Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co Q4 2023 Earnings Call: Financial Results and Outlook

Welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2023 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Earnings Conference Call. Our participants for today are Antonio Fabio Neri; CEO, President & Director of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, Jeffrey Thomas Kvaal; