Quantum Corporation (QMCO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, greetings, and welcome to the Quantum Corporation Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Quantum's Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Corporate Secretary, Tara Ilges. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining today's conference call to discuss Quantum's Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2026 financial results. With me on today's call are Hugues Meyrath, Quantum CEO; and William White, our Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the call up to questions from analysts. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that comments made on today's call may include forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact should be viewed as forward-looking, including any projections of revenue, margins, expenses, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, cash flows or other financial, operational or performance metrics. These statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that we refer to as risk factors. Risk factors may cause our actual results to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the detailed descriptions we provide about these and additional risk factors under the Risk Factors section in our 10-K and 10-Qs filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company does not intend to update forward-looking statements once they are issued, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except where required by applicable law. Please note that today's press release and management statements during today's call will include certain financial information in GAAP and non-GAAP measures. We will include definitions and reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP items in our press release. With that, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Quantum's CEO, Hugues Meyrath.

Thank you, Tara, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. I'll start with an overview of our fourth quarter. I'm pleased to report that we delivered a strong close to fiscal 2026. Our fourth quarter revenue of $78 million was $10 million above our guidance midpoint, up 5% quarter-over-quarter and 27% year-over-year. Demand was solid across our storage solutions, driven by continued growth in data and increasing AI-related workloads. Our ability to grow faster was limited by supply chain and fulfillment timing particularly around disk and tape drives, which continues to be a factor for us in the near term. That said, we expect greater backlog conversion heading into the second half of this fiscal year. What we're hearing from our customers is very consistent. They're dealing with much higher data volumes and looking for better ways to manage at scale. Rising primary storage costs and lengthy supply chain for flash and disk are affecting their ability to grow within budget. Power constraints are increasingly putting their growth at risk especially in AI, HPC and research verticals. That's where we're seeing increasing demand for our solutions. Our ongoing focus is to support our customers' need to manage the right data for the right workload at the right cost. With our portfolio across Scalar, DXi, ActiveScale and StorNext, we can support both high performance requirements and long-term lower-cost storage in a single integrated approach. This is a critical priority as customers look for practical ways to manage both growth and cost in their environments. We're seeing very strong momentum in object storage with revenue from our ActiveScale solutions tripling year-over-year driven by new use cases around large-scale data management and AI workloads. Adoption of ActiveScale cold storage solution continues to ramp, and we expect ongoing strong demand due to our unique capabilities and performance. We're also seeing more customers actively moving data out of primary storage and adopting tiered storage architectures. That's driving increased interest in tape and object storage, particularly in large-scale environments where cost and power really matter. As an example, we recently announced a partnership with Pink Elephant. Pink Elephant is a sovereign MSP in Europe, who are using our solutions to deliver cost-effective and energy-efficient data resilience services. The true value of ActiveScale was evident following an incident involving a fire in one of their data centers, and may I say the fire was unrelated to our equipment. But because they have deployed ActiveScale across multiple data centers, while the affected data center was down, their service remained uninterrupted. It's an excellent example of how our technology performs in real-world conditions and why experience and resiliency matter. We've been tested and our unique capabilities are unmatched enabling business as usual for our customers. We recently won a large deployment with a global sports network who will be using ActiveScale cold storage with our integrated tape libraries to host their full content archive. We also continue to see existing customers expand their ActiveScale environments towards hundreds of petabytes on the way to exabyte scale. I would now like to talk about our sales performance. We ended the quarter with great pipeline momentum and with a record $45 million backlog, which is largely tied to supply availability, particularly around disk and tape components. Tape library sales and funnel are incredibly strong. However, we're currently limited by IBM's ability to deliver more tape drives. We're actively managing the supply chain challenges with our partners and expect to see much better conversion of the backlog as we move through the second half of the fiscal year. We will continue to navigate the industry-wide supply constraints but expect continued volatility in the coming months. Looking at the full year, fiscal 2026 was a year of clear progress for Quantum. This past year, most of our growth was in the enterprise storage market, delivering a healthier revenue mix for the company. Since I assumed the CEO role in June, we focused on improving execution lowering our cost structure and strengthening the balance sheet. Those actions are reflected in our results. We've strengthened our balance sheet through a combination of fully paying off our term debt obligations, converting notes into common stock and increasing our cash balance through a $100 million equity raise. We're particularly proud of the quality of the investors in this latest offering as it validates our strategy and market position. Simply said, Quantum is in its strongest financial position in decades. With this major financial transformation plus our sales momentum and innovating -- innovative products we're developing, I'm feeling very positive for the future. As we move into fiscal 2027, we're in a much stronger position than we were a year ago. Demand continues to grow, and we expect this momentum to persist over the next 24 months. We're seeing our pipeline grow as organizations continue to adjust their storage strategies in response to AI, cost and power constraints. Our priorities remain the same: Drive sustained revenue growth, recovery of margin towards 40%, improve operational efficiency and continue executing with focus and discipline across all functions of the business. Overall, Quantum is operating from a position of renewed strength. I'm very excited about the opportunity we have in front of us as the proliferation of AI-driven data rapidly reshapes the industry and drives demand for our tiered storage solutions. With that, I'll turn it over to Will to go through the financials.

