Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ:STX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ:STX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript April 20, 2023

Operator Welcome to the Seagate Technologies Fiscal Third Quarter 2023 Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded.I would now like to turn the conference over to Shanye Hudson of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.Shanye Hudson Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s call. Joining me are Dave Mosley, Seagate’s Chief Executive Officer; and Gianluca Romano, our Chief Financial Officer. We posted our earnings press release and detailed supplemental information for our fiscal third quarter 2023 results on the investors section of our website.During today’s call, we’ll refer to GAAP and non-GAAP measures. Non-GAAP figures are reconciled to GAAP figures in the earnings press release posted on our website and included in our Form 8-K that was filed with the SEC.

We’ve not reconciled certain non-GAAP outlook measures because material items that may impact these measures are out of our control and/or cannot be reasonably predicted. Therefore, a reconciliation to the corresponding GAAP measures is not available without unreasonable efforts.Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that today’s call contains forward-looking statements that reflect management’s current views and assumptions based on information available to us as of today 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 to differ from these forward-looking statements are contained in our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC, our Form 8-K filed with the SEC today and the supplemental information posted on the Investors section of our website.

As always, following our prepared remarks, we’ll open the call up for questions.With that, I’ll now turn it over to you, Dave.Dave Mosley Thanks, Shanye, and hello, everyone. Seagate’s March quarter revenue came in at $1.86 billion, just above the low end of our guidance range, while we reported a non-GAAP loss of $0.28 per share. These results reflect rising economic uncertainties and an elongated inventory correction that impacted demand among a few large customers late in the quarter. As a result, we’ve altered our outlook regarding the timing and trajectory of recovery to now begin later in the calendar year.In response to the current market environment, we are taking aggressive actions to further reduce costs and rightsize the business to navigate this downturn and position Seagate to thrive when recovery ultimately comes.

Beyond this cycle, we remain excited about the long-term opportunities presented by the secular growth of data and the relevance of mass capacity storage as new data-centric applications emerge and more workloads migrate to the cloud. We continue to make strong progress on our industry-leading technology road map, including launching HAMR-based products this quarter, which we believe put us in outstanding longer-term position.In my remarks today, I will share some perspectives on the current market dynamics, provide greater context on our restructuring initiatives and update you on our product plans. First, let me address the settlement we announced with the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security, or BIS. The agreement resolves BIS’ allegations regarding Seagate’s sales of hard disk drives to a certain customer between August 2020 and September 2021.

Under the terms of the settlement agreement, Seagate has agreed to pay a total of $300 million in $15 million quarterly installments that will take place over the course of five years. I want to emphasize that Seagate maintains its strong commitment to export compliance, and we believe that we comply with all export regulations at the time we made the shipments.However, in working toward a mutually acceptable solution with BIS, we balance factors such as the risks and cost of protracted litigation involving the U.S. government, the size of a potential penalty, which could have been a significant multiple of the settlement amount, and our desire to focus on current business challenges and our long-term business goals. We believe the outcome we have reached and putting this matter behind us is in the best interest of our customers, shareholders and other stakeholders.Turning now to the near-term business environment.

For the past year, Seagate has been navigating a complex market shaped by a few primary factors. Inventory digestion among our large cloud customers that is impacting our nearline business, lower economic activity in China owing to the country’s COVID lockdown policy and weakening macro conditions that initially impacted consumer demand and is now affecting all end-markets. These pressures have been compounded recently and weighed on our end of quarter dynamics.In the nearline markets, CIOs are now facing constrained IT hardware budgets, which has raised the bar for projects to get funded and resulted in efforts to optimize existing workloads, both on-prem and in the cloud. In turn, cloud service providers have focused on maximizing utilization of their existing infrastructure rather than deploying new capacity.

The combination of these factors dramatically slowed the pace of cloud customer inventory consumption, and led to the pronounced slowdown in cloud and enterprise storage demand that we experienced exiting the March quarter. However, we don’t foresee a strategic shift in customer spending patterns or a change to what remains a robust long-term outlook for cloud storage.Digital transformation trends will continue as enterprises realize significant cost benefits and operational efficiencies by transitioning workloads to the cloud. Industry analysts have observed that once applications and workloads are moved to the cloud, they generally stay there and grow. Digital workloads rely on data, which bodes well for mass capacity storage as the number of new cloud workloads multiply every year.Within the China markets, customers remain constructive on their end market demand outlook as the economy continues to reopen.

