Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript June 12, 2024
Broadcom Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $10.96, expectations were $10.85.
Operator: Welcome to Broadcom Inc. Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Ji Yoo, Head of Investor Relations of Broadcom Inc.
Ji Yoo : Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Joining me on today’s call are Hock Tan, President and CEO; Kirsten Spears, Chief Financial Officer and Charlie Kawwas, President, Semiconductor Solutions Group. Broadcom distributed a press release and financial tables after the market closed, describing our financial performance for the second quarter of fiscal year 2024. If you did not receive a copy, you may obtain the information from the Investor section of Broadcom’s website at Broadcom.com. This conference call is being webcast live and an audio replay of the call can be accessed for 1 year through the Investor section of Broadcom’s website. During the prepared comments, Hock and Kirsten will be providing details of our second quarter fiscal year 2024 results, guidance for our fiscal year 2024, as well as commentary regarding the business environment.
We’ll take questions after the end of our prepared comments. Please refer to our press release today and our recent filings with the SEC for information on the specific risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements made on this call. In addition to US GAAP reporting, Broadcom reports certain financial measures on a non-GAAP basis. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP measures is included in the tables attached to today’s press release. Comments made during today’s call will primarily refer to our non-GAAP financial results. I’ll now turn the call over to Hock.
Hock Tan : Thank you, Ji. And thank you everyone for joining today. In our fiscal Q2 2024 results — consolidated net revenue was $12.5 billion, up 43% year-on-year as revenue included a full quarter of contribution from VMware. But if we exclude VMware, consolidated revenue was up 12% year-on-year. And this 12% organic growth in revenue was largely driven by AI revenue, which stepped up 280% year-on-year to $3.1 billion, more than offsetting continued cyclical weakness in semiconductor revenue from enterprises and telcos. Let me now give you more color on our two reporting segments. Beginning with software. In Q2 infrastructure software segment revenue of $5.3 billion was up 175% year-on-year and included $2.7 billion in revenue contribution from VMware, up from $2.1 billion in the prior quarter.
The integration of VMware is going very well. Since we acquired VMware, we have modernized the product SKUs from over 8,000 disparate SKUs to four core product offerings and simplified the go-to-market flow, eliminating a huge amount of channel conflicts. We are making good progress in transitioning all VMware products to a subscription licensing model. And since closing the deal, we have actually signed up close to 3,000 of our largest 10,000 customers to enable them to build a self-service virtual private cloud on-prem. Each of these customers typically sign up to a multi-year contract, which we normalize into an annual measure known as Annualized Booking Value, or ABV. This metric, ABV for VMware products, accelerated from $1.2 billion in Q1 to $1.9 billion in Q2.
By reference, for the consolidated Broadcom software portfolio, ABV grew from $1.9 billion in Q1 to $2.8 billion over the same period in Q2. Meanwhile, we have integrated SG&A across the entire platform and eliminated redundant functions. Year-to-date, we have incurred about $2 billion of restructuring and integration costs and drove our spending run rate at VMware to $1.6 billion this quarter, from what used to be $2.3 billion per quarter pre-acquisition. We expect spending will continue to decline towards a $1.3 billion run rate exiting Q4, better than our previous $1.4 billion plan, and will likely stabilize at $1.2 billion post-integration. VMware revenue in Q1 was $2.1 billion, grew to $2.7 billion in Q2, and will accelerate towards a $4 billion per quarter run rate.
We therefore expect operating margins for VMware to begin to converge towards that of classic Broadcom software by fiscal 2025. Turning to semiconductors, Let me give you more color by end markets. Networking. Q2 revenue of $3.8 billion grew 44% year-on-year, representing 53% of semiconductor revenue. This was again driven by strong demand from hyperscalers for both AI networking and custom accelerators. It’s interesting to note that as AI data center clusters continue to deploy, our revenue mix has been shifting towards an increasing proportion of networking. We doubled the number of switches we sold year-on-year, particularly the PAM-5 and Jericho3, which we deployed successfully in close collaboration with partners like Arista Networks, Dell, Juniper, and Supermicro.
Additionally, we also double our shipments of PCI Express switches and NICs in the AI backend fabric. We’re leading the rapid transition of optical interconnects in AI data centers to 800 gigabit bandwidth, which is driving accelerated growth for our DSPs, optical lasers, and PIN diodes. And we are not standing still. Together with these same partners, we are developing the next generation switches, DSP, and optics that will drive the ecosystem towards 1.6 terabit connectivity to scale out larger AI accelerated clusters.
,: Next year, we expect all mega-scale GPU deployments to be on Ethernet. We expect the strength in AI to continue, and because of that, we now expect networking revenue to grow 40% year-on-year compared to our prior guidance of over 35% growth. Moving to wireless. Q2 wireless revenue of $1.6 billion grew 2% year-on-year, was seasonally down 19% quarter-on-quarter and represents 22% of semiconductor revenue. And in fiscal ’24, helped by content increases, we reiterate our previous guidance for wireless revenue to be essentially flat year-on-year. This trend is wholly consistent with our continued engagement with our North American customer, which is deep, strategic, and multiyear and represents all of our wireless business. Next, our Q2 server storage connectivity revenue was $824 million or 11% of semiconductor revenue, down 27% year-on-year.