Thank you, Hugues. Good afternoon to those joining us on the phone and webcast. I'll provide an overview of the company's GAAP and non-GAAP financial results for our fiscal fourth quarter that ended on March 31, 2026. Revenue in the quarter was $78 million, increased $3.4 million or approximately 5% sequentially from $74.6 million in the prior quarter. This is an increase of 27.3% over $61.3 million in the prior year's fourth quarter. Revenue of $78 million exceeded our guidance midpoint of $68 million by approximately $10 million, driven by strong enterprise demand across all major product lines worldwide as well as improved shipping velocity near the end of the quarter. As a result of the robust demand, our quarter-end backlog more than doubled sequentially to approximately $45 million. This is significantly above our historical backlog run rate of $8 million to $10 million. We anticipate near-term backlog to remain meaningfully above our recent run rate given high demand and component part availability. GAAP gross margin for the fourth quarter was 35.7% compared to 38.8% in the prior quarter and 39.6% in the fiscal fourth quarter of 2025. The decline was driven by several factors. The most notable impact was from the unpredictable increase of numerous industry-wide component prices, which required fulfilling some previous backlog at less favorable margins. Gross margin was also impacted by a revenue decline and higher margin service revenue. Despite component cost volatility headwinds, we remain committed to improving gross margins back toward 40% over time. To this end, we are planning systems and processes to improve component cost visibility and strengthen margin management, including actively requoting orders where appropriate to protect margins on future sales. We anticipate these new internal processes to support a gradual recovery in our gross margin in the coming quarters. GAAP operating expenses for the fourth quarter were $30.4 million compared to $30.1 million in the prior quarter and $35.8 million in the year ago quarter. Operating expenses on a non-GAAP basis for the fourth quarter were $27.5 million, in line with our original guidance, compared to $26.9 million in the fiscal third quarter and $29.4 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025. Higher sales commissions drove the sequential increase in operating expenses as a result of increased revenue. Excluding commissions, non-GAAP operating expenses were flat sequentially. The year-over-year decrease reflects the continued realized savings from a lowered cost structure following our restructuring actions throughout the fiscal year. For the full fiscal year, non-GAAP operating expenses decreased by approximately $11.6 million or 10% from fiscal year 2025. This decrease in operating expenses coincided with higher revenue year-over-year, demonstrating our operational leverage. We remain committed to disciplined cost management and operational efficiencies going into the fiscal year 2027, and we currently expect to hold non-GAAP operating expenses flat year-over-year. GAAP net loss in the fiscal fourth quarter was $9.5 million or a loss of $0.66 per share compared to a net loss of $27.8 million or a loss of $2.03 per share in the previous quarter and a net loss of $7.7 million or a loss of $1.26 per share in the prior year's fourth quarter. The prior quarter GAAP net loss included $28.9 million of debt extinguishment costs. Non-GAAP loss for the fourth quarter was $3.1 million or a loss of $0.21 per share compared to a net loss of $4.9 million or a loss of $0.36 per share in the prior quarter and a loss of $12.1 million or a loss of $1.98 per share in the prior year's fourth quarter. Improvement in non-GAAP net loss for the fourth quarter reflected a combination of higher revenue and significant reduction in operating expenses. This includes approximately $2.9 million of interest expense in the quarter that will not continue beyond the fiscal quarter as a result of the recently announced debt elimination, which I'll discuss in more detail shortly. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was a positive $1 million, above the midpoint of our original guidance and compared to a positive $2.9 million in the fiscal third quarter of 2026 and a negative $3.9 million in the prior year quarter. The year-over-year improvement of approximately $4.9 million reflects the benefit of previous restructuring and ongoing cost discipline. The sequential step down reflects the higher commission and lower gross margin discussed earlier. We believe we will begin to see improvements in our quarterly EBITDA in fiscal year 2027 over our EBITDA this quarter. Turning to an overview of debt and liquidity as of March 31. Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash at the end of the fiscal fourth quarter were approximately $16.2 million. Total outstanding debt between term debt and our convertible notes was $55.9 million and $90 million, respectively. At the end of the quarter, the company's net debt position was approximately $130.4 million. As Hugues previously highlighted, subsequent to quarter end, we announced a series of transactions that significantly strengthened our balance sheet and will support our future growth. First, the company completed a private placement led by Two Seas Capital and Oaktree Capital with participation from several other institutional investors, generating gross proceeds of $100 million. Additionally, Dialectic Technologies agreed to voluntarily convert their -- the entire outstanding principal amount of its senior secured convertible notes together with all associated accrued and unpaid interest into shares of our common stock. Third, a majority of the proceeds for the private placement was used to repay all previously outstanding term debt with the remaining net proceeds to be utilized for working capital and general corporate purposes. The $94.7 million in net equity proceeds and subsequent full repayment of approximately $56 million of term debt and conversion of all outstanding convertible notes materially changed the company's liquidity position. Post transaction, the company added approximately $36.9 million of cash, net of interest and fees to its balance sheet and has no outstanding debt. In addition to meaningfully derisking the company's overall financial position going forward, we now have significantly greater financial flexibility to support ongoing operations as well as to make investments in the future growth of the company. Turning to the company's outlook for the fiscal first quarter of 2027. As conveyed in our remarks on today's call, we are seeing strong and sustained demand from customers, acknowledging our substantial backlog and continued strong bookings, our near-term revenue will be determined by the extent to which we can fulfill and ship orders in a supply-constrained market. Company's fiscal first quarter had historically averaged a 5% seasonal decline versus the fiscal fourth quarter over the past 5 years. Due to the strong demand we have seen thus far in the fiscal first quarter, we expect sales to reflect better than typical seasonality and are guiding revenue to be approximately $75 million, plus or minus $2 million. At the midpoint, this represents approximately 17% growth year-over-year. We expect first quarter non-GAAP operating expenses to be approximately $27 million, plus or minus $1 million. As a result, non-GAAP adjusted net loss per share for the fiscal first quarter is anticipated to be negative $0.15, plus or minus $0.10 per share based on an estimated 24 million shares outstanding on a weighted basis. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter is expected to be $1.5 million, plus or minus $1 million. With that, I'll now turn the call to the operator for the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Jacob Stephan with Lake Street Capital Markets.