However, rising macro uncertainties are pushing timing for recovery to begin later in the calendar year. Despite the pushout, we are seeing some positive demand movement in the consumer and service sectors after COVID lockdown restrictions were lifted. These trends support a digital economy growth that bodes well for China cloud demand as growth in consumer demand has historically led to revenue growth for regional cloud customers.Within the VIA markets, future demand pickup is based on two factors. First, you will recall that several existing VIA projects were delayed during COVID lockdowns. Customers expect these projects to gradually resume as the economy reopens in the coming months, which will consume theexisting HDD inventory that was earmarked for these projects.

Second, we expect new smart city and smart manufacturing initiatives to build momentum as government funding and enterprise budgets free up and the global economy improves.In this dynamic environment, we are continuing to manage what is within our control. In late March, we extended the first phase of our restructuring efforts to adjust our factory headcount to align with lower production volumes, realized efficiencies across various operational support functions and reset our live edge to cloud business plans. We are scaling back new investments in Lyve Cloud as we focus on filling our existing infrastructure. We expect to drive operational and cost synergies across all platforms to accelerate time to profitability while growing the business over the long term.Since fiscal Q1, we’ve taken more than $150 million out of our cost structure, lowered debt by 5% and significantly reduced manufacturing capacity.

Given the prevailing market conditions and our reduced near-term demand outlook, we are undertaking the next phase of restructuring actions targeted to yield at least an additional $200 million in annualized savings from both COGS and OpEx as well as implementing temporary cost savings measures, including salary reductions.We are taking a programmatic approach focused on three key areas: first, we are reassessing the levels of production output and functional support required to meet both near- and long-term business needs. These actions are intended to ensure that supply and demand are appropriately balanced. Second, we are simplifying our product road map to create operational efficiencies. We plan to reduce the number of drive configurations and major capacity node transitions to lower supply chain and manufacturing costs and complexity.

We’re taking these actions in concert with our customers who can also capture cost benefits from fewer product qualifications. Finally, we will continue prioritizing resources towards higher-return products and end markets, while rationalizing support levels and investments aimed at noncore businesses.Our goal is to emerge a stronger, more agile company able to navigate well in all demand environments, return to profitable growth and preserve our technology leadership momentum. To that end, we have not let up on executing our HAMR-based product road map to preserve our significant time-to-market advantage. We are tracking well to our stated plans and achieved the key milestone last week of shipping initial qualification units to a cloud launch partner, and we expect to recognize initial revenue from 30-plus terabyte platforms this quarter as part of our Corvault system solutions.The decades of development that have led us to HAMR productization are even more important today as highly cost-efficient, mass capacity storage will be a competitive enabler in a world where data is rapidly growing and increasing in value.

We believe HAMR will further extend the large and sustainable cost advantage multiple compared to other storage media, even with current market prices. Additionally, Seagate’s ability to service this growing demand through areal density gains by increasing capacities from three to four to five terabytes per disc or more provides far greater capital efficiencies compared with current PMR technology over time.We are confident in Seagate’s ability to translate areal density leadership into the most advantaged TCO across a broad range of customers from the highest capacity drives used in cloud data centers to lower and mid-cap drives more typically used by enterprise and VIA customers. We currently expect the high-volume ramp to begin in early calendar 2024, depending on customer qualification time lines and prevailing macro conditions at that time.Tactically, we are very focused on realizing our targeted savings which, along with an improved demand environment, should create the foundation to move towards our targeted financial model.

And as we transition to our strategically vital HAMR platform, we believe that we are positioning the Company to drive differentiated financial performance for Seagate over the long term.Thanks. And now I’ll turn the call over to Gianluca.Gianluca Romano Thank you, Dave. Amid intensifying economic uncertainties, we saw a rapid decline in demand in certain parts of the business over the last couple of weeks of the quarter, pressuring supply-demand balance. These factors, along with underutilization charges and tax expenses weighed unfavorably on profitability.For the March quarter, we reported revenue of $1.86 billion and non-GAAP losses of $0.28 per share. Despite these conditions, we generated free cash flow of $174 million, demonstrating our ability to maintain discipline and strong cost control measures.

