Micron Technology, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to Micron's third quarter 2023 financial call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 11 again. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Farham Ahmed, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, and welcome to Micron Technologies' fiscal third quarter 2023 financial conference call. On the call with me today are Sanjay Mehrotra, our President and CEO, and Mark Murphy, our CFO. Today's call is being webcast from our Investors Relations site at investors.micron.com, including audio and slides. In addition, the press release detailing our quarterly results has been posted on our website along with the prepared remarks for this call. Today's discussion of the financial results is presented on a non-GAAP financial basis unless otherwise specified. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures can be found on our website. We encourage you to visit our website at micron.com throughout the quarter for the most current information on the company, including information on the financial conferences that we may be attending. You can also follow us on Twitter at MicronTech. As a reminder, the matters we are discussing today include forward-looking statements regarding market demand and supply, our expected results, and other matters. 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, including our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q, for a discussion of the 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 to conform these statements to actual results. I'll now turn the call over to Sanjay.

Thank you, Farhan. Good afternoon, everyone. Micron delivered fiscal third quarter revenue within our guidance range with gross margin and EPS above the range. The ongoing improvement of customer inventories and memory content growth are driving higher industry demand, while production cuts across the industry continue to help reduce excess supply. As a result, pricing trends are improving, and we have increased confidence that the industry has passed the bottom for both quarterly revenue and year-on-year revenue growth. Our technology leadership and strengthening product portfolio position as well across diverse growth markets, including AI and memory-centric computing. Beyond this downturn, we expect to see record TAM in calendar 2025, along with a return to more normalized levels of profitability. The impact of the May 21st decision by the Cyberspace Administration of China on Micron's business remains uncertain and fluid. Several Micron customers, including mobile OEMs, have been contacted by certain critical information infrastructure operators or representatives of the government in China concerning the future use of Micron products. As discussed before, Micron's revenue with companies headquartered in mainland China and Hong Kong including direct sales as well as indirect sales through distributors, accounts for approximately a quarter of Micron's worldwide revenue and remains the principal exposure. We currently estimate that approximately half of that China-headquartered customer revenue, which equates to a low double-digit percentage of Micron's worldwide revenue, is at risk of being impacted. This significant headwind is impacting our outlook and slowing our recovery. Micron is working to mitigate this impact over time and expects increased quarter-to-quarter revenue variability. Micron's long-term goal is to retain its worldwide DRAM and NAND share. Turning to technology, Micron continues to lead the industry in both DRAM and NAND technology. We are investing prudently to maintain our technology competitiveness while managing capex, node ramps, and wafer start reductions to reduce our bid supply and align it with demand. Our industry-leading 1-beta DRAM and 232-layer NAND nodes are achieving world-class yields, and the yield ramp for these nodes has been faster than any of our prior nodes. These leadership nodes provide a strong cost capability along with best-in-class power and performance specifications that will be leveraged across the portfolio of DNAM and NAND products. In fiscal Q3, we achieved several important product qualifications on these advanced nodes and are well positioned to ramp them in fiscal 2024. We are also making good progress towards the introduction of our EUV-based One Gamma node in 2025. This node will be manufactured first in our Taiwan site, where we already have EUV capability installed and operating in preparation for this ramp. We also recently announced plans to bring EUV technology to our fab in Hiroshima, Japan, with support from the Japanese government. Micron will be the first company to bring EUV technology to Japan for production. We are also advancing our global assembly and test network in order to support our product portfolio and extend our ability to deliver on global customer demand in the future. In China, we announced an investment of approximately $600 million over the next several years in our operations in Xi'an. This builds on our long history of significant investment in our Xi'an assembly, packaging, and test operations. As a part of this investment, we have decided to