It’s been a brutal year for tech stocks. The Nasdaq is headed for its worst slump since 2008 and is poised to underperform the S&P 500 for a second straight year. Among mega-cap tech stocks, Amazon, Meta and Tesla have each lost at least half their value.
Investors looking for some sign of optimism can turn to a 29-year-old server maker located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Shares of Super Micro Computer have soared 89% in 2022, topping all other U.S. tech companies valued at $1 billion or more. Supermicro has a market cap of $4.4 billion, up from $2.4 billion at the start of the year.
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Supermicro manufactures computers and sells them to companies, which use them as servers for websites, data storage and applications like artificial intelligence algorithms. In the low-margin server business, Supermicro competes with Dell, IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise as well as lesser-known players such as China’s Inspur. According to estimates from The Next Platform, Supermicro had about 2.6% of the market in 2021.
Supermicro has sought to differentiate itself in the market by allowing customers to more easily customize their computers. That makes for a more profitable offering than off-the-shelf servers.
The strategy has been working. Supermicro reported 46% growth in its fiscal 2022, which ended in June, to $5.2 billion in revenue. Earnings per share climbed to $5.32 in 2022 from $2.09 in 2021 and $1.60 the year before that.
“The stock is actually just simply mirroring the EPS increases we have seen over two years,” said Nehal Chokshi, an analyst at Northland Capital Markets who recommends buying the stock. Chokshi has a price target of $165, by far the highest among five analysts tracked by FactSet.
Supermicro closed on Tuesday at $82.89.
Chokshi said that Supermicro’s profitability and growth have been strong enough that it might deserve a larger multiple. Yet even with this year’s rally, the stock is only trading at 8.6 times earnings over the next 12 months, which is lower than its five-year average of 9.5, according to FactSet. For the past 12 months, it trades at 10.1 times earnings, down from a five-year average of 17.8.
“There still hasn’t been multiple expansion,” Chokshi said. “A lot of investors, including myself, find that befuddling, because this is a name that has historically generated 20-plus percent revenue and EPS growth that’s trading only at 10 [times] earnings.”
Across the board, investors have taken a hatchet to tech multiples, reflecting concerns that soaring inflation and rising interest rates will dampen enthusiasm for growth stocks for the foreseeable future. The Nasdaq currently trades for 26 times earnings, compared with its five-year average of 35, according to FactSet.
Supermicro shares started rising in July and continued going up in August, after the company’s annual earnings report. They soared another 30% in November, after Supermicro showed a nearly 80% increase in year-over-year sales for the September quarter to $1.85 billion.
Manufacturing servers involves putting many different parts together. Supermicro starts with one of its own motherboards, plugs in a processor from Intel or AMD, or a graphics processor from Nvidia, and adds a power supply, RAM, networking and whatever other parts the computer might need. Supermicro will sell the client the motherboard, a fully assembled server, or an entire rack of servers.
Heading into 2023, the outlook for the server market is murky, especially in the early part of the year. Companies are tightening their belts, and likely to spend less on capital expenditures. Supermicro’s revenue growth is expected to moderate to about 32% in fiscal 2023 and 9% the following year.
But the company has at least regained the support of Wall Street after a rough stretch in the middle of the last decade. From 2015 through 2017, Supermicro had misstated financial statements and published some key filings late, according to the SEC.
“They have done a marvelous job of coming back,” said Susquehanna’s Mehdi Hosseini, who has a hold rating on the stock. “I would say they’re the comeback story of 2022. And that’s what’s reflected in the share price. But the management team has to remain very aggressive with their target.”
The comeback, according to Hosseini, is partially driven by confidence in CFO David Weigand, who has implemented strong internal financial controls since taking the job in early 2021.
“They became compliant with SEC filings in 2020, and it’s just been straight line up,” Hosseini said. “They have done really well.”
Bigger customers
Supermicro CEO Charles Liang told CNBC that the company’s recent performance reflects the size of the business and its ability to offer a wider array of products, particularly around customization.
While the company has been rapidly expanding in Taiwan, one component of its differentiation strategy, Liang said, is its San Jose, California, headquarters, where Supermicro still does the majority of its manufacturing.
Liang said it’s more expensive to build locally than overseas but doing so allows the company to be physically closer and more responsive to the chip companies it supplies as well as major customers like cloud providers and big websites.
“Silicon Valley enables us for better technology, faster time to market, and quick service, quick maintenance of our customer,” Liang said.
He said tech companies can move faster with Supermicro servers and are willing to pay for execution and the company’s design skills.
