Earnings Labs

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (STX)

Q4 2016 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 2, 2016

$639.21

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Seagate Technology's Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Year End 2016 Financial Results Conference Call. My name is Kevin and I'll be your coordinator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Kate Scolnick, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please proceed, Kate.

Kate Scolnick - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you. Good morning everyone and welcome to today's call. Joining me today in the room from Seagate's executive team are Steve Luczo, Chairman and CEO and Dave Morton, Executive Vice President and CFO. Dave Mosley, President and COO is connected into the call remotely and Phil Brace, President of Cloud Systems and Silicon Group is not on today's call as he is traveling. We've posted our press release and detailed supplemental information about our fourth quarter and fiscal year end 2016 on our Investor Relations site at seagate.com. During today's call we'll review the highlights for the June quarter and fiscal 2016, provide the company outlook for the first fiscal quarter 2017, and then open the call for questions. We will refer to non-GAAP measures on this call, which are reconciled to GAAP figures on our supplemental information available on the investor section of our website. We have not reconciled our non-GAAP financial measures guidance to the most directly comparable GAAP measures because material items that impact these measures are out of our control and/or cannot be reasonably predicted. Accordingly, reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measure guidance to the corresponding GAAP measures is not available without unreasonable effort. We are planning for the call today to go approximately half an hour and we will do our best to accommodate your questions following our prepared remarks as time permits. As a reminder, this conference call contains forward-looking statements about the company's anticipated future operating and financial performance, customer demand, technology and product development advancements, and general market conditions. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current views and assumptions and should not be relied upon as of any subsequent date. Actual results may vary materially from today's statements. Information concerning our risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause results…

Operator

Operator

Our first question comes from Sherri Scribner with Deutsche Bank.

Sherri A. Scribner - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

Hi. Thank you. Just thinking about the restructuring actions you've taken, you've taken a number of actions over the past quarter. Are you done with the restructuring actions? And how should we think about OpEx as we move beyond the September quarter? Should we start to see that trend down because of the actions, or is it still going to stay about flat? Stephen James Luczo - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: We're not done. And in terms of OpEx, I think for the next one or two quarters, it'll be relatively in this range, Sherri, and then it should reduce afterwards.

Sherri A. Scribner - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

Okay. And I know you said you'd comment on the $2.50 in October, but it seems like at least at these levels, you're well ahead of that $2.50. Do you have any thoughts for what the earnings power could be as we move into fiscal 2017 and calendar 2017? Stephen James Luczo - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: We're starting to get a sense of it, and to your point, obviously we're confident that the $2.50 will be exceeded. I think until we start kind of getting a better sense on some of these demand patterns on the CSPs, we just want to get a little more data under our belt before we give you a more specific number. But to your point, we're confident that it'll be materially different than $2.50 a share.

Sherri A. Scribner - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

Thank you. Stephen James Luczo - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Rich Kugele with Needham. Rich J. Kugele - Needham & Co. LLC: Thank you. Good morning. First, congratulations on the balance sheet. It's good to see those turns. Just in terms of your comment about cyclicality overcoming seasonality, that's interesting. When you look at the cloud service provider market, do you find that they tend to be more accurate if you look at it over six months versus a quarter? And also, about the qual cycle there, do you see the 10 terabyte and other high capacity products like that getting qualified quicker in the future? And would that help improve the visibility as well as you move out to 12 and other terabytes? Thanks. Stephen James Luczo - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah, I'd say that the visibility over a year by quarter isn't great, Rich. I mean I think they have a decent sense of what they think they need in terms of capacity deployment on an annual basis, but when it breaks down to quarter to quarter, I think given the nature of the customers, many of them aren't actually witnessing centralized perspective of demand. So there's a bunch of BUs that are deploying, and a lot of those BUs actually buy on their own. Some of them go to a centralized deployment; some of them don't. So you can't think of these big CSPs necessarily as holistically planning capacity for every one of their application sets, because a lot of those business units within those companies are on their own cycles and maybe it gets aggregated, maybe it doesn't, depending on the customer. So I think they're all learning. I think what's going to drive the better visibility is just the lead time associated with these products, and we've already…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Ananda Baruah with Brean Capital.

Ananda P. Baruah - Brean Capital LLC

Analyst · Brean Capital

Hey, guys. Thanks you for taking the questions. And hey, congrats getting the confluence of these actions to come together pretty quickly in a nice way. Steve, just a couple for me real quick. I just love your context around second half, specifically second half CSP cycles. Sounds like you saw a little bit of a greater than expected pickup in June. How long do you expect that to last? And then we'd just love your current thoughts around kind of the longer term normalized exabyte growth. And I'll actually squeeze my last one in. Just any thoughts you have on September Q TAM. That's it for me. Thanks. Stephen James Luczo - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah again, the CSP influence on the overall business is a little tricky just because like we witnessed in this quarter, can be so kind of significant. And when they do start buying, they tend to start buying for longer periods of times, two, three, four quarters. That really hasn't been modeled into our expectations. We'd rather kind of see the whites of their eyes before we make that call. We can say that July started off quite strong and the demand seems to be fairly solid. But as I think most of the analysts know, typically the September quarter is a back-end weighted quarter. And if we overlay the back-end weighted quarter on what we've seen so far, it kind of doesn't make sense to us. So we've been a bit cautious and then we'll see what happens with that demand. And again, I think until that customer base diversifies a bit more and we get I think more data around what happens month to month in addition to quarter to quarter, it's probably better for us just to be cautious about what we see and then be smarter as we move forward. What was the second question?

Ananda P. Baruah - Brean Capital LLC

Analyst · Brean Capital

The annual. Stephen James Luczo - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: I still think the annual demand for storage is still probably more defined by available capacity than it is real demand. I mean again, if you take population growth times connected devices times richness of content, it gets you easily to three or four zettabytes by 2020, which would imply kind of 30% to 35% annual growth in storage. And I still think that's really kind of what the demands is, and the question is can the HDD industry or the NAND industry for that matter invest to those levels of capital or not. And we'll see. It's pretty tight though, given the budgets that people have deployed or the fabs that are lined up. But I still think you're seeing exabyte demand that's well in excess of areal density demand, so in that sense we view it as demand's outstripping supply. And then of course the packaging requirements are moving to more high capacity, so more heads and disks per units, but units probably flattening out. But from an absorption perspective for Seagate, making heads and disk or because the process content is so much higher or the test content is so much higher, that's a really good trend for us.

Ananda P. Baruah - Brean Capital LLC

Analyst · Brean Capital

Thank you. And just real quickly, September Q TAM thoughts. Stephen James Luczo - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: In terms of unit TAM?

Ananda P. Baruah - Brean Capital LLC

Analyst · Brean Capital

Unit TAM, yeah. Stephen James Luczo - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah, we're not actually that focused on unit TAM. Again, we're more focused on exabyte. We've heard the 110 million number from our competitor, and on the face of it, that probably seems reasonable. That's not probably a TAM we see visibility to, because we're not participating in the low end of that segment and there's obviously a lot of units there, especially in the gaming market. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to us.

Ananda P. Baruah - Brean Capital LLC

Analyst · Brean Capital

Thanks for all the context. Appreciate it. Stephen James Luczo - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Okay, market's opening so we should probably wrap it up, everyone. We appreciate your support and thanks to our employees, our customers, our suppliers, and we'll talk to you in three months. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's presentation. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful day.