In response to the near-term business environment, we have and we will continue to evaluate and take steps to improve our cost structure and strengthen our balance sheet as evidenced by the expansion of our restructuring efforts, which we announced in the late March.Exiting the June quarter, the actions that we committed to and taking charges for are expected to deliver cost savings of $40 million to $45 million annually, with roughly 60% realized in cost of goods sold. As Dave described in his comments, we are taking additional actions to further improve our cost structure, targeting at least $200 million of annualized savings exiting fiscal Q1 2024.Now turning to the end markets. Total hard disk drive revenue declined 4% sequentially to $1.6 billion.

Mass capacity revenue remained essentially flat quarter-over-quarter at $1.2 billion, but lower than our expectations due to more prolonged cloud customer inventory adjustment and slower demand recovery in China. Shipments into the mass capacity market totaled 104 exabytes compared with 97 exabytes in the December quarter. Consistent with the prior quarter, roughly 83% were derived from nearline products shipped into cloud and enterprise OEM customers.Nearline shipments of 87 exabytes were up 9% sequentially, driven by growth in 20-plus terabyte drives. As a percentage of our nearline exabytes shipments, 20-plus terabyte capacity drives has grown from high single digits to approximately 2/3 of our nearline exabytes year-over-year, reflecting our customer of higher density storage for their data center needs.

Looking ahead, we expect nearline exabyte shipments to decline over the next couple of quarters as cloud customers intensify their efforts to reduce inventory and improve the productivity of their existing infrastructure.Specific to the VIA market, revenue declined sequentially, largely as expected. As we outlined earlier, based on interaction with customers, we expect gradual recovery in the second half of the calendar year. Within the Legacy market, revenue was $371 million, down 12% sequentially, reflecting a steeper-than-anticipated decline in mission-critical sales amid a more cautious spending environment and weakening server demand, while the client and consumer markets reflect the typical seasonal demand patterns.Finally, revenue for our non-HDD business increased 14% sequentially to $256 million, a bright spot for the quarter.

As anticipated, we grew sales for our enterprise system as component supply constraints continue to improve and we expand our market coverage.Moving to our operational performance. Non-GAAP gross profit in the March quarter was $347 million reflecting lower revenue and a less favorable mix than what we anticipated. Underutilization cost of approximately $75 million, similar to the prior quarter but higher than we were originally forecasting as we delayed the start in production to later in the quarter, as noted at the recent investor conference. Accounting for risk and underutilization cost, which translates into more than 400 basis points of margin headwind, we recorded non-GAAP gross margin of 18.7% compared with 21.4% in the prior quarter.Based on our current outlook, we expect underutilization costs to improve in the June quarter, even if production output remained well below the year ago level.

We expect both gross profit and gross margin to move higher as demand recovers towards the end of calendar year 2023 and our cost structure improvements are fully realized.We reduced non-GAAP operating expenses to $282 million, down $63 million year-over-year and $12 million sequentially. The year-on-year decline reflects our cost structure improvement actions to date, lower variable compensation as well as disciplined cost management. We expect non-GAAP OpEx in the June quarter to be similar to the March quarter.I would point out that our GAAP operating expenses for the March quarter included the $300 million reserve associated with the BIS settlement agreement and will be paid in quarterly installments of $15 million over the course of five years, starting in fiscal Q2 of 2024.

We incurred non-GAAP tax expenses of $36 million in the March quarter. Our tax expense is largely based on a full year GAAP forecast by geography and allocated between the quarters based on expected profitability.We expect total non-GAAP tax expenses for fiscal year ’23 to be approximately $45 million to $50 million. Based on diluted share count of approximately 207 million shares, GAAP loss per share for the March quarter were $2.09, which reflects the reserve that I mentioned earlier. Non-GAAP loss per share was $0.28.Moving to balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the March quarter with liquidity level of approximately $2.5 billion, including our revolving credit facilities. Inventory was relatively flat sequentially at $1.2 billion, consistent with our plans.

We reduced capital expenditure to $54 million in the March quarter, down 22% sequentially. We expect CapEx to remain relatively flat in the June quarter.Free cash flow generation was $174 million, up slightly quarter-over-quarter and reflecting our ongoing focus to optimize free cash flow. We currently expect to generate positive free cash flow through calendar year 2023, dependent on the timing of restructuring costs. We used $145 million for the quarterly dividend and exited the quarter with 207 million shares outstanding. We are not currently planning to repurchase any share in the next several quarters, consistent with our near-term focus on optimizing cash balances.Our debt balance exiting the quarter was just below $6 billion, down $71 million quarter-over-quarter.

