Marvell Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MRVL) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Ashish Saran: Hey CJ, it’s Ashish. Let me just add some more color. So I think if you look at the year-on-year, the much bigger portion of storage, as Willem just walked through, if you think about all the other product lines, right, this include optics as well as some of our networking products within data center, that’s where we’re seeing a much smaller decline in Q1. These inventory corrections take typically a couple of quarters, right? So I think you’ll expect them to start to bounce back, I would say, in the second half. And I think they get a lot bigger. So the non-storage portion of data center really starts to recover in the second half and gets a lot bigger. And on top of that, even though we have pushed out some of the ramps of our cloud optimized, on an incremental basis, you will see some additional revenue in the second half. So overall, non-storage is a big part of how we see data center recovering in the second half of the year.

C.J. Muse: Thank you.

Operator: And our next question will come from Joe Moore with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Joe Moore: Great. Thank you. I wonder if you could talk about the gross margin pressure in the April quarter, carrier being up mid-single digit is not that much incremental revenue. Can you just give us some sense for the gross margin disparity between the carrier centric custom business and the rest of it? And then I guess, separate from that, as you ramp other parts of custom ASIC into cloud, do you expect to see that be more like the corporate gross margin.

Willem Meintjes: Yeah. So let me start. So the way to think about that is, I think in the prepared remarks we just said wire was done significantly about 20% and that was offset by the growth in wireless. So net-net, you see a small growth there, but it’s those two dynamics that offsetting each other.

Joe Moore: Okay. And I mean, it seems like still even 25% growth in 5G, to cause a four-point margin disparity overall, it seems like

Willem Meintjes: Yeah, sure. So I think the way to look at it is overall, we saw additional weakness in storage, particularly in HCV and fiber channel, which typically is higher gross margin product for us. In addition, we’ve seen a decrease in our merchant enterprise networking business, which is also a higher gross margin product. And so that with the growth in 5G, and then also we’ve seen some strong increase in our ASIC business, which both of those are typically slightly lower gross margin product. And that in combination with — certainly with the top line coming down, we’ve had some headwinds from fixed cost absorption. And so overall, that’s driving the decrease that you’re seeing.

Matt Murphy: Hey Joe, let me add a couple of things because it’s a very good question. So first, fully agree with everything Willem said in the way he characterized it, which is fundamentally that we had some accretive to gross margin product lines declined fairly significantly and fairly rapidly. And at the same time, we’re seeing strong growth in product lines that are less than the corporate average, and it’s moved the gross margin much more significantly than anything we’ve experienced in some time. And maybe just to take it from the top on a bigger picture for a second. Our custom business came from the purchase of Avera back in 2019. And we knew at that time that was going to be a lower gross margin business and that was fine.

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