Nice quarter and nice guidance. With the $45 million in backlog, you said a couple of times throughout the call, you expect to see backlog conversion improve throughout the year. I guess if you could kind of break down what your confidence level is in that? Is that coming from the actual supply side in IBM? Or is that coming from somewhere else?

Jacob, yes, I think it's a little bit different between flash drives, disk drives and tape drives. IBM is continuing to ramp up production of tape drives throughout the year. Our understanding is still a little tight in this quarter in the June quarter. But as you go into September and December quarter, we should see a lot more tape drives out there, which would allow us to convert the backlog into revenue on the tape driver side. With regards to disk drives, I think it's still going to be tight, but some of the vendors are actually right now procuring disk drives with some of the chassis, for example, Supermicro. So -- and I think having some capital also allows us to -- with the financing to go place orders a little bit more aggressively in terms of procuring both servers and disk drives and flash drives. So I think as we get into the summer and the second half of the year, we should be able to convert the backlog into more revenue.

Okay. Got it. And then just touching on kind of the gross margins. I know the comment this quarter was that you had to fulfill some orders at less favorable gross margins. But $45 million in backlog, I guess, is that a concern moving forward? Or do you have a different kind of dynamic pricing strategy in place to mitigate that?

Yes. So I think the dynamics are changing a bit between the March quarter and June quarter in the sense that like in the March quarter, this is when everything went to hell, where we saw huge increases in disk drives and flash drives uncertain pricing, pricing on shipment, pricing on arrival to the dock. I think now the industry has adjusted slightly better in terms of telling us a bit ahead of time what the prices are back to that. It doesn't mean that the prices are lower and the customers can follow it. But I think everybody understands the situation better now and as we're speaking right now versus 4, 5 months ago. So now we have to do a better job of trying to match up the cost of the supply chain to the orders. And obviously, there's still some tightness with the customers. If you look at government customers or government contracts that are in the backlog, it's really hard for them to -- it's hard to requote those deals without losing them. But I think in general, I think we can work on the gross margin and improving it through the rest of the year.

Got it. And maybe just to kind of touch on that again. So that -- what percentage or -- I mean, I guess, any way that you can break it out, how susceptible or sensitive are your customers to change in price?

It really depends -- it depends a little bit on the customer and on the situation, right? Because the things -- the situation you got into were government customers or contract or research customers on their contract, like I saw last week that -- they get awarded a certain amount of money, and they're getting inspected for the gear. And if you just don't fulfill the gear on time, then they basically like have to basically cancel the contract, right? So these are extremely price-sensitive situation and there's a mix -- a small mix of those, right? Then there are customers like when price increased a lot and several times without the quarter -- throughout the quarter, you had to requote some of the deals 2, 3 times. I think now it's slightly more stable than in the March quarter. So once there's more stability, you can control the margins a little bit better. It's when there are major hikes and you get kind of this disconnect between your COGS and the price you quote to the customer. I hope that answers.

Got it. Very helpful. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Maybe just one last one for me. Last quarter, you guys talked about tape sales doubling sequentially. This quarter, you mentioned ActiveScale revenue tripled year-over-year. I'm wondering if you had any kind of update on the overall tape sales as it relates to last year versus -- even last quarter.

Yes. I would say like our strategy really is like in component tightness, we can move some of the data from primary storage to tape. ActiveScale is actually a combo of flash and disk plus tape, so it's not 100% tape. But what it does is like it makes the tape experience much faster on ingest and on cataloging and on retrieval. So basically, that solution is very appealing for everybody because you can actually get high performance that you would get on disk and then you can benefit from the cost and the power consumption of tape and that's been what's tripling year-over-year. And as we're looking forward, that combo of disk drives and tape drives seems to be the winning combo. And as we go back into some of the classic enterprise use cases as well, you can go figure out that about half of the data of the customers on primary storage is usually not used before in the past years, you can have like buy more disk drives or buy more flash drives. I think people just realize they can't do it right now with today's budget. So that's where we're hitting the playbook. So -- if that helps.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets.

Congrats on a good quarter, especially on the demand side. And with respect to the demand side, you're giving us this backlog number of $45 million. I presume this is largely all product. And our math suggests that product bookings was probably like in the $70 million to $75 million range, which I think would then be up basically 2x year-over-year. Could you confirm if that's approximately right?

Yes. Thank you, Nehal, that is approximately right.

Okay. Great. And so I believe that this represents an even more bigger acceleration from the product demand that we're seeing in the December quarter of about, I think, 30% or 35% year-over-year. So this acceleration that you're seeing, would you attribute it mostly to component price increases? Or is there a material element associated with incremental unit demand?

We're still analyzing the average selling price. But for most of our products, that was primarily driven by demand. It was not driven by average selling price, at least for the fourth quarter.

Okay. So units basically, more units, more -- well -- and these would be basically more LTO-10 units? Or is it more hard drive units?

Looked at...

