Quantum Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
June 6, 2023

There are 10 speakers on the call.

Operator

Greetings. Welcome to Quantum's 4th Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Please note this conference is being recorded.

Operator

I will now turn the conference over to Brian Cabrera, Quantum's Chief Administrative Officer, thank you. You may begin.

Speaker 1

Good morning and thank you for joining today's conference call participants will discuss Quantum's 4th Quarter and Fiscal 2023 Financial Results. I'm Brian Cabrera, Quantum's Chief Administrative Officer. Participants are in the line of Jamie Lerner, our Chairman and CEO followed by Ken Gianella, our CFO. Participants will now open the call to questions from analysts. Some of our comments during the call today may include forward looking statements.

Speaker 1

All statements other than statements of historical fact could be viewed as forward looking, including any projections of revenue, margins, expenses, these statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties we refer to as risk factors. Risk factors may cause our actual results to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the detailed descriptions we provide participants are in the Risk Factors section in our 10 Qs and 10 ks filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not intend to update or alter our forward looking statements once they are issued, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, participants are required by applicable law. Please note that our press release and our financial statements we make during today's call and the management statements we make during today's call will include certain financial information in GAAP and non GAAP measures.

Speaker 1

We include definitions and reconciliations of GAAP to non GAAP items in our press release. Now, I would like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Jamie Lerner. Jamie?

Speaker 2

Thank you, Brian, and thank you all for joining us today. Earlier today, we announced our results for our 4th quarter and participants are in full fiscal 2023 with revenue results that exceeded the high end of guidance. We are pleased with the revenue results. Participants are ready to take questions. We feel good

Speaker 3

about supply

Speaker 2

chain and we're excited about recent product launches, but we have work to do in fiscal year 2024

Speaker 3

participants will be conducting a

Speaker 2

call to improve our bottom line results. Today, Ken and I will walk through actions we have taken to strengthen our company participants will be conducting a review of our financial results and deliver adjusted EBITDA of at least $20,000,000 as we described in our press release. Turning to Slide 3, here is a brief overview of the results from the quarter and the full fiscal year. Participants are in the range of $100,000,000 in revenue, above the high end of guidance participants are in the range of 10.7 percent year over year non GAAP gross margin of 35.5 percent Adjusted EBITDA of $1,000,000 compared to $400,000 a year ago, driven by higher revenue participants are in the range of $1,000,000 For the full fiscal year 2023, We delivered revenue of $412,800,000 an increase of 10.7% year over year, non GAAP gross profit in fiscal 2023 was $147,000,000 or 35.6 percent of revenue, primarily driven by a higher mix of low margin hyperscaler business along with inflationary cost pressures in our supply chain. Participants are now turning to Slide 4, I would like to share some operational insights from the quarter.

Speaker 2

We exceeded revenue and EBITDA guidance In fiscal Q4, based on another strong quarter of hyperscale sales, a sequential increase in royalty revenue participants are in the range of $1,000,000 and improved operational execution. We had an incredible year of hyperscale sales with 2 times revenue growth versus the prior year. As we discussed, that segment is characterized by generally lower margins. So the hyperscale business has had a strong influence on our revenue

Speaker 3

participants are in the range of $1,000,000 in the range of

Speaker 2

$1,000,000 in the range of $1,000,000 in the range with the progress we are seeing in our video surveillance business and improving our efforts to sell the full portfolio of products. We continue to see improving conditions internationally and we are starting to realize the results of our transformation work, especially in the Americas. As an example, we are seeing a higher volume of large deals becoming a bigger component of our revenue mix in the pipeline. Participants are in the position of the company's financial results. As part of the sales transformation, we are directly engaging in larger enterprise deals, especially in areas of repatriation data back on premise from cloud providers.

Speaker 2

We also are extremely encouraged

Speaker 3

that

Speaker 2

our end to end portfolio of products An illustration of this was a large scale deal we closed in the financial sector at 1 of the largest banks in Asia participants are in the Fortune 500 Company. We are also working on several OEM partnership opportunities with global technology providers.

Speaker 3

Participants are

Speaker 2

in the line with us. Just this past quarter, we secured an active scale OEM win at a global provider of video streaming solutions expanding our solution footprint at existing accounts is a key part of our strategy. It is also notable that in fiscal Q4, participants are selected by West Coast Major League Baseball team to provide AI driven analytics for their video and image content. This team is an existing Quantum Stornext customer and we were able to drive a broader engagement with them participants will be able to help them catalog, analyze and enrich their content to drive better fan engagement.

Speaker 3

Participants are in

Speaker 4

the process of

Speaker 3

executing our strategy. We are very pleased

Speaker 2

with the progress we made in the quarter and we are very pleased with the progress we made in the quarter and represents the opportunity in front of us participants are ready to move from storing data to analyzing, manage and enriching it to drive improved business outcomes. Participants are ready to take questions. These sales highlights are just an example of our sales transformation strategy. As we focus our execution to improve revenue mix, this includes growing total annual recurring revenue. Another positive indicator in fiscal year 2023 was that we grew the subscription ARR by 81% year over year participants are in the range of $1,000,000 We anticipate our continued innovation will accelerate future growth of subscription ARR into new markets for us, participants are in the range of $1,000,000,000,000,000, which is a result of the high growth all flash storage market.