One area of notable growth is machine learning, or AI algorithms that require a large amount of computing power, usually centered around graphics processors made by Nvidia or AMD. Supermicro makes motherboards and systems that can combine up to eight GPUs together on a single board.
In the latest quarter, 45% of Supermicro’s revenue came from enterprise sales, including AI and machine learning products.
Another specialized market Supermicro is targeting is servers for 5G or telecom applications, using a new kind of approach called OpenRAN.
Supermicro is targeting $8 billion to $10 billion in revenue for fiscal 2024. To reach that goal, the company says it needs substantial growth from AI products and has to sell more complete systems, or servers already installed in a rack.
Current growth is being driven by Supermicro’s large data center business, which has been landing bigger accounts and comprised 50% of total sales in the September quarter, according to a November note from Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson, who has a neutral rating on the stock.
Supermicro said in November that a big unnamed customer was responsible for nearly 22% of the company’s sales in the quarter. In recent years, Supermicro had no single customer accounting for more than 10% of its sales.
‘Far more cautious’
Among analysts, there’s some skepticism that the company can hit its targets in a softer economic environment.
Susquehanna’s Hosseini said he recently downgraded the stock “because I think they will face headwinds in the next year” and the “growth targets are too aggressive.”
Inteland AMD have issued downbeat prospects for the server market, and companies of all sizes are cutting costs.
“While we applaud the quarter, we are far more cautious when thinking about Supermicro’s intermediate to longer term path and in particular view the company’s now stated goal of $8 billion to $10 billion in revenues in 2024 with trepidation given the headwinds noted above,” Wedbush’s Bryson wrote.
Analysts at Evercore said in a note this month that they expect server market revenue growth to slow to about 2.7% globally in 2023 from 13.5% last year. Server makers like Supermicro need to carry a lot of inventory and may face margin pressure if sales slow.
Northland’s Chokshi said that Supermicro’s strengths, especially in AI systems, could allow it to weather a market downturn better than its rivals.
“While their competitors are showing strong signs that there is a significant capex down cycle, their results are accelerating,” Chokshi said. “So far, they’re showing no signs of this cycle catching up to them.”
Liang is confident that Supermicro can continue to gain new customers, even if growth slows from its recent torrid pace.
“In a good year, growth will be around 80%,” he said. “In a bad year, hopefully 20%.”
CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, speaks during the launch of the supercomputer Gefion, where the new AI supercomputer has been established in collaboration with EIFO and NVIDIA at Vilhelm Lauritzen Terminal in Kastrup, Denmark October 23, 2024.
Ritzau Scanpix | Mads Claus Rasmussen | Via Reuters
Nvidia is replacing rival chipmaker Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a shakeup to the blue-chip index that reflects the boom in artificial intelligence and a major shift in the semiconductor industry.
Intel shares were down 1% in extended trading on Friday. Nvidia shares rose 1%.
Nvidia shares have climbed over 170% so far in 2024 after jumping roughly 240% last year, as investors have rushed to get a piece of the AI chipmaker. Nvidia’s market cap has swelled to $3.3 trillion, second only to Apple among publicly traded companies.
Companies including Microsoft,Meta, Google and Amazon are purchasing Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), such as the H100, in massive quantities to build clusters of computers for their AI work. Nvidia’s revenue has more than doubled in each of the past five quarters, and has at least tripled in three of them. The company has sginaled that demand for its next-generation AI GPU called Blackwell is “insane.”
With the addition of Nvidia, four of the six trillion-dollar tech companies are now in the index. The two not in the Dow are Alphabet and Meta.
While Nvidia has been soaring, Intel has been slumping. Long the dominant maker of PC chips, Intel has lost market share to Advanced Micro Devices and has made very little headway in AI. Intel shares have fallen by more than half this year as the company struggles with manufacturing challenges and new competition for its central processors.
Intel said in a filing this week that the board’s audit and finance committee approved cost and capital reduction activities, including lowering head count by 16,500 employees and reducing its real estate footprint. The job cuts were originally announced in August.
The Dow contains 30 components and is weighted by the share price of the individual stocks instead of total market value. Nvidia put itself in better position to join the index in May, when the company announced a 10-for-1 stock split. While doing nothing to its market cap, the move slashed the price of each share by 90%, allowing the company to become a part of the Dow without having too heavy a weighting.
The switch is the first change to the index since February, when Amazon replaced Walgreens Boots Alliance. Over the years, the Dow has been playing catchup in gaining exposure to the largest technology companies. The stocks in the index are chosen by a committee from S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Charles Liang, chief executive officer of Super Micro Computer Inc., during the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on Wednesday, June 5, 2024. The trade show runs through June 7.
Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Super Micro investors continued to rush the exits on Friday, pushing the stock down another 9% and bringing this week’s selloff to 44%, after the data center company lost its second auditor in less than two years.
The company’s shares fell as low as $26.23, wiping out all of the gains for 2024. Shares had peaked at $118.81 in March, at which point they were up more than fourfold for the year. Earlier that month, S&P Dow Jones added the stock to the S&P 500, and Wall Street was rallying around the company’s growth, driven by sales of servers packed with Nvidia’sartificial intelligence processors.
Super Micro’s spectacular collapse since March has wiped out roughly $55 billion in market cap and left the company at risk of being delisted from the Nasdaq. On Wednesday, as the stock was in the midst of its second-worst day ever, Super Micro said it will provide a “business update” regarding its latest quarter on Tuesday, which is Election Day in the U.S.
The company’s recent challenges date back to August, when Super Micro said it would not file its annual report on time with the SEC. Noted short seller Hindenburg Research then disclosed a short position in the company and wrote in a report that it identified “fresh evidence of accounting manipulation.” The Wall Street Journal later reported that the Department of Justice was in the early stages of a probe into the company.
Super Micro disclosed on Wednesday that Ernst & Young had resigned as its accounting firm just 17 months after taking over from Deloitte & Touche. The auditor said it was “unwilling to be associated with the financial statements prepared by management.”
A Super Micro spokesperson told CNBC that the company “disagrees with E&Y’s decision to resign, and we are working diligently to select new auditors.” Super Micro does not expect matters raised by Ernst & Young to “result in any restatements of its quarterly financial results for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024, or for prior fiscal years,” the representative said.
Analysts at Argus Research on Thursday downgraded the stock in the intermediate term to a hold, citing the Hindenburg note, reports of the Justice Department investigation and the departure of Super Micro’s accounting firm, which the analysts called a “serious matter.” Argus’ fears go beyond accounting irregularities, with the firm suggesting that the company may be doing business with problematic entities.
“The DoJ’s concerns, in our view, may be mainly about related-party transactions and about SMCI products ending up in the hands of sanctioned Russian companies,” the analysts wrote.
In September, the month after announcing its filing delay, Super Micro said it had received a notification from the Nasdaq indicating that its late status meant the company wasn’t in compliance with the exchange’s listing rules. Super Micro said the Nasdaq’s rules allowed the company 60 days to file its report or submit a plan to regain compliance. Based on that timeframe, the deadline would be mid-November.
Though Super Micro hasn’t filed financials with the SEC since May, the company said in an August earnings presentation that revenue more than doubled for a third straight quarter. Analysts expect that, for the fiscal first quarter ended September, revenue jumped more than 200% to $6.45 billion, according to LSEG. That’s up from $2.1 billion a year earlier and $1.9 billion in the same fiscal quarter of 2023.
Peopl walk outside Steve Jobs Theater at the Apple Park campus before Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event in Cupertino, California, on Sept. 9, 2024.
Nic Coury | AFP | Getty Images
Apple will buy Pixelmator, the creator of image editing apps for Apple’s iPhone and Mac platforms, Pixelmator announced Friday in a blog post.
Pixelmator, a Lithuanian company, was founded in 2007, and in recent years has been best known for Pixelmator and Pixelmator Pro, which compete with Adobe Photoshop. It also makes Photomator, a photo editing app.
Apple has highlighted Pixelmator apps over the years in its keynote product launches. In 2018, Apple named Pixelmator Pro its Mac App of the year, citing the company’s enthusiastic embrace of Apple’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, such as removing distracting objects from photos or making automated color adjustments.
“We’ve been inspired by Apple since day one, crafting our products with the same razor-sharp focus on design, ease of use, and performance,” Pixelmator said in its blog post.
Apple does not acquire as many large companies as its Silicon Valley rivals. It prefers to make smaller acquisitions of companies with products or people that it can use to create Apple features. Neither Pixelmator nor Apple provided a price for the transaction.
Pixelmator said in its blog post that there “will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time.”
Earlier this week, Apple released the first version of Apple Intelligence, a suite of features that includes photo editing abilities such as Clean Up, which can remove people or objects from photos using AI.
Apple has acquired other popular apps that received accolades at the company’s product launches and awards ceremonies.
In 2020, Apple bought Dark Sky, a weather app that eventually became integrated into Apple’s default weather app. In 2017, it bought Workflow, an automation and macro app that eventually became Shortcuts, the iPhone’s scripting app, as well as the groundwork for a more capable Siri assistant.