Micron Technology, Inc.

Hello, thank you for standing by and welcome to Micron's first quarter 2022 financial call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Farhana Mehd. Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to Micron Technologies Fiscal First Quarter 2022 Financial Conference Call. On the call with me today are Sanjay Mehrotra, President and CEO, and Dave Zinsner, Chief Financial Officer. Today's call will be approximately 60 minutes in length, This call, including the audio and slides, is also being webcast from our investor relations website at investors.micron.com. In addition, our website contains the earnings press release and the prepared remarks filed a short while ago. Today's discussion of financial results will be presented on a non-GAAP financial basis, unless otherwise specified. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures may be found on our website. As a reminder, a webcast replay will be available on our website later today. We encourage you to monitor our website at micron.com throughout the quarter for the most current information on the company, including information on the various financial conferences that we will be attending. You can follow us on Twitter at MicronTech. As a reminder, the matters we will be discussing today include forward-looking statements, These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made today. We refer you to the documents we filed with the SEC, specifically our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q, for a discussion of risks that may affect our future results. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements. We are under no duty to update any of the forward-looking statements after today's date to conform these statements to actual results. I will now turn the call over to Sanjay.

Thank you, Farhan. Good afternoon, everyone. Micron delivered outstanding results in Fiscal Q1, achieving strong year-over-year revenue growth and solid profitability. Our strong start to the year and our product portfolio momentum keep us on track to deliver record revenue and robust profitability in fiscal 2022. We are rapidly ramping our industry-leading 1-alpha DRAM and 176-layer NAND products and achieving excellent yields, and these products are now shipping across our major end markets. We achieved significant product advancements and customer wins, including launching our first DDR5 solution, introducing our vertically integrated Gen4 NVMe data center SSD, validating the world's first low-power DDR5X with MediaTek, and shipping our GDDR6 for AMD's Radeon RX 6000 graphics card. The secular demand for memory and storage, along with Micron's focus on building our technology and product leadership and deepening our customer relationships, continues to strongly position us to create significant shareholder value in fiscal year 22 and beyond. With a successful ramp of 1-alpha DRAM and 176-layer NAND products across major N markets, we are several quarters ahead of the industry in market deployment of these leading-edge process technologies. The combination of 1-alpha and 1-Z DRAM nodes represents the majority of our DRAM bit production, and 176-layer NAND now accounts for the majority of our NAND bit production. Our strong execution on these advanced nodes sets us up for the successful fiscal year 22. We are also investing to scale our technology for the next decade. We are planning for volume DRAM production on EUV in 2024 with our one gamma node. Integrating EUV with our existing multi-patterning immersion lithography expertise will help us maintain DLAM technology leadership for many years to come. And in NAND, we have successfully transitioned to replacement gate and have a roadmap to scale for several generations while leveraging our leadership in CMOS under array and QLC to maintain a bit density leadership. In addition to being a technology leader, Micron is the industry quality leader with two-thirds of our customers ranking us number one in quality. As a technology and quality leader and as an innovation partner with strong global manufacturing network, we have become a strategic supplier to our customers. Amid ongoing semiconductor supply chain challenges, Micron has leveraged our deep relay partnerships with customers and suppliers to support DRAM, NAND, and Nord supply continuity. On the customer side, we are seeing greater commitment and collaboration on supply planning, including the use of long-term agreements. Today, over 75 percent of our revenue comes from volume-based annual agreements, a significant increase from five years ago when they accounted for around 10 percent of our revenue. On the supplier side, we have entered into strategic agreements to secure supply of certain components that we need to manufacture our products. As a result of these agreements, the current tight supply of these components is expected to gradually improve for us throughout calendar 2022. Now let us review our end markets. Demand for memory and storage is broad, extending from the data center to the intelligent edge and to a growing diversity of user devices. Memory and storage revenue has outpaced the rest of the semiconductor industry over the last two decades, and we expect this trend to continue for years to come, thanks to AI, 5G, and EV adoption. In addition, the build-out of immersive virtual worlds, often referred to as the metaverse, will offer even more opportunity due to the intensive use of significant memory and storage in these applications. Our team's execution on strengthening our product portfolio has been outstanding, With several new product launches and customer qualifications in FQ1, achievements we are very proud of. I will highlight some of these achievements as I discuss our end markets. Data center is the largest market for memory and storage, and we expect it to outpace the broader memory and storage market over the next decade. Memory and storage is growing as a portion of server BOM, supported by new and heterogeneous computing architectures, the growth of data-intensive workloads and AI, and the ongoing displacement of HDDs by SSDs. In the fiscal first quarter, data center revenue grew more than 70% year-over-year as a result of continued cloud demand and a resurgence of enterprise IT investment. Our strengthening product portfolio also contributed to strong profitability. In FQ1, we launched the 7400 SSD, the first data center NVMe SSD to utilize our internally developed controller and firmware along with our DRAM and NAND. This Gen 4 NVMe product has already been qualified by two key customers. Looking ahead, we expect a strong ramp in our data center SSD revenues in FQ2 and driven by increased sales of our NVMe SSD products. In addition, we launched the industry's leading DDR5 and see strong demand as customers prepare for new server product launches in calendar 22. While PC end demand remains strong, our client revenue declined sequentially due to the PC production impact from ongoing non-memory component shortages and related customer inventory adjustments of DRAM and NAND products. Consistent with the expectations we articulated in our last earnings call, the inventory adjustment at most PC customers is now largely behind us, and we are seeing signs of stabilization in demand