Speaker 2

Driving improved operational efficiency is another part of our transformation. Our supply chain continues to stabilize and improve with greater parts availability and at lower costs, participants are ready to take questions. And we expect that to carry forward into fiscal year 2024. Also, our focused efforts to improve working capital and decreased inventory yielded positive results to further strengthen our company. As we execute our strategy, participants are ready to take questions.

Speaker 2

It is important that we operate our company to drive profitable growth. To that end, we recently implemented a global efficiency plan and work with our lenders to improve our strategic flexibility by securing additional liquidity through an upsizing of our existing debt. Ken will discuss these items in more detail during his prepared remarks. Turning to Slide 5, I would like to give you an update participants are on our product innovation progress. On April 3, we announced Myriad, a new all flash storage platform for the enterprise.

Speaker 2

This is a huge milestone for the company and introduces a totally modern software design to one of the highest growth segments in storage right now.

Speaker 3

Participants are in the line

Speaker 2

with the financial results. We then showcased Myriad at the NAB Trade Show, which is the largest broadcast trade show in the world participants are in the process of meeting with our customers in this space. The reception from our customers and partners has been outstanding. They were frankly blown away that Quantum has been able to develop an all new software defined storage platform to address this space. Participants are in the position of the company's business.

Speaker 2

And the innovation was recognized by the industry, with Myriad winning 3 industry awards, including this year's NAB will be recorded. We also introduced the latest version of our unified surveillance platform software at the ISC West tradeshow in March. The unified surveillance platform is the culmination of our strategy to combine the best software innovation from Pivot3 will be recognized with multiple industry awards and will be a key opportunity for us to build on the success we achieved in our video surveillance business participants are in the process of Myriad and the unified surveillance platform, Quantum now offers end to end solutions for the world's biggest unstructured data workloads, including AI and machine learning, corporate video for entertainment, call will be available on our website, branding and communications, video surveillance, massive data lakes for archiving and digital preservation

Speaker 3

participants are in the range of $1,000,000 and

Speaker 2

$1,000,000,000 and $1,000,000,000 and $1,000,000,000,000 participants are in the process of providing a

Speaker 3

detailed review of our financial results through forever data archiving, along

Speaker 2

with AI enabled data cataloging and monitoring software for managing and enriching unstructured data. Now, I'd like to turn it over to Ken to walk through our financial results in more detail. Participants are

Speaker 3

in the line with us.

Speaker 4

Thank you, Jamie. Please turn to Slide 7, and I'll provide an overview of the financial results starting with our fiscal Q4. As Jamie previously highlighted, strong operational execution in the Q4 of 2023 drove revenue above representing our strongest fiscal 4th quarter since fiscal 2017. This growth was led by another Strong quarter of secondary storage accounting for 42% of total revenue, up 1,000 basis points year over year and above our guidance. This represents a 2.5 times improvement compared with $400,000 in the prior year quarter, in the year over year trends.

Speaker 4

Our presentation of revenue has been enhanced to better show the performance of our primary and secondary storage systems from both perpetual license and subscription delivery. Services on this slide is highlighted as our traditional participants are in the range of $1,000,000 and does not include subscription. Primary storage revenue was $14,400,000 are down approximately 8% both year on year and sequentially. Secondary storage systems revenue increased 40% year over year and decreased 12% sequentially to $46,000,000 or approximately 44% of total revenue. Participants are in the range of $1,000,000 While our sales to hyperscale customers were down sequentially, the significant traction we have achieved in the hyperscale vertical participants have continued with 62% year over year growth.

Speaker 4

Looking at our services business, revenue in the 4th quarter was $29,900,000 down approximately 6% over year due to a continued decline revenue to begin to level off in the first half of this fiscal year. Next, in Devices and Media, while there was some sequential improvement, Revenue was down approximately $600,000 or 5% year over year. And finally, royalties in the quarter increased sequentially and year over year to $4,000,000 Moving to Slide 9, participants are in the range of $1,000,000,000 I want to provide a review of

Speaker 3

our annual recurring revenue and subscription metrics.

Speaker 4

Total annual recurring revenue or ARR for the full year 2023 was approximately 38% of our total revenue at $155,900,000 We are focused on improving our total ARR by maximizing our Quantum service opportunities to both our partners customers globally combined with our strategic shift to delivering more of our solutions via software and service subscriptions. Our subscription offering is a strong proof point of the success of our business transition efforts. The subscription portion of our total ARR increased approximately 81% year over year and approximately 20% sequentially in the 4th quarter to $13,400,000 Today, we have over 734 cumulative active customers with over 78% of our new software sales subscription, up from only 25% in the prior year. As a reminder, Quantum now has subscription offerings that expand our full portfolio with the exception of tape. Plus, we are very encouraged by the progress we are seeing in the renewal of initial subscriptions in early fiscal 2024.

