Sanjay Mehrotra
President and Chief Executive Officer at Micron Technology
Thank you, Farhan. Good afternoon, everyone. Micron delivered record quarterly revenue with strong profitability and free cash flow, enabled by our team's excellent execution and our industry-leading technology and product portfolio. Micron achieved revenue records in the auto, industrial and networking markets, and in SSDs for both data center and client. Our NAND business delivered record quarterly revenue, and our Embedded Business Unit and Storage Business Unit NAND revenues also hit all-time highs.
Our 1-alpha DRAM and 176-layer NAND ramps are several quarters ahead of the industry and progressing well as we continue to qualify new products that use these nodes. The Micron team delivered these excellent results despite supply chain challenges and COVID-19 control measures in China, which impacted our business on both the demand side and the supply side. There are consumer demand and inventory-related headwinds impacting the industry and consequently our fiscal Q4 outlook. However, we remain confident about the secular demand for memory and storage, the attractiveness of our market opportunity, Micron's excellent competitive position and strong execution capabilities, and our cross-cycle financial model.
Micron is leading the industry in both DRAM and NAND technology, and we are also well-poised to continue this lead into calendar 2023. In DRAM, our 1-alpha node ramp is several quarters ahead of the industry, and in fiscal Q3, 1-alpha represented the largest DRAM node in our shipment mix. Our newest node, 1-beta, is on track to ramp in manufacturing by the end of calendar 2022. In NAND, our industry-leading 176-layer node continues to grow in mix of sales, having previously reached the majority of our NAND bit shipments in fiscal Q2. This technology node is contributing to a competitive cost structure across our product portfolio, and in F Q3, we achieved several important 176-layer product qualifications.
We are also making excellent progress on our 232-layer node and expect to ramp production by the end of calendar 2022. Across the industry, there are cost challenges stemming from supply chain and inflationary pressures; however, we continue to expect our cost reductions to outpace those of the industry this year, driven by excellent productivity improvements in our fabs and the well executed ramp of our world-class 1-alpha DRAM and 176-layer NAND nodes.
Despite COVID-19 control measures in China that created challenges for the global electronics supply chain, Micron's strong execution enabled record assembly output in fiscal Q3, supporting record quarterly revenue. However, these COVID-19 control measures in China impacted our outsourced assembly and test subcontractors and led to some impact to fiscal Q3 results.
Now turning to our end markets. AI, ongoing cloud adoption, EVs and the ubiquitous connectivity offered by 5G are strong secular demand drivers, enabling the memory and storage industry to outpace the broader semiconductor industry. Micron's product portfolio has become significantly stronger, and we have established product momentum in several attractive growth markets. We are also driving a portfolio mix shift toward higher growth and more stable markets.
2021's 55 to 45 revenue split in favor of the more mature mobile, PC and consumer markets is expected to shift, by fiscal 2025, to a 38 to 62 split in favor of the higher growth data center, auto, industrial, networking and graphics markets. Several of these end markets also exhibit more stable profitability. Our fiscal Q3 new product launches and customer qualifications reflect solid execution toward this portfolio transformation.
Data center is the largest market for memory and storage today, and the rapid growth of AI and memory-intensive workloads ensures that it will sustain strong growth through the end of the decade. Corporations around the world are investing in digitization and extracting more value from data, and this approach remains one of the primary ways of improving efficiency and driving competitive advantage.
Data center fiscal Q3 revenue grew by a double-digit percentage sequentially and well over 50% year-over-year. Data center end demand is expected to remain strong in the second half of calendar 2022, driven by robust cloud capex growth. Despite the strong end demand, we are seeing some enterprise OEM customers wanting to pare back their memory and storage inventory due to non-memory component shortages and macroeconomic concerns.
In fiscal Q3, we achieved several product and customer milestones. We began volume shipments of HBM2E, one of the fastest growing product categories, driven by the growth in AI and machine-learning workloads. Micron continues to lead in DDR5; however, delays in the rollout of new server CPU platforms have slowed the industry DDR5 ramp versus prior expectations. In data center SSDs, we more than doubled revenue year-over-year and achieved a new revenue record in the fiscal third quarter.
We are excited by the strong reception of our industry-leading 176-layer data center NVMe SSDs, which are already in volume production, and in fiscal Q3, we completed qualifications with three OEMs. We recently launched the world's first 176-layer data center SATA SSD, which will help sustain our industry leadership in this product category.
In fiscal Q3, we achieved client revenue growth in the mid-teens percentage range sequentially, driven by DRAM shipments and share gains in client SSD. A number of factors have impacted consumer PC demand in various geographies. As a consequence, our forecast for calendar 2022 PC unit sales is now expected to decline by nearly 10% year-over-year from the very strong unit sales in calendar 2021. This compares to an industry and customer forecast of roughly flat calendar 2022 PC unit sales at the start of this calendar year.