Adjusted EBITDA for the last 12 months totaled $1.3 billion, resulting in a gross debt leverage ratio of 4.5x. Since fiscal Q1 of ’23, we have reduced debt by approximately $290 million. In fiscal Q4, we plan to further reduce debt by approximately $550 million. Interest expense in the March quarter was $81 million, and is expected to be similar in the June quarter.Turning to our outlook. In the context of the market challenges that we have outlined today, we expect the June quarter revenue to be in the range of $1.7 billion, plus or minus $150 million. We project incremental decline in the mass capacity business mainly driven by customer focus on inventory drawdown in our nearline cloud market. At the midpoint of our revenue guidance, we expect non-GAAP operating margin to be in the low to mid-single-digit range, which includes between $50 million and $60 million in underutilization cost, and we expect a non-GAAP loss in the range of $0.20 plus or minus $0.20.I will now turn the call back to Dave for final comments.Dave Mosley Thanks, Gianluca.

The past year has presented a set of challenges that have impacted Seagate and our industry to a degree not seen for more than a decade. As our outlook and commentary today demonstrate, we believe that we are still a couple of quarters away from seeing a positive turn in demand for data storage. However, there are a few key takeaways that underpin our confidence in the business and our long-term potential.We are aggressively managing through this environment and taking appropriate actions to generate positive free cash flow, strengthen our balance sheet and enhance future profitability, all while executing our technology road map. To that end, we have continued to prioritize investments on our HAMR product road map. These drives offer the highest density, most cost-efficient mass capacity drive storage, which we believe translates into a competitive advantage for our customers, and we are focused on driving appropriate returns for the value we are delivering.

And we continue to receive indications from our customers that demand will pick up as the global economy improves.The secular drivers powering long-term demand for storage are intact, and this fact is at the root of the conversations we’re having with customers across our key markets and geographies. I’d like to thank and recognize our global team for your resilience and perseverance through this challenging period. We are keeping our heads down and aim to make continued progress towards our goal as we move closer to market recovery. Thanks again for joining, and let’s open up the call for questions.

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Question-and-Answer Session Operator [Operator Instructions]

Our first question will come from Erik Woodring of Morgan Stanley.Erik Woodring Dave, can you maybe help us understand kind of as we sit here today, what gives you the confidence to kind of talk about a recovery towards the end of the calendar year?

I guess what I’m hearing from you is a worsening of demand in the last few weeks of the quarter, greater macro concerns amongst customers, obviously, challenges in the nearline market. And so like what data points are you seeing today? Or what are customers saying to you that gives you the confidence that the recovery will happen towards the end of the year as we sit here today? And then I have a follow-up.Dave Mosley Yes. Good. Thanks, Erik. As you alluded to, we’ve been anticipating a return to exabyte demand growth in the nearline for a few quarters, but what we saw coming out of the last quarter still reflects that there’s too much inventory against just a very slow near-term mass capacity demand. I would say that the customers are spending money.

They’re not necessarily spending money on mass capacity storage right now, they may be spending on compute or other investments that they’re choosing to make. And then as we look through into their data center behaviors, if you will, we’re somewhat encouraged that the data continues to grow.So in the data centers, the drives that are in there are being strongly utilized. There are some drives that are living a little bit longer in data center applications, but there’s also really compelling value propositions we’re putting in front of them with higher capacity drives like 30-plus terabytes and new features that are coming that should drive adoption, and we should get a refresh. So as all of these things need to be factored into our planning, they’re all important.

But the most important thing right now is this reflects kind of our sentiment coming out of last quarter is we don’t want to push too much in, especially the older technology products.We want to really stage ourselves for the new technology products and make sure that, that inventory flows through. Timing is everything, exactly to your point. But I do think with the way data is growing, the evidence that we have, the data is growing. Even anecdotally, I can talk about Seagate’s IT, we can see the data growing in the cloud much further than our projections were a long time ago, and this is fairly consistent with discussions that I have with CIOs and other fellow travelers.I do think that we’re not at peak cloud or anything like that. I think the cloud applications are growing tremendously in data size, and it’s just a prioritization issue that we’re in the middle of right now.

