Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Harlan Sur from JPMorgan. Your question please.

Harlan Sur: Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I guess as a follow-up to that, Mark, on your gross margin guidance for the fourth quarter, I know there are no inventory write-downs, but is it contemplating a step-up in underutilization charges or period costs associated with underutilization charges sequentially? And because you cut your wafer starts another 5 percentage points right to 30%, if you could maybe quantify that step-up in underutilization charges? And then as a follow-up, is the incremental 5% cut in utilization is primarily a result of the CAC restrictions?

Mark Murphy: It is not. It’s more of an industry dynamic and our intent to get supply discipline in the market. Supply needs to come out of the market given inventory levels, and that’s the principal driver. As far as the effects of utilization, it is already incorporated in this guide. The period costs in the fourth quarter are about $200 million. And again, they’re contemplated in the guidance.

Harlan Sur: Perfect. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Ambrish Srivastava from BMO Capital Markets. Your question please.

Ambrish Srivastava: Hi. Thank you very much. Mark, I wanted to come back to the gross margin. When you had given the guidance for this quarter, you had walked us through in detail. And you had said that stripping out all the adjustments and the industry write-down, 3Q would be at 7.5%. Am I reading this right that now we stripped out as negative 16%, right? So it’s much worse than what you were thinking?

Mark Murphy: No, I don’t think it’s much worse than what we’re thinking. If you strip out just the underutilization effects, but you keep in the insurance settlement, you’re close to what we said, sort of that 7%, 8%. So that you need to consider. We had said that was in there.

Ambrish Srivastava: Okay. Got it. And then a follow-up either for you or for Sanjay. On the 15% [big round] (ph) number, 15% of bit loss — share loss in China, how do you recoup that? Is that based on the assumption that bit growth or bit supply will be constrained, and so if the other two suppliers are able to meet the China demand, they’ll leave some demand out here — in other regions for you to basically go after? Is there a pricing element to that? I’m just not pretty sure I understand how [you hit that] (ph).

Sanjay Mehrotra: I will take that. So what we have said is that approximately 50% of our business in China is at risk of getting impacted. And of course, we are focused on mitigating any share loss with CIIOs or as a result of CAC decision, with those customers — global customers who are not impacted by CAC decision. So keep in mind that our share in DRAM is approximately 23% and our share in NAND is approximately 12%. So obviously, we have opportunities to gain share with other customers. And this is what we are focused on. It will take some time, and the CAC decision can — I mean, as we have said, it is hurting our business. It is slowing our recovery. It can result in quarter-to-quarter variations as well. But over longer term, our target is to maintain our share.