SMART Global Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:SGH) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Adams: Yes, and the Penguin on demand piece, for us, is something that we’re kind of shifting slightly our model on demand. We announced this year in fiscal ‘23, our partnership with Google Cloud as an HP partnership model with them. And so while we do have cycles being used on our part, Penguin on-demand platform, our strategy really is to leverage some of their capabilities in infrastructure with our Google partnership and in addition to that, leverage our control-plane software, the skilled cloud software platform that allows people to run their workloads in a hybrid environment, both on-prem and in the cloud. And just really focused on their workload optimization, not necessarily carrying where that workloads being processed.

Sidney Ho: Okay, great. Maybe a follow-up question. Looking at the Brazil memory divestiture, you talked about EPS being neutral to slightly positive. Can you talk about what’s included in that assumption in terms of the use of proceeds from the divestiture and kind of relate to that now that you have divested the Brazil Memory business to focus on enterprise solutions, how are you thinking about other non-enterprise driven businesses, maybe you can touch on your M&A strategy going-forward, that will be great. Thank you.

Ken Rizvi: Thank you. Yes, sure, good question, Sidney. So if we look at the accretion dilution, one, we said on the formal portion of the transcript that we would expect the gross margin accretion would be north of 200 basis-points and the transaction-based on the current run rates to be kind of neutral to slightly positive to our non-GAAP EPS. That does not include what the net proceeds that we would receive. And so it is just based on the current state and run-rate of the Brazil business. If we look at the net proceeds, I think this is your second question, in terms of how we look at and where we will deploy that, we said, we really have. I would say three to four vectors in terms of how we think about capital allocation.

First and foremost, continue to invest in the business. I think Mark highlighted on the his formal comments, continued investment in the IPS segment. There’s lots of opportunities as you could imagine with our platform and our ability to grow longer-term in that segment. Number two. It is to look at M&A and inorganic opportunities similar to Stratus, which we closed here earlier this fiscal year. Those have been great additions to our overall business line. Number three is returning capital back to shareholders. If you looked over the last 12 months or so, we’ve returned about $58 million in terms of share repurchases. And then also I would say, four, is looking at reducing our gross debt levels. Our net-debt levels are very reasonable, but just looking at potentially reducing gross debt.

So in terms of the net proceeds from Brazil, once that transaction closes, we would look at those opportunities.

Operator: Thank you, Mr. Ho. Our next question is from the line of Raji Gill with Needham and Co. You may proceed.

Raji Gill: Yes, thank you and congrats as well on great results. A question again on the AI business, the IPS business. So you mentioned it grew 31% year-over-year excluding Stratus. When we’re thinking about the overall market size for this opportunity, is there a way to think about it from kind of a bottoms up view? How are you kind of valuing the overall market opportunity? Are you kind of valuing it in terms of potential projects based on certain verticals that you’re targeting. You mentioned conceptually some of these vertical here you’re focusing on, financial services, healthcare. Just any kind of thoughts on long-term in terms of how you’re identifying and quantifying the size of the market and how that leads into your pipeline of business that you want to try to go after?