QLogic Corp. (QLGC) Deutsche Bank dbAccess Technology Conference Call September 13, 2012 11:50 am ET Executives Jean Hu – Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Presentation Jean Hu Good morning. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Before I start, just a quick reminder, our comments today may contain forward-looking statement, so they are subject to our Safe Harbor statement. You can read on the screen. I want to start this presentation with some key messages about QLogic. The first one is certainly market opportunity. So what we have seen is a tremendous growth opportunity ahead of QLogic. Our traditional Fibre Channel market continued to be very solid and stable. Fibre Channel technology continued to be the choice for enterprise mission-critical applications. Now what we have seen is a significant growth opportunity in 10-gig Ethernet and converged market. There is a secular technology trend happening in data center, the technology transition from 1-gig to 10-gig Ethernet and the converged network. QLogic participated in this market from both the host side and switching side. So our market opportunity would double in next several years in this space, it’s very exciting. Then last week, we also announced a new technology. This new technology really combine our high performance I/O adapter card with industry-standard flash technology to bring the server-side caching to storage area network. It’s very exciting and it opened additional adjacent big opportunity for us. Secondly, QLogic is very uniquely positioned to capture those opportunities, and our competitive advantage really comes from our strong IP portfolio, deep expertise in high performance I/O in data center, and also the key differentiator is really the battle-hardened software, firmware we have been with during the last decade and tested for a long time. And the other advantage we have certainly is our strong incumbency. We have shipped over 12 million Fiber Channel adapter ports for the last decade. We established the strong brand preference for our product in the data center. CIO’s really know QLogic product very well on the interconnect side.
Of course, the third thing is execution. As a company, we are very focused on execution, in delivering quality and innovative product and also execution in delivering a good business model and shareholder value. If you look at our financial model, we have consistently delivered strong financial performance over many, many years. The business generate a very strong cash flow. We also have returned $1.8 billion cash to shareholders through stock buyback, so we’re very committed to shareholder value creation.
On the market leadership side, just a quick highlight, right, we are the leader in Fiber Channel market. We have 55% market share, and we gained market share each year during the last eight years. In the emerging Fiber Channel over Ethernet market, again, we are number one. We have 54% market share. This is a emerging new market, the market is still very small, but leverage our Fibre Channel adapter leadership, but we have again the similar market share. In the 10-gig Ethernet, including FCoE adapter card in 2011, we’re number two just next to Intel. So in this new market opportunity, we really carved out a nice position for ourselves. For some of you who are not familiar with QLogic, just two quick slide about our product and the customers. Our host product include Fiber Channel adapters, the 10-gig adapters, converged adapters, and iSCSI adapters. Typically, they sit inside of the server or it could be in the storage array from the end, it accounts for about 77% of our revenue, so it’s really the major business of QLogic. And then our network product include Fibre Channel switches, Fibre Channel over Ethernet switches, and the intelligent storage routers. The revenue is about 13% of our overall revenue and also we provide silicon product, ASIC to customers when they need just ASIC product. Most of the silicon product actually belong to the host category. Silicon products tend to be around 10% of our revenue. We have a very OEM-centric model traditionally. If you look at our top six customers that we have, top four server OEMs, HP, IBM, Dell and Oracle and also we have two top storage OEMs, EMC and NetApp, those are our top six customers.Channel business is around 20%, but even some of the channel business really is for demand fulfillment for OEMs. So overall, it’s a very OEM-centric business. And if you look at our end customers, they tend to be big enterprises like AT&T, Federal Express, Intel, but also we serve web giant like Amazon and other Web 2.0 companies, too.
Now I want to talk quickly about the fundamental demand drivers for QLogic’s technology and the product, the major technology trends happening in the data center. All of us know there is significant explosion of data. We created so much data, like 90% of digital data in the world has been created during the last two years. And this trend will continue, because there’s a continued explosion of devices, applications, social media, every one of us really wants to get instant access to information, and every business now really need a competitive advantage by instant access to information, data, business intelligence, analytics. So all those factors really end up creating more and more volume data, that’s why the big data terminology come into play. All the data created need to be processed by servers. They also need to be transmitted. So there will be like 4.8 zettabyte annual global IP traffic by the end of 2015, and also other data needed to be installed. Read the rest of this transcript for free on seekingalpha.com