So we just focused on taking actions to further manage the downturn like cost and footprint and still to keep driving the technology leadership so we’re there when markets recover. That’s how we think we can create the best foundation to quickly move back into the targeted financial range when the demand resumes.Erik Woodring Okay. And then I guess, Luca, I know you mentioned talking about paying down the $540 million maturity in June. But can you maybe just help us understand some of your sources and uses in cash over the next, let’s call it, 6 to 12 months, how you’re thinking about your liquidity situation, just given your leverage is kind of quickly kind of creeping up towards that 5x number. And then, for example, how are you thinking about the stability of your dividend, any potential drawdown of your revolver, adjustments to covenants?

Maybe if you could just unpackage that a bit, that would be helpful for us.Gianluca Romano Yes. Thank you, Erik. Well, we renegotiated our covenants in the December quarter. We have paid down already a big part of our debt between December and even the March quarter. As you said, we already discussed about the repayment coming in June about $550 million. So we are very focused on reducing the debt as to the leverage. We are generating free cash flow — positive free cash flow every quarter until now. So part of that free cash flow is also going to help with the repayment of the debt. We have other sources that we are looking at. One of those that we discussed in the past is some sales and leaseback of nonmanufacturing buildings that we are working on right now.

So all this will help with our debt covenants. And if we need to do more, we can do more.Operator The next question comes from Tom O’Malley of Barclays.Tom O’Malley I just wanted to dive a little bit into the dynamics of the full year. I think you just said that you expect some declines in nearline for the next several quarters. Just given the size of how big that end market is for you guys, do you expect any sequential growth for the remainder of this calendar year? And if so, are you getting that with about a VIA market or a recovery in Legacy? Can you just walk through the puts and takes of total revenue and when you may see that inflection given the new outlook?Dave Mosley So a few points. I would say that the next quarter will be fairly muted as what we just described.

I do think that there will be exabyte growth as we– I’ll say, late in this calendar year as we get towards the end of the calendar year. That comes from many cloud service providers in the world that are getting through their digestion phase, if you will. Because again, there’s a lot of data that we get from them about utilization rates being high inside the data centers and data continuing to grow. So I do think this is going to be over at some point.Relative to the VIA markets and maybe the broader macro, we’re not really calling the end of any macro uncertainty as part of this, but we do think that some of the investments that have been put off and put off for quite some time may actually come back at the — towards the back half of the year.

So there’s positive sentiment. It hasn’t translated into POs yet, but that’s the way we’re feeling about it.And only one other point that I would make there is that inside of the cloud workloads that we see, the data growth is actually fairly profound. So I think people can make trade-offs with older drives that they have running and throwing data away and things like that, but at some point, the world runs out of gas. We all know it’s — we’re creating more and more data all the time in the form of videos and communications and AI and things like that are all going to need the data. So we’re just really focused on making the space for it. I don’t think the world can deal with this kind of supply and demand imbalance for very long, but we need to take the actions that we are taking on the supply side to make sure that we’re not waiting too long.Tom O’Malley Got it.

And then the second one is for Gianluca. Just on the gross margin side, underutilization charges went up slightly quarter-over-quarter, and you kind of laid out what the charges would be for the guided quarter. But in terms of the impact to gross margin, gross margins are down substantially more than the impact on the map that I’m doing in underutilization. Obviously, there’s some revenue impact as well. But could you talk to — is it just mix with VIA being a bit higher in mass capacity? Is there any pricing pressure that you’re seeing from the nearline customers? Could you just walk through why you’re seeing more gross margin pressure than just the underutilization charges?Gianluca Romano Yes. Thanks, Tom. So I would say the March quarter, of course, has some mix impact also.

For example, mission-critical was sequentially down. And as you know, it has a good gross margin generation. VIA was also sequentially down. So we had a couple of segments that are, let’s say, above average gross margin in March because of seasonality we’re down. So we see that recovering actually in the June quarter.As you said, there is also some pricing pressure, especially through the end of the quarter with no certain customers. We decided to take some of those deals, and we decided to take — not to take other deals. And so this is what we are focusing on, trying to keep a supply-demand balance where we can. This is why we are doing another restructuring action. We want to keep the capacity that we have internally aligned to the short-termdemand and then, of course, in the longer term, keeping that balance in a way that there is not too much pricing pressure to Seagate and to the industry in general.Dave Mosley Tom, I would add on to that.