Speaker 4

Now turning to Slide 10, let's review our 4th quarter GAAP results. GAAP gross margin for the 4th quarter was 30.2%, which reflected the unique product mix that we discussed last quarter as well as GAAP net loss in the 4th quarter was $13,600,000 or a loss of $0.15 per share. The increase we had a large life science deal in Europe that was dilutive to gross margin, but a strategic account for us to grow long term. Non GAAP operating expenses were $37,000,000 in the 4th quarter, which was flat year over year and an increase from the $34,500,000 last quarter. The expected sequential increase was due to end of year commissions, was $3,700,000 or a $0.04 loss per share.

Speaker 4

And finally, adjusted EBITDA in the Q4 was $1,000,000 and above our guidance. Now turning to Slide 12, I'll provide brief highlights of our fiscal 2023 results. Full year 2023 total revenues increased $40,000,000 or by approximately 11% to $412,800,000 Growth was driven by strong performance in secondary storage systems participants are participating with our hyperscale customers. For the full year 2020 adjusted EBITDA was essentially flat with the prior year at 11,800,000 participants are in the same period. This was largely a reflection of a higher mix of hyperscale business and supply chain related headwinds in the first half of the year, measures began subsiding and we anticipate this trend to continue into fiscal 2024.

Speaker 4

Moving to Slide 13 for a breakdown of fiscal year revenue results and the associated historical trends. Primary storage revenue for the full year 2023 was $57,600,000 compared to $60,700,000 in the prior year. Exiting fiscal year 2023, we are seeing positive signs of recovery of our primary storage systems going forward due to increased market demand, the introduction of our Myriad platform and our multiple year investment in our U. S. And international sales teams.

Speaker 4

Secondary storage systems revenue for the full year 2023 increased 48% or $175,500,000 participants are in the range of $1,000,000 to come down from fiscal 2023 levels. We expect our higher margin DXI, active scale object storage and Scalar tape storage solutions all to gain traction with large enterprise companies seeking a more affordable solution As repatriation of their data from cloud based environments continues to accelerate. Next, Looking at our traditional Quantum Services business without subscriptions totaled $123,600,000 in 2023. While end of life services on older tape products have impacted our services business over the last few years, We anticipate this stabilizing in the first half of fiscal year twenty twenty four. Total device and media revenue for 2023 decreased to $42,400,000 And finally, total royalties for the full year were $13,700,000 primarily reflecting the transition to the latest generation and higher capacity LTO-nine node.

Speaker 4

We anticipate this to stabilize to an annualized royalty rate of approximately $11,000,000 to $12,000,000 going forward. Now please turn to Slide 14 for an overview of debt and liquidity at the end of the quarter. Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash at the end of the 4th quarter were approximately $26,000,000 outstanding debt split between term and our revolver was $91,400,000 and our net debt position was $65,400,000 participants are ready to begin the Q1 of 2019. We anticipate our working capital will continue to improve and we are pleased with the progress on our overall cash conversion metrics.

Speaker 3

Participants are in the line with us.

Speaker 4

Heading into next year, we believe it is important to create greater strategic flexibility and have a clear plan for improved actions we've taken subsequent to the end of the quarter. Recently, we proactively secured an additional $15,000,000 of liquidity and received greater covenant flexibility from our current lenders to better position the company as we begin our recent product innovations to market. Participants are in the line with us. As Jamie discussed, our path to improve profitability is focused execution on improving revenue mix and driving global efficiencies. Improving revenue mix is a key lever to expanding gross margin and our earnings.

Speaker 4

This includes getting back to growth in our primary storage systems, participants are participating in our existing markets, but expanding into new enterprise verticals with our Myriad solution. We are seeing pipeline increase in large enterprise opportunities, including repatriation of data from the cloud and expansion of enterprise AI and machine learning programs. Equally important to driving improved revenue mix is the streamlining of our operations. While we have made progress over the last year, our work is not done. To that end, there are several self help global efficiency initiatives we are undertaking that I'd like to share with you.

Speaker 4

Participants are in the range of $1,000,000. First, improved operational efficiency. We are actively executing on several projects, including improving manufacturing and logistics productivity, clawing back inflationary impacts from the last couple of years with value engineering efforts, combined with a continued focus on reduced will be recorded in our press release and our focus areas, both domestically and internationally, including our growing international centers in Kuala Lumpur, Thank you, Mr. And Mr. Guadalajara.

Speaker 4

We believe investing more in focused locations will drive deeper collaboration, more effective processes, lower facility costs and create a more effective operation as we move forward as an organization. 3rd is a new cost reduction initiative. Turning to Slide 16, let me provide some insight on these efforts. Participants are in the process of executing our strategy. As we execute our vision and our strategy, it is important that we operate our company to drive profitable growth.

Speaker 4

Participants will result in an annualized net savings of approximately $14,000,000 fully realized exiting participants are in fiscal year 'twenty five. With a payback in less than 6 months, we anticipate a fiscal year 2024 non GAAP P and L savings of approximately $7,000,000 from our Q4 'twenty three exit run rate. Participants are in the process of executing on our financial results. As we move forward, we will continue to evaluate our performance, take measured actions as necessary, while balancing a strong customer experience and level of support that ensures we continue to deliver innovation and high quality of service to our customer. Participants are now ready to begin the Q1 and full fiscal year 20 participants are in the range of 24.