purchase the assembly equipment of our partner, Powertech Semiconductor Xi'an, who has been operating inside our Xi'an facility for the last eight years. We also intend to construct a new building at our Xi'an site to provide space to add more product capabilities. This will allow us over time to serve more of the demand from our customers in China from the Xi'an side. In India, with the strong support of the Indian government, we will build a new assembly and test facility in Gujarat to address demand for the latter half of this decade. We are also increasing our investments in assembly and test capacity in Taiwan for high bandwidth memory products as we gear up for stronger demand in this segment driven by the AI wave. Now turning to our end markets. Customers continue to make progress in reducing their excess inventory in fiscal Q3. Most customer inventories in the PC and smartphone segments are close to normal levels now, consistent with our forecast six months ago. Some of these inventory levels can get distorted by customer attempts to leverage current prices, which are deemed to be transient and unsustainable at these levels, to purchase additional volumes before prices rise significantly. Data center customer inventory is also improving and will likely normalize around the end of this calendar year or somewhat thereafter, depending on the growth in traditional data center spending. In data center, we saw strong sequential revenue growth in both cloud and enterprise in fiscal Q3, driven by some recovery from depressed sales levels in fiscal Q2. The recent acceleration in the adoption of generative AI is driving higher than expected industry demand for memory and storage for AI servers while traditional server demand for mainstream data center applications continues to be lackluster. Micron's product portfolio and roadmap of innovative products position us to capture growth opportunities from AI and data-centric computing architectures for both training and inferencing. Increasingly large AI models with an exponentially growing number of parameters are driving demand for dramatically higher memory content. As we have said before, AI servers have six to eight times the DRAM content of a regular server and three times the NAND content. In fact, some customers are deploying AI compute capability with substantially higher memory content. A striking example is NVIDIA's DGX GH200 supercluster which shows just how memory-intensive AI workloads can be. It provides developers the ability to support giant models with a massive shared memory space of 144 terabytes. A significant majority of that memory footprint is enabled by a joint development project between our two companies that extends Micron's low-power DRAM leadership to server-class applications. We are proud to pioneer the differentiated LPDRAM innovation to deliver a significant reduction in data center power consumption compared to DDR based solutions, helping to support our customers green initiatives. High bandwidth memory used in high performance computing is seeing very strong demand this year driven by demand for generative AI. We are working closely with our customers and have begun sampling our industry-leading HBM3 product offering. The customer response has been strong, and we believe our HBM3 product delivers significantly higher bandwidth than competing solutions and establishes the new benchmark in performance and power consumption supported by our one beta technology, TSV, and other innovations enabling a differentiated advanced packaging solution. We expect to begin a mass production ramp for this exciting HBM3 product in early calendar 2024 and to achieve meaningful revenues in fiscal 2024. Micron also has a strong position in the industry transition to D5, which is the latest generation of DDR memory. Our D5 percentage of DRAM shipments has more than doubled from fiscal Q2 to Q3, and we expect Micron D5 volume to cross over D4 at the end of first calendar quarter of 2024 versus mid-calendar 2024 for the industry. Micron's 1-alpha D5 modules are qualified and shipping to data center customers. We are also making good progress on our one beta-based, high-density, 128-gigabyte D5 modules using a 32-gigabit die that optimizes cost and performance to provide customers with a lower cost of ownership solution for memory-intensive workloads like AI. We expect these high-density modules to ramp in calendar Q2 of 2024 with significant cost improvements over today's expensive TSV-based solutions in the industry. Our 96-gigabyte D5 high-density module built on 1-alpha technology using 24-gigabit die is already shipping in volume and delivers equivalent performance for the majority of workloads versus the more expensive TSV dual-die package-based 128-gigabyte modules. In data center SSDs, Micron's entire portfolio is now on 176 layers or 232 layer NAND, demonstrating our product and technology leadership. We are in a strong position to serve AI demand for fast storage as these data intensive applications proliferate. In fiscal Q3, we launched the world's first 200 plus layer NAND data center SSD And qualification is in progress at multiple key customers to support AI cluster installations. In fact, we have already passed qualification of this product at a critical server OEM partner. We also launched our Extreme Endurance Data Center SSD, which offers superior scalability and affordability versus hard drives. In PCs, we now forecast calendar 2023 PC unit volume to decline by a low double-digit percentage year over year, with PC units expected to be below the pre-COVID levels last seen in 2019. We are excited about the ongoing industry transition to D5 and are well positioned for it with our strong D5 product lineup. Industry client D5 Mix is expected to crossover from D4 in early calendar 2024. In fiscal Q3, we achieved record quarterly client SSD bid shipments driven by shared growth in client SSDs as customers adopted our industry-leading solutions. Our SSD QLC bid shipment mix reached a new record for the third consecutive quarter with growth in both client and consumer. Last month, we launched Crucial T700, the world's fastest Gen 5 PCIe consumer SSD, built with our 232-layer NAND. In graphics, industry analysts continue to expect graphics-tamped growth categories to outpace the broader market supported by applications across client and data center. We expect customer inventories to normalize in calendar Q3. We plan to introduce our next generation G7 product on our industry-leading one beta node in the first half of calendar year 2024. In mobile, we now expect calendar 2023 smartphone unit volumes to be down by a mid-single-digit percentage year over year. While units are weaker, we are seeing stronger memory content growth driven by a mixed shift toward premium phones and elasticity. We expect sequential growth in fiscal Q4 as customers prepare for upcoming product launches in the back half of calendar 2023. In fiscal Q3, we achieved key mobile customer qualifications on our one beta-based LP5X and started high-volume revenue shipments to Tier 1 OEMs. In addition, we achieved significant milestones and UFS with the qualification and RAM of a high-capacity UMCP5 featuring 16 GB of DRAM and 512 GB of NAND. We have also started to sample a new UFS4 product based on our latest 232-layer NAND technology, which enables industry-leading performance for flagship AMSEPs. Last, I'll cover the auto and industrial end markets, which represent over 20% of our revenue and contribute more stable revenue and profitability. Micron continues to lead in automotive, which is a key market and growth driver for us. In fiscal Q3, auto revenue reached another quarterly record and grew by a high single-digit percentage year over year. We continue to expect growth in auto memory demand for the second half of calendar 2023, driven by easing non-memory semiconductor supply, normalizing customer inventory levels, and increasing memory content per vehicle. The industrial market saw early signs of recovery in fiscal Q3. Inventory levels are stabilizing at distribution partners and at the majority of our customers. As a result, we expect an improvement in demand in the second half of calendar 2023. We are excited about our growth prospects in this market as industrial customers continue to adopt and implement IoT, AI, and machine learning in the factory. Now turning to industry outlook. Our expectations for calendar 2023 industry bid demand growth have been further reduced to low to mid single digits in DRAM and to high single digits in NAND, which are well below the expected long-term CAGR of mid-teens percentage range in DRAM and low 20s percentage range in NAND. While the AI-driven demand has been stronger than our expectations three months ago, the PC, smartphone, and traditional server demand forecasts are now lower. We continue to expect stronger industry bid shipments for DRAM and NAND in the second half of the calendar year, driven by secular content growth and continued improvement in customer inventory. While the industry demand forecast for calendar 2023 is now lower, the significant supply reductions across the industry have started to stabilize the market. We see both DRAM and NAND year-over-year supply growth to be negative for the industry in calendar 2023 as utilization and capex cuts across the industry impact supply growth. While supply-demand balance is improving due to the excess inventory, profitability and cash flow will remain extremely challenged for some time. Market recovery can accelerate if there is further reduction in industry production and these cuts are sustained well into calendar 2024. In response to the industry environment, Micron has taken decisive actions to bring our supply back in balance with demand. We expect Micron's year-on-year bit supply growth to be meaningfully negative for DRAM. We also expect to produce fewer NAND bits in calendar 2023 than in calendar 2022. Our fiscal 2023 capex plan of $7 billion is down more than 40% from last year, with WFE down more than 50%. We continue to expect fiscal 2024 WFE to be down year on year. Recently, we have further reduced wafer starts to approach 30% in both DRAM and NAND. We currently expect reduced wafer starts will continue well into calendar 2024 as we remain focused on managing down our inventories and controlling our supply. I will now turn it over to Mark.