Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (NYSE:HPE) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Albeit you should not expect a 40% growth, obviously. And that’s why I want to have Jeremy talk about what we are affirming here in terms of revenue and as well as margins.

Jeremy Cox: Right. Yes. We — as Antonio mentioned, we did, as Sam mentioned, a slight growth we’re expecting year-over-year on a full year basis for Edge. As I think about that, I’d almost break that down into two halves. The first-half, as we mentioned, we do still benefit from a backlog position or an order book position that will go into the first half and help support that revenue performance. And then the second half will be more dependent on demand improvements. and in the areas that Antonio mentioned and the investment areas that were helping drive that expectation. From an operating margin perspective, I would say that I would expect the first half to still benefit from higher operating margins as again, the order book consumption has been at higher price with lower cost.

So that’s helped drive our operating margin performance, which again this quarter at 29.5% is exceptional. But we would expect to probably more in the second-half, you’ll start seeing that operating margin rate get more back towards the mid-20s that we had mentioned at SAM is our expectation for the long-term in this business.

Jeff Kvaal: Thanks very much, Wamsi. Gary, could we have the next question.

Operator: The next question is from Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Toni Sacconaghi: Yes. Thank you. If I look at your — take the midpoint of your first quarter revenue guide, and I run out normal seasonality I get revenues down about 5% for the year. You’ve just stated that the edge business is going to be weaker in the second-half, so below normal seasonality. So clearly, you’re expecting a huge ramp in HPC in AI over the course of the year? And I’m wondering if you can dimension that or — are you expecting greater than normal seasonality in the traditional server business? And why would that be? And then finally, can you just comment on total backlog for HPC and AI exiting the quarter, you said it was $3 billion exiting last quarter or greater than $3 billion. What is it today? Thank you.

Jeremy Cox: Toni, this is Jeremy. I’ll take those two for you. So you’re spot on as we think about next year, we will have a seasonal drop in HPC and AI. That’s largely as Q4 really benefited from a meaningful amount of Cray Ex acceptances. And as you know, the time between order and acceptance can be a long period of time and Q4 saw a larger number of acceptances, which helped drive the revenue performance. We’ll see a bit of a dip back down in Q1 and then Q2 and the second-half really benefiting from the acceleration in AI, as well as some additional supercomputing business. And so you’ll see a pretty significant ramp as we go from Q1 to Q2 and then sustaining at or ramping beyond that in the second-half of the year. And HPC and AI will be a big part of the revenue growth story for FY ’24.

Your question on the order book total, it landed at just over $3.2 billion, which was slightly above where we landed in Q3. And that really came off the back, though of Q4 revenue performance in HPC & AI up about $350 million on a quarter-over-quarter basis. And so what happened is you had a runoff of order book from revenue performance in Q4 and then how to rebuild of that order book coming largely from AI demand in Q4 that took it back up to its historical high level of just over $3.2 billion.

Jeff Kvaal: Thanks very much, Toni. Gary?

Operator: The next question is from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Samik Chatterjee: Hi, thanks for taking my question. I guess in your prepared remarks, you did make it a point to highlight the uneven demand backdrop that you’re seeing. I was wondering if you can flesh that out a bit more in terms of what you’re seeing between the different product groups. And particularly when I look at that in contrast to the strong AI demand you’re seeing, would you really sort of then see some of the AI demand from enterprises cannibalizing their own spend towards the other product groups? Or is the uneven demand more of inventory correction? Thank you.

Antonio Neri: Yes, sure. I mean no question, we see an explosion in demand in AI. Jeremy just comment on that. And I will say, of that order book that Jeremy just talked about in Q4, [Indiscernible] little was converted in AI. And to the point he made the growth we had in Q4 was driven by the supercomputer acceptances. But we have a very, very large pipeline in front of us, which is very exciting but ultimately it’s going to come down to time to revenue based on the GPU availability. But I will say that business is going to continue to be super strong. And clearly, when I speak to customers, which I do more than 50% of my time there is a huge amount of interest in AI and how to accelerate the deployment of a higher cost enterprise, understand that there are challenges, whether it’s sustainability challenges, where there are data center capacity, power and cooling and others.