We believe though, Q2 was the bottom in server storage. And based on updated demand forecast and bookings, we expect a modest recovery in the second half of the year. And accordingly, we forecast fiscal ’24 server storage revenue to decline around the 20% range year-on-year. Moving on to broadband. Q2 revenue declined 39% year-on-year to $730 million and represented 10% of semiconductor revenue. Broadband remains weak on the continued pause in telco and service provider spending. We expect Broadcom to bottom in the second half of the year with a recovery in 2025. Accordingly, we are revising our outlook for fiscal ’24 broadband revenue to be down high 30s year-on-year from our prior guidance for a decline of just over 30% year-on-year. Finally, Q2 industrial rev — resale of $234 million declined 10% year-on-year.
And for fiscal ’24, we now expect industrial resale to be down double-digit percentage year-on-year compared to our prior guidance for high single-digit decline. So to sum it all up, here’s what we are seeing. For fiscal ’24, we expect revenue from AI to be much stronger at over $11 billion. Non-AI semiconductor revenue has bottomed in Q2 and is likely to recover modestly for the second half of fiscal ’24. On infrastructure software, we’re making very strong progress in integrating VMware and accelerating its growth. Pulling all these three key factors together, we are raising our fiscal ’24 revenue guidance to $51 billion. And with that, let me turn the call over to Kirsten.
Kirsten Spears : Thank you, Hock. Let me now provide additional detail on our Q2 financial performance, which included a full quarter of contribution from VMware. Consolidated revenue was $12.5 billion for the quarter, up 43% from a year ago. Excluding the contribution from VMware, Q2 revenue increased 12% year-on-year. Gross margins were 76.2% of revenue in the quarter. Operating expenses were $2.4 billion and R&D was $1.5 billion, both up year-on-year primarily due to the consolidation of VMware. Q2 operating income was $7.1 billion and was up 32% from a year ago with operating margin at 57% of revenue. Excluding transition costs, operating profit of $7.4 billion was up 36% from a year ago, with operating margin of 59% of revenue.
Adjusted EBITDA was $7.4 billion or 60% of revenue. This figure excludes $149 million of depreciation. Now a review of the P&L for our two segments, starting with semiconductors. Revenue for our semiconductor solutions segment was $7.2 billion and represented 58% of total revenue in the quarter. This was up 6% year-on-year. Gross margins for our semiconductor solutions segment were approximately 67%, down 370 basis points year-on-year, driven primarily by a higher mix of custom AI accelerators. Operating expenses increased 4% year-on-year to $868 million on increased investment in R&D, resulting in semiconductor operating margins of 55%. Now moving on to infrastructure software. Revenue for infrastructure software was $5.3 billion, up 170% year-on-year, primarily due to the contribution of VMware and represented 42% of revenue.
Gross margin for infrastructure software were 88% in the quarter, and operating expenses were $1.5 billion in the quarter, resulting in infrastructure software operating margin of 60%. Excluding transition costs, operating margin was 64%. Now moving on to cash flow. Free cash flow in the quarter was $4.4 billion and represented 36% of revenues. Excluding cash used for restructuring and integration of $830 million, free cash flows of $5.3 billion were up 18% year-on-year and represented 42% of revenue. Free cash flow as a percentage of revenue has declined from 2023 due to higher cash interest expense from debt related to the VMware acquisition and higher cash taxes due to a higher mix of US income and the delay in the reenactment of Section 174.
We spent $132 million on capital expenditures. Days sales outstanding were 40 days in the second quarter, consistent with 41 days in the first quarter. We ended the second quarter with inventory of $1.8 billion down 4% sequentially. We continue to remain disciplined on how we manage inventory across our ecosystem. We ended the second quarter with $9.8 billion of cash and $74 billion of gross debt. The weighted average coupon rate and years to maturity of our $48 billion in fixed rate debt is 3.5% and 8.2 years respectively. The weighted average coupon rate and years to maturity of our $28 billion in floating rate debt is 6.6% and 2.8 years, respectively. During the quarter, we repaid $2 billion of our floating rate debt, and we intend to maintain this quarterly repayment of debt throughout fiscal 2024.
Turning to capital allocation. In the quarter, we paid stockholders $2.4 billion of cash dividends based on a quarterly common stock cash dividend of $5.25 per share. In Q2, non-GAAP diluted share count was 492 million as the 54 million shares issued for the VMware acquisition were fully weighted in the second quarter. We paid $1.5 billion withholding taxes due on vesting of employee equity, resulting in the elimination of 1.2 million AVGO shares. Today, we are announcing a 10-for-1 forward stock split of Broadcom’s common stock to make ownership of Broadcom stock more accessible to investors and to employees. Our stockholders of record after the close of market on July 11, 2024, will receive an additional nine shares of common stock after the close of market on July 12, with trading on a split-adjusted basis expected to commence at market open on July 15, 2024.
In Q3, reflecting a post-split basis, we expect share count to be approximately 4.92 billion shares. Now on to guidance. We are raising our guidance for fiscal year 2024 consolidated revenue to $51 billion and adjusted EBITDA to 61%. For modeling purposes, please keep in mind that GAAP net income and cash flows in fiscal year 2024 are impacted by restructuring and integration-related cash costs due to the VMware acquisition. That concludes my prepared remarks. Operator, please open up the call for questions.
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