Speaker 4

First, we anticipate total revenue in the Q1 to be $97,000,000 plus or minus $3,000,000 we expect non GAAP adjusted net loss per share for the Q1 to be breakeven plus or minus $0.02 per share based participants are on an estimated 93,300,000 shares outstanding. Adjusted EBITDA for the Q1 is expected to be approximately $1,000,000 We also are introducing guidance for the full year 2024, With revenue expected to be $415,000,000 plus or minus $10,000,000 non GAAP adjusted EPS of $0.01 plus or minus $0.10 and adjusted EBITDA is expected to be at least $20,000,000 for the full year. Participants are ready to take questions. To add some color to our guidance, as I mentioned earlier, we do anticipate a decline in our secondary systems participants are in the range of $1,000,000 year on year due to declining hyperscale business. We also anticipate those declines being replaced with an improving revenue mix of higher margin primary in secondary systems.

Speaker 4

We foresee a stabilizing supply chain and decreasing inflationary environment combined with our global efficiency initiatives participants are in the position of the company's business to significantly higher earnings performance than our current outlook. We have a path and are working to accelerate our efforts participants are in the position of the company's

Speaker 3

financial results. I'm super excited to be here.

Speaker 4

The team is focused and extremely optimistic about our company, our transformation, participants are ready to take questions. I look forward to catching up with you all in the weeks months ahead. With that, I'll now hand the call back to Jamie for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Ken. We're truly excited about the future.

Speaker 3

Participants are in the range of

Speaker 2

$1,000,000 We finished the year with positive momentum and a major new product introduction in Myriad. We laid the foundation for end to end enterprise sales growth in the Americas and internationally. We see the supply chain stabilizing and inflationary pricing subsiding. We are executing on our transition to subscription ARR and we have strengthened our company with increased strategic and capital flexibility to execute on the growth of the business. We expect these developments, combined with the global efficiency plans, cost improvements will allow us to significantly increase earnings growth this year participants are participating in the process of continuing our journey to elevating this company back to the kind of earnings potential we and our shareholders expect.

Speaker 2

Participants are ready to open it up for questions. Operator?

Operator

Remove your question from the queue. Our first question is from George Iwanyc with Oppenheimer and Company. Please proceed.

Speaker 5

Call. Thank you for taking my question. Jamie, maybe you could expand a little bit about what you're seeing from a macro environment perspective. If you look at the various regions and verticals, are

Speaker 6

there any

Speaker 5

spots of weakness that you're still managing through?

Speaker 2

Yes. I mean, let me answer that across a couple of dimensions. Probably the first thing that is First and most obvious thing is that the supply chain environment has changed drastically. Parts availability is it's almost everything is in an all clear state. We're not paying up charges to get things.

Speaker 2

And in some cases, we're even seeing parts and materials getting discounted to incentivize them to move more quickly as people have loaded up inventory. The other things that I'm seeing, I am seeing our Hyperscale customers slow down a bit. I'm seeing them Still buying, but I would say the rate slowing down a bit, as they adjust their inventory levels and think about the outlook for their business or rethink that. And I'm also Seeing a newer trend, which is I'm seeing certain organizations Bringing large amounts of data back from the cloud, for a variety of reasons. All Some of them are just pure cost savings.

Speaker 2

I think if they plan to leave data in or archived data for 20, 30 or 40 years. I don't think they're looking at paying a monthly bill for 40 years, And they're looking at ways to use their own IT resources to do that. I'm also seeing people doing that For security reasons and to have greater control over important data. So I'm seeing a number of very large projects That involve just bringing data back from a variety of cloud and other outsourced models and bringing that under company's own control. But in terms of the macro, I am not seeing in the segments we share that we serve, I'm not seeing large pullback.

Speaker 2

All in the movie making business, I'm not seeing slowing down sports and entertainment. I'm not seeing a lot of slowdowns. All I'm seeing most enterprises buying at a normal and healthy clip. I think most large enterprises view IT as something that's very strategic and I think they're protecting those budgets. I think people are looking at AI as an area to gain efficiency I'll be happy to take your questions.

Speaker 2

So more and more investments in IT and I think people are looking at other areas if they have to cut costs. But Cutting IT, I think people are trying to protect those investments because I think most companies compete

Speaker 5

Thank you for that. And maybe just to be clear on the hyperscale side, with the demand you're seeing, have you fully worked through your backlog at this point and are you kind of at a steady state on the shippable backlog level?

Speaker 4

Yes. We're not giving the exact backlog level, but I can tell you it's about normalized for where we would be going year over year. The backlog that was super large that we were working off of that was mostly due to supply chain constraints That we've worked through over the last couple of quarters. So it's more back to normalized levels that we stated Before somewhere between the $10,000,000 to $20,000,000 range.

Speaker 5

Okay. And just finishing up with one last question for you, Ken. With the cost reduction activity that you're planning, is that mostly going to be taking place over the next several months and you get to an OpEx level that you see as being sustainable after the Q1 of the year.

