SGI Q2 Deals Slip from Fiscal Cliff

SGI (Silicon Graphics International) today announced preliminary December 2012 (fiscal Q2 2013) results that exceeded earnings guidance while falling short of revenue guidance.

Based in Fremont, California, SGI manufactures supercomputers that are used in science research, Internet-based businesses, security, and other computation-intensive businesses. Revenues for the quarter were near $171 million, well below guidance of $180 to $195 million. CEO Jorge Titinger attributed the shortfall to three large deals with government agencies that normally would have closed in the quarter. In total the deals represented $15 million in revenue, and two of the three have closed since the quarter ended. The delays were due to agency concerns about their budgets due to the fiscal cliff standoff.

Despite the revenue shortfall, profits came in above prior guidance. This was due to better management, including closer attention to profit margins on individual supercomputer sales. On a GAAP basis net income is expected to be between break even and $1 million, or zero to $0.03 per share. On a non-GAAP basis net income is between $3 million and $4 million, for $0.07 to $0.10 earnings per share (EPS).

SGI ended the quarter with $128 million in cash, up $17 million in the quarter. Titinger and the new management team have started requiring deposits and milestone payments on the more expensive supercomputer systems, resulting in better cash flow.

It a presentation to investors, Titinger emphasized SGI's expertise in Big Data and Scale-Up Computing, as well as innovative storage solutions for massive amounts of data that need to be available for analysis. He talked about how SGI computers can do complex security checks for credit cards in real time (as they happen), something that used to take days to do.

As a sweetener SGI will used $15 million of its cash to buy back shares.

SGI stock ended the day at $10.87, up $0.34 for the day or 3.2%. That gave SGI a market capitalization of $360 million.

Disclaimer: I own SGI stock and will not trade the stock for 3 days after the publication of this report.