There's a little bit of both, right? There's a little bit of both. I mean what's changed year-over-year really is ActiveScale really take off the most, which is the combo of disk drives and tape drives into an object store. And that's really been the case right now. It's accelerated for like 3 or 4 quarters.

Okay. Doesn't ActiveScale have a much higher gross margin profile than the rest of your product portfolio?

It typically does, but mind you that like disk drive in the March quarter, price increased 250%. Tape drives have started to increase in Q1 and continue to increase through Q2 with 2 more increases. So that -- when you start like essentially quoting customers, some of them are government customers that we've talked about in the past, it's creating an issue because there's a delay between the moment you quote the customer, and you can fulfill both the disk drives and the LTO drives in it. So you requote the best you can, but it's been difficult, especially in the March quarter because there were several successive increases that came out of the left field. And these were essentially what we call like the pricing on shipment which is kind of crazy, right, because our shipment can be anywhere from 6 to 12 to 14 weeks after you quoted the customer. So that was the really dynamic of the March quarter that was particularly harmful for everybody in the market.

Okay. Could you give us a sense as far as how much of a shift in mix towards ActiveScale you're seeing, is it like from 10% to 20% on a Q-to-Q basis in dollar terms?

Yes. I mean we don't disclose our product breakdown in dollar terms, but I can tell you ActiveScale tripled year-over-year. And we're continuing to see momentum as we're right now in the late June time frame. We're seeing a lot of demand for ActiveScale cold storage.

And then this ActiveScale cold storage, you would directly link towards the AI and HPC environments that you talked about earlier in the call?

It's AI. It's HPC. It's in the media entertainment market, where they use it for repository of anything to do in M&E. It's in genomics customer. It's in medical research. Everybody that consumes a lot of data, and they need to have it available either for research or for access or for -- to rehydrate back into an M&E space. So it's across many verticals that are big data usages, right?

Okay. And then you talked about expectations of getting back to a 40% gross margin. But if this mix shift persists and with normalized supply chains at some point in time, then is that 40% gross margin correct? Or is it actually much higher?

Yes. I mean I think, look, when we started the journey about a year ago, I thought we could be in the -- our goal was to be in the 43%. But we still like assume -- we assume that like there's still going to be issues with regards to procuring flash and disk and tape for several quarters. I think it's less volatile than like the March quarter, but we do expect to see continuing price increase across storage for the foreseeable future, which is hard to recover margin, unless you're willing to do it at the cost of your relationship with customers and partners, right? So there's always a way in the short run to say, "Okay, well, I'm just going to go behave a certain way." And -- but I think you're creating potential issues. I want to see a very large customer in Europe last week that said, "Oh my God, storage vendors are taking advantage of this to increase their margin and touting it publicly." And I mean that's the strategy of some vendors. I think we're trying to be more channel-friendly and customer-friendly, but we have to find the right balance of also not letting the gross margin deteriorate, right? So there's a little bit of both takes several aspects into consideration.

Right. Okay. Well, let's just assume that you get back to 40% gross margin, what is the corresponding operating margin you can achieve assuming that you continue to see sustained growth and achieve the operating leverage you hope to achieve over time?

As we look at our gross margin going into the next year, we see a lot of benefits from holding the line on our fixed cost of goods. So that will be one benefit where we'll see increasing benefit as our revenue increases. We'll also see a natural benefit from the average selling prices. While they were not a large impact in Q4, we expect them to be increasingly an impact -- and a beneficial impact to our margins going into this next year.

I mean, I guess effectively, what I'm trying to say is that can your OpEx get down to, say, 20% of revenue? Or is it more like 30% of revenue? Can you give us a sense as far as like on a percent of revenue basis of where it can go with -- as you achieve scale?

Certainly, as we look to the next year, we're seeing our operating expenses to be held flat that as obviously, the targets as we get into the back half of the year, on revenue. We haven't released those. But we do see our operating expenses holding flat, and we're definitely holding the line for the entire year. So I'd say that as our revenue increases, as we're anticipating, we'll see a corresponding decline in OpEx as a percentage of our revenue.

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. So with that, we will go ahead and conclude today's call. Thank you for participating and all parties may disconnect. Have a good evening. Thank you.