Speaker 4

All Yes. It's going to happen really in over the next couple of weeks, the majority of it. And then we're going to see another slug coming in towards the back half of the year as we work through some international and regulatory locations. So I think that when you think about the profile of it, we're going to see about $7,000,000 of OpEx savings coming in, in this fiscal year based off of a Q4 'twenty three exit rate. And then we should see the other half of it coming in by the

Operator

our next question is from Craig Ellis with B. Riley. Please proceed.

Speaker 7

Yes. Thanks for taking the question. And Guys, I just want to say thanks for the very granular transparency in the deck, really helpful. So I'll just start with a revenue question. So clear on the trajectory overall with secondary storage customers at the hyperscale level, moderating their pace of purchase intensity, primary starting to pick up, Not looking for explicit guidance, but if we look beyond fiscal Q1, how does that dynamic play out In the fiscal second quarter, guys, does that mean we could see revenues step down one more time before we start to reaccelerate?

Speaker 7

Or how do we weigh the different gives and takes that you're seeing in the business?

Speaker 2

Yes. I mean, what we're trying to do, I hope it's Somewhat obvious, we need to bring our margins up.

Speaker 3

Participants are in the

Speaker 2

range of $1,000,000 and we bring our margins up based on the segments we sell to. So if you think about a hyperscale sale, that could be margins as low as 18%, Whereas you look at federal government sales could be as high as 70%. So that's a pretty big margin range. So we're putting a lot of emphasis on our high margin areas, software sales, North American sales, large enterprise sales, solution sales and trying to bring down or turn the volume down a bit on our low margin business, which are can be hyperscaler sales, certain OEM sales, tape media, things of that kind. So all I don't think you're going to see or trying to avoid kind of any kind of upheaval where you see massive changes, but we're trying to bring down all of the lower margin sales while bringing up the higher margin parts of our business.

Speaker 2

So we're doing that through our channel incentives, we're doing that through our sales compensation plan, we're doing it through our marketing efforts. And What we're trying to do throughout this year is keep the revenue flat While bringing the revenues up significantly in our high margin products, so you see things like primary storage Coming up as high as 25%. You see our enterprise sales coming up 25% to 30% As we bring down some of the larger pieces of our sales that are more, I wouldn't call them completely empty calories, but they're all of our employees, but they're certainly less nourishing than our higher margin business. So we're trying to manage that, so you won't see any big drops, But really shifting the mix towards higher margin products and services.

Speaker 4

Yes. And I'll just add on to that, Jamie, When you think about the services business over the last few years with the end of life runoff that we've seen, the team we had a change Some of these product life, product service life in some cases, and we do see that subsiding by the back half of the first half this year. So we should see going into the second half that stabilizing and potentially going back up. So if you think about our services business, just the legacy Quantum Service business, that carries anywhere from the high 50s to low 60s in margin. And so preserving that and then growing that again is a key part of our total ARR strategy.

Speaker 7

All That's real helpful. Nailed the first question and anticipated the second one on services. So moving on, talking a little bit further on OpEx. So It sounds like with the different levers that the company has, we'll be seeing $7,000,000 of benefit this year. Is that mostly in the back take the half of the fiscal year to get to that 7% can or would we see some of it as early as fiscal 2Q?

Speaker 4

All It's ongoing right now. So we started we had a lot of things going on this quarter, as you can see from our release, in order to get ourselves healthy and back in productivity mode. We have those elements going on right now, and so we would expect to start seeing benefit of that in Q2 And then heading into the back end of the year to pick up the rest of the 7. So I think you're going to see a little bit of health of that coming through in Q2 and the rest coming in Q3.

Speaker 7

Yes. One more model question and then on products. On the model side, Helpful to see what you've done with debt and taking it up another $15,000,000 to give you some operational flexibility. What does that mean for quarterly interest expense, Ken?

Speaker 4

We expect it to bump up a little bit on we've Looking at what's in the marketplace today, I think that we worked with our existing lenders to get a very favorable deal for where we were at on a blended basis. Our debt only goes up 67 bps. So I think it's a really good deal overall. So we're only expecting to see a little bit more interest payment in the year.

Speaker 7

Got it. And then finally, back to you, Jamie. So when Myriad was announced, we spoke and you were very excited about it. And then It was richly awarded at NAB, as you noted. What is your sales team hearing on potential Myriad uptake as we move through fiscal 'twenty three and how are you thinking about potential revenue impacts to the business either in late fiscal 'twenty three or fiscal 'twenty four On more of a qualitative than quantitative basis perhaps at this point.

Speaker 3

Yes.

Speaker 2

So as you said, we announced the product. We have put it in front of analysts and gotten all a lot of praise around the product. We are now pitching it to customers And certain customers are starting to install it and run benchmark testing with it, run different use case testing and we're extremely encouraged. What we're learning is the product is very unique. It's much more modern than the products that we're competing against.

Speaker 2

So it has many more capabilities participants are in very modern AI and ML use cases. It has certain features and capabilities that make it very unique for AI and ML, especially including integrated metadata tagging And we're pretty encouraged. And the other thing that we're really excited about, we may have underestimated Is that every time we would sell Myriad as a high speed analytics or high speed platform, it usually has a data lake that is a form of secondary storage Where data waiting to be analyzed resides and we're seeing that as Every time we sell Myriad, we expect to sell active scale or active scale cold storage as the data lake and then also sell management software participants are moving data from the data lake into the high speed analytics area and then back And doing metadata tagging, doing data classification, doing different forms of analysis. And so all We're really seeing it evolve into where a Myriad sale would typically drag with it active scale cold storage and likely also drag with it CatDV. So it's almost like an analytic ecosystem that we would sell.

