SMART Global Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:SGH) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Kevin Cassidy: Yes. Thanks for taking my question. Congratulations on the great results. I’ll stay on the IPS and visibility into the second half of the year. Can you give us a little more description of maybe what you’re seeing as far as RFQs go from both the public and private sector? And then also, are there service contracts that are up for renewal as you go out into the second half of the year?

Mark Adams: Thanks for the questions, Kevin. I think the way I would suggest is that the RFQ process is fairly stable. I wouldn’t say it’s increasing, but fairly stable. Where I think the visibility gets challenged, both in federal and commercial, is the implementation, the project schedules that we just can’t see. We’re just trying to be careful and cautious on better understanding that three quarters out. And so, we’re giving you some guidance on Q2 here, but we’re just trying to be careful in this environment to make sure that the deliveries that we have and we’re looking at the back half will go off as planned. And so, we’re just monitoring that kind of week-to-week, month-to-month. That’s the kind of game we’re in right now.

As it relates to the service piece of the business, a lot of the services we have, not all but a lot of them, are kind of on schedule. I’ll let Ken talk to that in a second, but they’re on schedules. And that’s where we get a little bit more color and predictability on the recurring nature of those services, and that’s really a strength of the business that we’re continuing to look to build.

Ken Rizvi: Yes. So, Kevin, thanks for the call. If we look at the services component and you look at those that have higher visibility, and I would exclude things like implementation services or logistics services that come in but can come in, in any period in a different size, it’s probably in the neighborhood, I would say, in that $50 million range, plus or minus, that are more on an annual recurring basis or we have better visibility even looking out to a year. So, I think that’s one of the things that we’ve highlighted over the last 1.5 years here is trying to build more recurring revenue base. And with Stratus, along with what the team at IPS and even within the memory business has been doing, we have a lot more services, which hopefully provides more stickiness and more value and demonstrates the value we’re providing to our customer base.

Kevin Cassidy: Okay. Maybe turning to the specialty memory. There are two exciting things happening in the memory market with DDR5, and also CXL. You’re still staying as a custom solutions for those products. Is that correct, first? And then, what do you see as activity for custom versions of DDR5 and CXL?

Mark Adams: Look, I think, Kevin, the long-term view of specialty memory for us is really, really pretty positive. Obviously, all of us have seen the cyclicality in the broader memory markets, and we’re kind of in that place today where there’s just a lot of oversupply, pretty much demand-driven. And then the capacity and the memory players are adjusting accordingly. In the short term, again, as we said, pricing will be a challenge. Demand in the consumer space will be a challenge. But as you’ve noted, there’s a number of trends that speak to a positive demand over a longer-term horizon and that being 5G and mobile, that being enterprise and high-performance specialty computing driven by AI and machine learning. And then, just broader need for high-performance memory, high-bandwidth memory, enabling compute, the challenges that are out there in terms of even high-performance computing that we get pretty good exposure with the Penguin business.

We see the demands on memory. And as you’re referring to controller-based memory, compute Express Link, CXL-like applications. A lot of the DDR5, CXL, 5G, the demands are good, automotive, all of those will be long-term tailwinds on the demand side. But right now, we’re in a market that just is oversupplied, and it’s kind of — they’re not able to call the turn, so to speak. And so, we’re going to be careful on how we see it in the short term. But we like the Specialty business. We think it’s performed much better over the last couple of years under Jack’s leadership, and we’re pretty positive about that in terms of the long-term prognosis. It’s just the market conditions we’re in are hard to call.

Operator: The next question is from the line of Raji Gill with Needham & Company.

Raji Gill: Yes. Thank you. And congrats again, and happy New Year. Just a question on the good progression in the services revenue. I think based on my numbers, the service revenue has really grown, almost probably doubled or tripled over the last several quarters, and now you’re starting to break it out. Can you talk a little bit about how Stratus is helping, contributing to that? And then Ken, you mentioned kind of two components of the services, the long-term service contracts. And then you have the point in time, I believe, is what you mentioned. Can you maybe elaborate further on kind of what you’re seeing within the mix of services and how you’re kind of catering the business on a go-forward basis?

Mark Adams: Well, thanks for the question, Raji. I’ll answer the first part, and I’ll let Ken talk to the back half of the question. Stratus’ business, the value-add has been their ability to maintain high availability, fault tolerant-type availability. The industry called it five nines, which is 99.999% above time. And they do that through a lot of remote monitoring, proactive system management capabilities that they have, and they also have a pretty good software platform for doing so. And so we are definitely evaluating how we can take advantage of that to scale beyond just their platform, Stratus into more IPS-specific customer environments. And so, the combination of two has really put us in a really good position to drive continued value-added services. Relative to the nature of these agreements, I’ll let Ken comment.