our mission-critical products that impacted our enterprise business. From an operations standpoint, it was a unique problem that required a thorough and timely investigation in order to determine the root cause. Given the nature of the problem, which was a particle contaminant coming from a supplier 3 levels down in the supply chain, determining the root cause was a challenging endeavor. Once we identified the issue, we were able to switch to an alternate supplier, and we resumed shipping the product within the June quarter. Despite our efforts to solve this issue quickly, the time we were out of the market impacted enterprise sales by approximately 1.5 million hard drives. As a result, our earnings were impacted by approximately $0.48 per share. We recognize the fact that an issue like this requires additional engagement with our customers to regain their confidence. Given the overall strength of our [indiscernible], shipments were relatively flat sequentially, and our share decreased marginally to 56%. Our notebook drive sales were up 12%, resulting in nearly twice the sequential growth of the market due to the strength of the 7-millimeter product line and the successful ramp of the Samsung product line. Our consumer electronics and retail businesses achieved sequential growth, and during the June quarter we made an important investment in our retail business with the proposed acquisition of LaCie, known for its premium external storage business. The overall breadth and depth of our hard drive product portfolio leads the industry, and we are aligning our technology road map to broaden our ability to provide customers with hybrid and solid state products that leverage NAND flash technology. To facilitate this effort, we announced today that Gary Gentry will be rejoining Seagate as Senior Vice President and General Manager of our SSD business. Prior to rejoining Seagate, Gary was General Manager of Micron's Enterprise SSD business. In the fall, we will be introducing our third-generation client hybrid drives, which will be in the 7-millimeter form factor. We will also be shipping demonstration units of our enterprise hybrid drives later this calendar year. We are encouraged by our engagements to date on this product, as several OEMs have requested exclusive access to this technology. In addition to the enterprise SSD products we are shipping today, our technology partnership with Samsung has progressed on plan and has resulted in a highly competitive Tier 0 product. We expect to be shipping customer test units of this product at the end of this quarter. To further deepen our SSD capabilities, we made a strategic investment in DensBits technology, and we are also jointly developing a next-generation solid state controller technology with DensBits that’s focused on breaking through current cost, reliability and performance benchmarks in the client and enterprise markets. We continue to believe that hybrid drives and SSDs are an important complementary technology to HDDs. We are confident in our approach to these markets, where we leverage our customer relationships and technical capabilities and focus on building core technology with strategic partners to produce best-in-class devices and solutions. Turning to our September quarter outlook, we believe that the industry is operating with sufficient supply -- with supply sufficient to meet demand. We continue to monitor several key indicators in the market, including macroeconomic dynamics, overall PC demand, product mix, growth in tablets and smartphones, the upcoming release of Windows 8 and the numerous thin and light product initiatives. Based on current planning indications from a broad base of customers, we are approaching the September quarter conservatively, focusing on supply-demand balance and are currently aligning our business for relatively flat demand sequentially and continued improvement in the average capacity per drive shipped. For the September quarter, we expect to maintain market share, achieve revenue of approximately $4 billion, deliver gross margins exceeding 30% and have operating expenses that remain relatively flat. At this time, we believe the December quarter's addressable market will improve for the September quarter, and these conditions will put us on a path to revenues of at least $17 billion in calendar 2012 and exiting the year with margins above 30%. For fiscal 2013, assuming modest market growth, we are planning to maintain market share and deliver at least 25% annual growth in non-GAAP earnings. With respect to our capital structure and priorities for cash, as previously discussed, we expect to continue to enhance shareholder value through dividends and share redemptions. Seagate is well positioned in the current environment, and we look forward to updating you on our vision and strategic plan at our Investor Meeting on September 21. Melanie, we are now ready to open up the call to questions.