Speaker 2

So That's been really encouraging to see that develop. And in terms of Looking forward, my best view into that is by watching the pipeline. And I would say it's the The fastest growing pipeline we have inside the company right now. So I think it's as we suspected, it's The fastest growing market in storage and you can see it by its pipeline growth relative to other products. So we're pretty encouraged, but at the same time, it's a new product and we've got to get it through its initial launch, get it through all of its trials and then get it moving in the market.

Speaker 2

But yes, I will it will have revenue impact this year. We've modeled it very conservatively Until we start to see POs coming in, but there'll be revenue impact in this fiscal for sure.

Speaker 7

That's really helpful. Thanks, Jamie. Thank you, Ken.

Operator

Our next question is from Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street panelists, please proceed.

Speaker 8

Hey, Jamie, the cadence of business in Given the success on the numbers, I would anticipate that you saw kind of a normal February up from January and March up from February. Is that how things played out?

Speaker 2

Yes. Typically, January February are very slow for us, especially in Europe. And then you really hit the buying season in March. And that's really what we saw. Things really accelerated in March for us.

Speaker 2

That always puts a lot of pressure on the supply chain that build and ship that quickly. All And but yes, it slowed January and very rapid March. And to add to it,

Speaker 4

I mean, this was the best Fiscal Q4, we've had since 2017. So if you look at the numbers that were coming through, a lot of that was aided by the improving supply chain, also that when these things came in, in March, historically, we had to just sit back on it and ship it back.

Speaker 2

They go to backlog.

Speaker 4

Yes, it goes straight to backlog. And so with this Loosing the supply chain and our improved operational performance this quarter, we were able to get that out the door and that's why you saw the higher end beat.

Speaker 2

Yes, that was a big difference. I mean, a year ago, we'd order a product and it could be a simple product like a server And it would be months to get a network card. And now we order a server and it can ship in like 2 days. We get an order and servers can be at the customer site in a week to 2 weeks. It's just a very and not in all cases, but That wasn't even thinkable a year ago and now products are just shipping off the shelf a lot like A lot more normalized and that had a big impact.

Speaker 8

Got it. And then for Q1 outlook is A little bit below where I was modeling, anything that you saw in April or May regarding kind of the normal seasonality here? Did we have maybe a tough comp on the hyperscaler side from a year ago?

Speaker 2

Yes. I think that's probably Where you see things happening, the hyperscalers are it's a big part of our revenue and it's slowing down a bit. And whereas a year to 2 years ago, We're the only company that had a hyperscaler tape offer. Now 2 other companies now offer something similar to us. And you can imagine through the supply chain the pressures, the hyperscalers are want to be sourcing from multiple vendors to manage their risk.

Speaker 2

So we're sharing some of that load with other Buyers as well.

Speaker 4

Yes. In the Investor deck online, we've tried to give a little bit more color when you look at the verticals of how we go at it. And so Hyperscaler is going to be less of a mix when we look at this fiscal year. Obviously, that helps with Total rotation for margin as we talked about, but on the near quarters that's going to be some pressure I'll turn the call back over to the top line, but we would expect the margins to improve to offset that.

Speaker 8

Okay. And then on the you talked about gross margins rising from the all It was 35.5 percent was the non GAAP gross margin in Q4. What are you targeting by year end?

Speaker 4

Well, for the full year in this mix, I'd love to see us somewhere between 37% to 38% And total gross margins, and if you look at that, that's a number of things that are driving that. 1 is the improved mix that we have. Number 2, as Jamie was saying, the overhead and the increased pricing from the inflationary pressures we saw for goods and services, we expect that to come down pretty dramatically. But also our manufacturing organization, Eric is running that and I think he's done a really great job of finding efficiencies within the total work and finding ways to bring our costs down from Will cost manufacturing. And so I think you combine those 3 together, we're feeling really positive about the margin rotation this year.

Speaker 4

The second piece, and I don't want to discount it, some of these actions that we're taking, this isn't just an OpEx action. All There's things that we're doing within our margin profile too, specifically within our services business. We really didn't do a good job of keeping the chip that Jamie put in there with Ross and the team, really excited about what Ross is doing in the products and services that we're going to be offering to customers for an uplift. That service mix change will also help us out. But then you look at what he's doing with the org.

Speaker 4

The synergies that we can get from globalization and moving org to lower cost regions to help service and maintain these product sets, That's going to get us to a much better margin position going forward.

Speaker 8

Okay. And then last question is on the balance sheet. Obviously, you made the borrowing move after the close of the fiscal year. Do you have a pro form a Cash and debt balance maybe as of the end of May

Speaker 1

or whenever you took the loan out?

Speaker 4

I don't have that To give right now, but we can probably make that public. The way we carry forward, because I didn't want to do a walk of what we actually did during this quarter. But if you think about the dollars taken down, it's probably plus or minus another 10,000,000

Speaker 8

Okay. Great. Thanks for taking my questions.