in this end market. As we enter calendar year 2022, we expect PC unit sales to be in line with those for calendar year 2021. Mix of enterprise PCs in calendar year 2022 is projected to be higher as companies invest to support hybrid work environments. This shift in the mix of PC unit shipments should increase average PC DRAM and NAND content. Low-power DRAM has grown to 20% of the PC industry DRAM bid demand today and is projected to become the majority of the PC market in five years. Given our industry-leading solutions in low-power DRAM, we are well-positioned to benefit from this trend. In FQ1, we achieved qualifications in volume production of our 176-layer Gen 4 PCIe client SSD at several PC OEMs, as well as our first revenues for DDR5 memory. Across the PC industry, demand for DDR5 products is significantly exceeding supply due to non-memory component shortages impacting memory suppliers' ability to build DDR5 modules. We expect these shortages to moderate through 2022, enabling bit shipments of DDR5 to grow to meaningful levels in the second half of calendar 2022. We are poised to take advantage of this transition with industry-leading DDR5 solutions for PCs. In the fast-growing graphics market, Micron holds an excellent position with a broad product portfolio featuring our proprietary GDDR6X product line and deep partnerships with leading GPU suppliers. We increased our revenue sequentially and year-over-year. Our proprietary GDDR6X continues to have market success, including integration on NVIDIA's high-end gaming cards. In FQ1, we were pleased to announce availability of our GDDR6 memory solutions on AMD's Radeon RX 6000 graphics card, extending the value of GDDR6 memory to the entire gaming market. FQ1 mobile revenue increased more than 25% year over year. Mobile memory and storage demand continues to strengthen, supported by content-hungry applications, and the continued transition from 4G to 5G. Recent 5G phones feature more than 50% higher DRAM and double the NAND content versus 4G phones. 5G smartphone sales are forecast to exceed 500 million units in calendar year 21, with 700 million units forecast for calendar year 22. We expect mobile content to continue increasing as 5G phones benefit from further innovation in 5G-enabled applications. Following several industry firsts last year in FQ1, our 1-alpha-based LPDDR5X, the world's fastest mobile DRAM, was sampled and validated with MediaTek, further demonstrating Micron's leadership in the mobile market. We expect automotive and industrial to be the fastest-growing memory and storage markets over the next decade. and we are exceptionally well positioned as a market share leader with over 10% of our revenue coming from these end markets. In the near term, non-memory component shortages are limiting calendar year 21 auto unit production to be flat year over year, significantly below end consumer demand. However, our FQ1 year over year auto revenue growth remains strong at 25%, as a result of content growth from in-vehicle infotainment and driver assistance applications, which are advancing rapidly, especially as EV adoption accelerates. New EVs are becoming like a data center on wheels, and we are already seeing examples of 2022 model year EVs supporting level three autonomous capability with over 140 gigabyte of DRAM and also examples with over one terabyte of NAND. In addition to continued content growth, we expect calendar year 22 auto unit production to increase as non-memory component shortages ease. We entered into a new supply agreement with UMC to improve our ability to support our automotive customers with NAND solutions as market demand strengthens in calendar year 22. In industrial IoT, we saw more than 80% year-over-year revenue growth fueled by the continued ramp in applications such as factory automation and security systems. In consumer IoT, we saw more than 40% year-over-year revenue growth driven by applications such as VR headsets and smart home devices. We expect IoT demand trends to accelerate further as 5G speeds the adoption of data-intensive applications powered by intelligent edge infrastructure. Our view of calendar 2021 and calendar 2022 industry bid demand and supply growth is largely unchanged from last quarter. We expect calendar 2021 DRAM industry bid demand growth to be in the low 20% range and industry NAND bid demand growth to be in the high 30% range. We expect calendar 2022 industry bid demand growth to be in the mid to high teens for DRAM and approximately 30% for NAND, in line with our view of the long-term bid demand growth categories for each. We anticipate underlying demand in calendar 2022 to be led by increasing volume of data center server deployments, 5G mobile shipments, and continued strength in automotive and industrial markets. Non-memory supply shortages have constrained customer bills and pushed out some demand across many end markets. While these shortages may cause some variability to our demand, we expect them to ease through 2022, supporting memory and storage demand growth. Turning to our bid supply expectations for the year, Given prudent industry capex and very lean supplier inventories, we expect a healthy industry supply-demand balance in calendar year 22. Micron's calendar year bid supply growth for DRAM and NAND will be in line with industry demand. We are planning to deliver record revenue with solid profitability in fiscal year 22 with stronger bid shipment growth in the second half of the fiscal year. The stronger second half-bit shipments will be aided by the easing impact of non-memory component shortages on our supply and on customer demand, together with additional product qualifications of our 1-alpha DRAM and 176-layer NAND-based products. As expected in fiscal year 22, the continued ramps of 1-alpha DRAM and 176-layer NAND are providing us with good front-end cost reductions. As we mentioned before, our efforts to increase supply chain resilience and provide business continuity to our customers are headwinds for our assembly and packaging costs consistent with the broader industry. Overall, we expect annual cost-per-bit reductions to be competitive with the industry in fiscal year 22 and over the long term. Turning to capital expenditures. We expect fiscal year 22 capex in the range of $11 billion to $12 billion. For both DRAM and NAND, we plan to achieve bid supply growth with no transitions alone through the middle of the decade. Beyond this time horizon, we anticipate the need to add greenfield wafer capacity for DRAM. However, for our NAND supply growth, we expect continued 3D scaling to be sufficient to to meet industry demand growth without the need for wafer capacity additions. We recently announced our intent to invest more than $150 billion globally over the next decade in leading-edge memory manufacturing and R&D. As part of our commitment to investing in R&D, we announced plans to establish a state-of-the-art memory design center in Atlanta. These announcements reflect our confidence in persistent long-term demand growth for memory and storage, and our ability to generate returns on these investments. We look forward to working with governments around the world, including in the U.S., as we consider sites to support future expansion. I will now turn it over to Dave.