Q4 2008 Smart Modular Technologies Earnings Conference Call - Final.(Broadcast transcript)

OPERATOR: Welcome to the Smart Modular Q4 fiscal year 2008 conference call. During today's presentation all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions. (Operator Instructions)

This conference call is being recorded today, Thursday September 25 2008. At this point, I would now like to turn the conference over to Suzanne Craig. Please go ahead.

SUZANNE CRAIG, IR, BLUESHIRT GROUP: Good afternoon and thank you to everyone for joining us on today's earnings conference call to discuss Smart Modular Technologies fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2008 financial results. Iain MacKenzie, President and Chief Executive Officer; Barry Zwarenstein, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Michael Gennaro, Principal Financial Officer join me on today's call.

Before we begin, I would like to make the following Safe Harbor Statement. During the course of this conference call, Iain, Barry or Mike may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future conditions or events concerning our future business, our current and new products and services and our performance, the size and strength of our market and/or the future financial performance and outlook of the Company.

These statements are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. You should review the management's discussion and analysis and related risk factors affecting future results contained in the forms and reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission including the Company's 10-K for fiscal year 2007 and its 10-Q for the first, second and third quarters of fiscal 2008.

We caution you that such statements are just projections. Accordingly, our future results may differ materially from such projections. These forward-looking statements are made as of today and Smart does not currently intend and has no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. The fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2008 earnings press release is available on the Company's website at smartm.com or you may call our investor relations office at 415-217-7722 and we will fax you a copy.

Please note that non-GAAP venture results presented exclude charges related to restructuring, goodwill impairment, in-process R&D and other infrequent or unusual items as well as stock based compensation. Please refer to the non-GAAP information section of our earnings press release for further details.

Our agenda for the call today is as follows. Iain MacKenzie will discuss key highlights from the quarter and fiscal year and Barry Zwarenstein will review the quarter on from a financial perspective and provide the forward-looking guidance. Our live Q&A session will follow.

An audio replay of this call will be available for two weeks by accessing the investor relations page at smartm.com or by dialing 1800-405-2236 and using the pass code, smart. Now I would like to introduce Iain MacKenzie, President and CEO of Smart Modular Technologies.

IAIN MACKENZIE, PRESIDENT AND CEO, SMART MODULAR TECHNOLOGIES: Thanks Suzanne and welcome to everyone on the call. The fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 marked the close of an exceptionally challenging year for Smart. My comments today will be organized as follows.

First I will recap our financial results and then review the restructuring program and the latest developments in our various business groups. I will next turn the call over to our new Senior Vice President and CFO, Barry Zwarenstein, who I'm very pleased to have on board as part of our executive team.

Let me first recap our capital results. In the face of a continued decline in memory component pricing combined with a worsening economy here in the US, we reported fourth quarter fiscal 2008 net sales of approximately $161 million.

Gross profit of about $25 million and net income on a non-GAAP basis of $0.05 per share. The full fiscal year net sales totaled $670 million (inaudible) gross profit totaled approximately $120 million and non-GAAP net income totaled $35 million or $0.55 per share.

Industry reports of DRAM factory closures, manufacturing capacity cutbacks, reduced capital expenditures and increasing DVRC applications should contribute to an eventual return to improve market conditions. In the meantime as we described in the press release, we took decisive action performing a Company-wide review of operations resulting in the restructuring program announced on September 10 which is designed to take prudent and early action to help us remain profitable in fiscal 2009.

Specifically, this program when completed is expected to result in an annualized cash savings of $11.8 million. The program encompasses a 19% reduction of our global workforce and is expected to be completed by the end of the next fiscal quarter.

In addition, we continue to serve major markets including China and India, but have discontinued our manufacturing presence in China and India where business conditions are too price competitive for us to grow profitably. We're also closing our Dominican Republic facility and consolidating that business into our facilities in Malaysia and Puerto Rico.

In connection with this restructuring program, we expect to incur a total of $3.3 million in pretax charges. Of this total, $1.9 million were recognized in the fourth fiscal quarter and the majority of the balance will be recorded in the first half of fiscal 2009.

We expect this plan will help to increase our earnings power by a combination of cost reduction measures and the reallocation of resources to higher growth businesses. We continue to see the results of our investments and our expanding family of high value solid-state drive products and growing and embedded and display business as well as one of the industry's broadest portfolios of specialized DRAM modules for OEM customers around the world.

Turning to a review of our various business lines, I will first address our DRAM business which represented about 83% of our fiscal fourth quarter and 85% of our full year net sales. The world publicized downturn in the DRAM market is characterized by some of the worst seen in 15 years.

Since a substantial portion of our products are integrated into products ultimately sold into the US market, the microeconomic climate domestically has clearly impacted our sales. That said, from a technology standpoint, we're very well-positioned.

Intel still dominates the server market in terms of market share. So whatever it does drives memory demand. We expect that the recent release of its (inaudible) Xeon 7400 six-core CPU will drive more demand for our high-density fully buffered DIMMs as more processing power typically requires a greater amount of memory.

We have already expanded our product line in this area with lower power, higher density offerings so we were well aligned. In addition, Intel's Nehalem-based platform is still on track to be released in early calendar 2009 which should bode well for our high-density DDR3 modules.

We're also seeing growing interest from networking and telecom customers for small form factor DVRC solutions, namely high-density SO-DIMMs, Mini-DIMMs and very low-profile DIMMs. After completing qualification cycles, we …