Operator

Our next question is from Neha Key with Northland Capital Markets. Please proceed.

Speaker 2

Yes. Thank you.

Speaker 6

So with respect to the guidance, which I think is characterized as being down seasonally, all But then you also talked about how you expect hypercellars to be down year over year for you guys as well. So is it fair to say that you're expecting secondary storage of the main components of your down Q review for the June Q?

Speaker 4

Yes. Listen, if we categorize it with hyperscaler in secondary the way we do today, Yes, secondary is going to be down Q on Q. But I think that we're expecting to see some improvement out of the primary business this quarter, Which is going to help the cause, but also, you're going to see services coming down slightly. As I said it's going to be more towards the end of Q2 that you're going to see that stabilizing. So that's going to be down a little bit in the quarter too, but it's primarily the secondary portion of it that and the hyperscaler segment within that, that is the decrease.

Speaker 6

Okay. And given that the hyperscale portion is relatively low calorie, Why then and also given that the March Q had this negative impact from the EBITDA dilutive Lighthouse I'm a little bit surprised to see the EBITDA guidance effectively be flattish Q over Q. Can you walk us through those dynamics there?

Speaker 4

Well, I think when we come into the quarter, we're looking to see somewhere around that 36% to 37% gross margin. And again, all these things that we see movement on, there is still some mix of hyperscaler in there that is going to have an impact on the lower revenue number. So It's purely just a number of going from a 105 down to a 1 to that 97 range that we're in. But then you have to add on these actions that we're anticipating, we didn't start them until this week. So I'm still carrying a little bit higher OpEx in the 1st two quarters, a little bit higher selling expenses in the 1st 2 months, I mean, I apologize.

Speaker 4

In the 1st 2 months, including some higher sales and marketing in those 1st 2 months that is dragging that down.

Speaker 6

I see. Okay. And can you guys size what your expectation is for hyperscalers in terms of the year over year decline for fiscal year 'twenty four?

Speaker 4

We don't want to give the specific piece of it, but I can tell you it's going to be pretty significant drop year over year. It's probably going to be normalizing a little bit more towards what we did in 'twenty two versus what we did number wise in 'twenty three.

Speaker 6

Got it. That's very helpful. And then you did mention that you are seeing all Pipeline increase from large enterprises. That's really great to hear that. Can you give a little bit more detail as far as you gave workloads, but you didn't talk About the products that you're actually seeing for.

Speaker 6

Yes.

Speaker 2

We're seeing a couple of things. One is we're putting a lot of emphasis On backup and our DXI product, which is a deduplication and compression backup target. So we're putting seeing a lot of large deals there. I think we said in our prepared remarks, We did north of a $10,000,000 deal with a Fortune 50 bank, with DXI. So Seeing those kind of large deals come together is good to see in that business.

Speaker 2

It's probably our highest margin product. The other business that is accelerating very quickly and a little bit unexpectedly is the active scale cold storage product, Which is essentially for storing enormous amounts of data for very long periods of time. And we're seeing people use this for all storing movie and film footage, we're seeing people store video surveillance footage, Autonomous vehicle footage, just anyone who had just large sums of data, the national labs, that they want to keep for long periods the time. So that offer has really begun accelerating and we have probably over 10 deals in our pipeline that are over $5,000,000 So they are large, large, usually north of 100 petabyte, often north of 500 petabytes, Just enormous data repositories. So that product is gaining a lot of traction.

Speaker 2

And then StorNext for non media and entertainment use cases, analytic use cases, analyzing large amounts of unstructured data, being just a High speed file system for unstructured data and also strengthen its traditional area media and entertainment. So StorNext is also a key part of that. But those are the products we're really placing in the enterprise, ActiveScale, StornX and DXI.

Speaker 3

Participants are now open.

Operator

Our next question is from John Fichthorn with Dialog Capital. Please proceed.

Speaker 9

Yes. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. A lot of things sound good. And as we sit here and yet it's hard to kind of parse some of that out in your numbers.

Speaker 9

And I think it's because you've got a lot of different moving parts in your business. You've got some things with bad margins that were growing and some things with good margins that weren't growing and A lot of that's now reversing in theory going forward. You've said some things like primary storage Could be 25% this year. I didn't know whether that was 25% growth or 25% of revenues. I don't know if 25% growth.

Speaker 9

25% growth, great. And I assume you're factoring Myriad into that and so that is in the guidance for this year maybe conservatively. Participants. So I guess my first comment, you can comment on it, but it isn't necessarily intended to be a question is, it'd be great if you could, On the next quarter or next year, think about ways to if you're now focused on EBITDA over top line, which is what it sounds like you are effectively, If you could break that out at a segment level so that we can really kind of analyze what you guys are looking at when you're driving the business. So we can measure Whether you're succeeding or not, because it's very difficult to kind of look at the numbers now and know whether you're accomplishing your goals to a large degree.

Speaker 9

All On the gross margin side specifically Okay. Yes, go ahead.

