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

Mark Adams: And the follow-on, I’d just like to add one more comment, Raji, if that’s okay. We’ve said all along that, sure, AI and the HPC environment on-premise is where a lot of the early movement is going to be. But over the long-term, we believe AI will be more broadly deployed throughout the enterprise and certainly at the edge. And what Ken just described is going to give us an opportunity to extend the AI and the enterprise customer relationships we have.

Operator: Thank you, Mr. Gil. Our next question is from the line of Mark Lipacis with Jefferies. You may proceed.

Mark Lipacis: Hi, thanks for taking my question. Mark, for the IPS business, you described it as lumpy. Can you describe the process that you expect to undertake that, kind of, transition that to a less lumpy business? And I’m wondering, is that each time you do a project, it ends up being a kind of a recurring service or management stream over multi-year period. And then these just kind of stack-up on top of one another for each project that you do and then — is that it or is it like you become the in-house? Go ahead, sorry.

Mark Adams: Thanks very much for that question. It’s a great question and it really reinforces the differentiation I think we are achieving with our capabilities and the byproduct of that should help us on some of the lumpiness over the long-term. But as you said, because of our strategy, our aspiration is to build out these services over time that become more and more kind of recurring and predictable. And remember we’re early on, we’re two years into this guys. I mean, if you look at, the services have grown dramatically and we’re excited about that. But our focus is on, if we select the right engagements with our customers, we will be continuing to build that over time. And right now, given that we have been growing so substantially, yes, services are up, but we’re only going to be able to do that with continued execution and that’s why when I had been asked earlier on this call how we differentiate ourselves?

Well because of our capabilities and our skillsets, we’re going to tend to select customers that value that as opposed to hardware-only transactions that don’t give us that stability. They tend to be one-offs, it’s going to take us time to build that guys. I mean, if you think about where we’ve come from, I mean, with the divestiture of Brazil, we’ve got a business that is now a compute story, with gross margin percentages dramatically up, operating income performance is pretty stellar through a hard difficult cycle. I mean, the memory business has been, this is about as bad as it’s been in 15-years in the memory business. Generating cash and investing in this new transformation and we’re a long-term company builders guys, we’re not trying to one-off people on a quarter-by-quarter basis.

We are excited about this opportunity. The Specialty Memory business really plays well into this enterprise solutions for AI, machine learning and data analytics because the biggest bottleneck right now in high-performance compute AI is the memory connectivity and I think SMART Modular is a leader. So if you put this all together, we have a pretty bright future. It might not be perfect every quarter, because of the lumpiness, but as we design and get our customer relationships more aligned to a full engagement model with solutions and services over the long-term, I think we can work out some of the lumpiness and concentration issues that we’ve had in the past.

Mark Lipacis: Got you. And appreciate you’re only a couple of years into this. I mean, do you have like the starting base of services and management and would you care to break it out?