Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (NYSE:HPE) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Antonio Neri: Sure. I mean, I don’t think there is one specific geography or one specific segment. I will say, as we said in the early remarks, right, the Compute business, obviously, we see a little bit more unevenness, if you will, with longer sales cycles because also they are digested all what they acquired last year, because of the supply chain and the cost rising. But when you look at the rest of the segments, as Tarek said and I said, the Intelligent Edge business, the Connectivity business, is very, very solid. And we exited once again in Q1 with an extremely elevated book of orders. HPC, we just talked about it, right? We see an amazing pipeline in front of us. We have only deployed one exascale system, and we have few to go because we are delivering all of them to the Department of Energy.

And then as I said earlier, right, we have an opportunity to grow that business through an as-a-Service model. But that said, what customers are telling me is that they need a hybrid cloud experience. And we see, in some cases, repatriation of workloads on-prem, but they want the same cloud experience with the same consumption model, and that’s what GreenLake does extremely well. It’s a true hybrid cloud experience for low-dose overloads, where data, data compliance and cost plays a big role, and that’s why we see the momentum we have. The fact that we doubled the total contract value from Q1 2021 to Q1 2023 from $5 billion to $10 billion, it tells you the momentum. What I’m really pleased is the fact that two-third of that momentum is in software and services, which means we will be more resilient as we go forward to weather some of these challenges because it’s a recurring revenue.

And we count in that, just to be clear, through Software-as-a-Service subscription and consumption, which is exactly the way it’s supposed to be. And that’s why we are very bullish about our GreenLake and the fact that we crossed $1 billion ARR, it’s just a testament that we have a winning strategy.

Jeff Kvaal: Thank you, Meta. Next question, please.

Operator: Our next question will come from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. You may now go ahead.

Samik Chatterjee: Yes. Hi, thanks for taking the question. Congrats on the execution here. I guess my question was more on the full year guide, and I understand some of the headwinds in certain segments that you’re calling out, but the revenue guide goes up by about sort of 300 basis points for the year. The operating profit growth sort of goes up by 100 basis points. And while I understand some of the headwinds, what maybe I can use some help on is really understand the mix implications of how you’re thinking about it, just given the more lower sort of flow-through that we’re seeing to operating profit growth for the full year guide? Thank you.

Tarek Robbiati: Sure. So thank you for remarking that our revenue guide at the midpoint is effectively doubling from the prior guide that we gave. The prior guide that we gave was 2% to 4%. We’re now guiding 5% to 7%. So at the midpoint, it is 6%, which is double what we gave previously. And in giving that guide, we factor in a number of elements. First of all, the macro environment, second of all foreign exchange rates; and third of all, our desire to continue to invest to perpetrate the momentum that we have in the second half and in fiscal year 2024 because there’s always something else that we have to think about for the end of the year, and we’re not done yet. I also want to flag that we believe that commodity costs are coming down in particular areas, which should effectively come with added pricing pressure in compute, and this is also something that we have factored into our guidance.