Speaker 4

No, I just want to comment. I heard that feedback from you and others when we were talking about it. I'll And I encourage folks to look at our investor deck that we put out there this quarter on top of our earnings deck. So we do give a little bit of a color breakout The segments in the verticals of what we're doing in a little bit more detail to help with that rotational view. You just gave me a good in to give a little advertisement there to go folks to go check out that investor deck.

Speaker 9

Cool. I have not seen it. I was looking at your earnings deck here. But you mentioned for gross margins, the year end 37 to 38 all And you're kind of coming into the quarter 36% to 37%. I would have kind of expected a little bit more gross margin improvement.

Speaker 9

Did I hear that wrong? Or is that what the target is? And if so, why is it so anemic? And then further, like Where do you think you can get to a gross margin over what time period?

Speaker 4

Yes. So part of this and you said it at the top of your comments was around the rotation and a lot of moving parts. So we still have this declining services business that we have to work through. There's still a nice slug of hyperscale that is in there that we're rotating out the hyperscale and we're rotating back in The primary and the secondary product sets that Jamie was talking about earlier. So you have those Three moving parts all happening at the same time there, that as we take action going into the back half of the year with all the cost savings that we're looking at, it's going to start rotating back up in a positive way.

Speaker 4

So I think all It's just a matter of mix and rotation back up to get to the higher levels. So if we can start rotating and we get towards that higher end of the range all Can we see more of the primary and secondary come on as we anticipate? Because the guidance I was giving was more on that midpoint. As we start rotating more The higher end, I would expect those numbers to rotate up more into the 38% to 39%, maybe starting to peak at 40% as we get that rotation.

Speaker 9

So you said peak at 40 and I just want to make sure you're what you're saying is I

Speaker 4

thought peak at 40.

Speaker 9

Look So you can start to see $40,000,000 at the end of this fiscal year is what you're hoping for?

Speaker 4

If we get to the higher end with the rotation of primary and Myriad Starts picking up, absolutely. And then longer term,

Speaker 9

what do you See yourself building towards with gross margin, like looking out I'm not looking for specific guidance for FY 'twenty five, but just kind of curious, You're focused on I mean, is the Myriad gross margin 60% and is the things you're growing into as opposed to moving away from, Where do you see that gross margin getting to longer term? Look at this business.

Speaker 4

Well, in that investor deck that we put out there, we restated kind of what We're going for those goals, right? We want to see 45% plus gross margin. In the primary business with Myriad alone, the margins in that business and we think about the rotation traditionally are high 40s, low 50s. With this Myriad product line coming we want to see that rotation continuing more into the 50s. The secondary business, once you pull out hyperscale, it's a pretty healthy business, right, all Especially with DXI, it's one of our largest margin products that we have out there.

Speaker 4

Those underlying products, that can be carrying mid-40s type of gross margin to it too. Getting services healthy, services dipping down in the mid-50s, high-50s, not where we want it to be. That business can be up into the 60s also. The other piece that we really didn't talk about a lot, but we are really, really stressing The amount of subscription and how we're rotating there. Going from 25% a year ago of new sales being subscription Over 78% of our sales being subscription based now and looking at a 60 plus percent margin with that, that's an awesome rotation that the sales team is doing there and the great traction that we're seeing.

Speaker 4

So I guess, John, what I'm trying to say is the proof points that we're driving and why we feel confident we can get back to the mid-40s is all in the rotation of the primary coming back, driving the subscription portion of that versus being a one time sale And then getting services healthy again and having that be in the 60s, those elements of those three things combined with the self help of the lower cost of production, that's why we feel confident that the trends going out of 2024 into 2025, 26 etcetera, We can get back up into the 40s plus.

Speaker 9

So help me just, last question, drill down on this Software subscription concept, it would seem like if you've seen the attach rate, I don't know what else to call it, go from, call it, 20s to 70s, That I would see a higher revenue jump than I have year over year. Look, the revenue growth is great. It's still a small number though. And so if I'm all of a sudden getting 70% of my sales with attaching to a software sale, why am I not seeing that a double digit quarterly revenue number, for example, and where can that get to? So maybe flesh that out a little bit for us if you would.

Speaker 4

All Well, I want to break the 2 out as I was very specific on the new sales that were coming in. We still have a lot of legacy sales. So think of it of a forty-sixty split, 40% being new sales to new customers, those are coming through a subscription, where the add on to legacy customers That were already in perpetual, they tend to want to add on in perpetual. So we got to get that rotation for both new and legacy into the subscription side, John. I don't know if that answers your question, but Encryption side, John.

Speaker 4

I don't know if that answers your question, but that's the bigger point.

Speaker 9

Got you. So it's the new sales as opposed to the legacy that is that. So you're succeeding in new customers and new sales. They have now a very high attach rate. And Does that blend increases versus legacy that will drive the growth?

Speaker 4

Spot on, John.

Speaker 9

All right. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Participants are in the process of answering questions. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for closing comments.

Speaker 3

Participants are ready for questions.

Speaker 2

All right. I'd like to thank everyone for attending today. And if you have further questions or want to speak to us directly, Ken and I are always available. Thank you, everyone.

Operator

Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation.

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Earnings Conference Call
Quantum Q4 2023
00:00 / 00:00