We expect PC per unit memory and storage content growth trends to remain healthy in calendar 2022, driven by a mix shift toward enterprise PCs and the increasing content in new architectures such as Apple's M1 Ultra platform, which features up to 128 gigabyte of DRAM. Micron has a strong product portfolio and is well positioned in this market. We are leading the DDR5 transition and expect our DDR5 revenue to continue to grow as multiple client customers launch next-generation notebooks. Increased availability of non-memory bill of materials will also improve our ability to ship DDR5-based modules. In addition, we continue to lead the industry in client QLC SSD technology and expect QLC to increase as a percentage of 176-layer bit output in fiscal Q4 and beyond.
In fiscal Q3, graphics revenue grew at a strong double-digit percentage rate sequentially and year-over-year, driven by the strength of Micron's products and customer relationships. Micron continues to be the industry performance leader in graphics. We announced volume shipments of our new 1z 16Gb GDDR6X in fiscal Q3, which features twice the capacity and up to 15% higher performance than the previous 1y generation. The 24 gigabyte per second peak bandwidth of GDDR6X is made possible by Micron's groundbreaking PAM4 signal transmission technology. No other memory vendor offers this capability or level of performance. We also began volume shipments of our newest 1z 16 gigabyte GDDR6 product to our largest graphics customers.
Fiscal Q3 mobile revenue declined slightly year-over-year but grew quarter-over-quarter due to strong customer partnerships and product execution. Smartphone unit sales expectations have declined meaningfully for calendar 2022. We are now projecting smartphone unit volume to decline by mid single-digits percent range year-over-year in calendar '22, well below the industry and customer expectation earlier in the year of mid single-digit percentage growth.
5G unit sales are expected to grow and reach approximately 50% penetration of the smartphone unit TAM this year. The growth of 5G units will also drive higher DRAM and NAND content. We continue to deliver key mobile customer qualifications and strong mobile product ramps on our leading nodes. In fiscal Q3, we expanded our 1-alpha LPDRAM leadership with the industry's first ramp of 1-alpha LPDDR5. In addition, 176-layer NAND made up over 90% of our mobile NAND bit shipments.
Micron is the market share and quality leader in the fast-growing auto and industrial end markets, and in fiscal Q3, we achieved record revenue in both. These markets also exhibit higher stability in their gross margin profile through the cycle. Auto growth has been driven by robust demand that remains constrained by auto unit production. We see robust auto content growth as OEMs adopt significant architectural changes to support ADAS, infotainment and electric vehicles. In fiscal Q3, there were announcements of several new EVs featuring content-rich ADAS, including the Ford F-150 Lightning, Mercedes EQS SUV and EQE sedan, and BMW iX1.
We expect the auto market to have a strong long-term bit growth CAGR in DRAM and NAND that is roughly twice the CAGR of overall DRAM and NAND markets, and consequently our strength in this market will become increasingly important. Industrial IoT achieved record revenue in fiscal Q3, demonstrating broad-based growth with various end market applications. We continue to see tailwinds from secular growth drivers as industrial customers invest in increasing factory automation and digitization.
Turning to the market outlook. Our expectations for calendar 2022 industry bit demand growth have moderated since our last earnings call. Near the end of fiscal Q3, we saw a significant reduction in near-term industry bit demand, primarily attributable to end demand weakness in consumer markets, including PC and smartphone. These consumer markets have been impacted by the weakness in consumer spending in China, the Russia-Ukraine war, and rising inflation around the world.
COVID-19 control measures in China have exacerbated supply chain challenges for some customers, and the macroeconomic environment is also creating some caution among certain customers. Several customers, primarily in PC and smartphone, are adjusting their inventories, and we expect these adjustments to take place mostly in the second half of calendar 2022. While end demand in the mobile, PC and consumer markets has weakened, cloud, networking, automotive and industrial markets are showing resilience.
Due to weaker demand in the second half of calendar 2022, we now expect year-over-year calendar 2022 industry bit demand growth to be below the long-term CAGRs of mid-to-high-teens percentage for DRAM and high-20s percentage for NAND. Despite the near-term weakness, secular demand trends remain strong, and our view of long-term DRAM and NAND bit demand CAGR remains unchanged from prior expectations.
Turning to supply. Given the change in market conditions, we are taking immediate action to reduce our supply growth trajectory. To protect profitability, we will maintain pricing discipline, manage capacity utilization, and use inventory as a buffer to navigate through this period of demand weakness. Additionally, we are planning for a reduced level of bit supply growth in fiscal 2023 and will use inventory to supply part of the market demand next year. This approach will enable us to reduce wafer fab equipment capex for fiscal year 2023 versus our prior plans, and we now expect our fiscal 2023 wafer fab equipment capex to decline year-over-year.
Overall industry supply is also being impacted. Manufacturing equipment shipment delays, challenges for some in the industry in ramping new nodes of technology and DRAM supply discipline evident in the industry are all expected to limit supply growth over the next few quarters. These supply reductions will help offset some impact of the weaker demand.
I will now turn it over to Mark Murphy, Micron's Chief Financial Officer.
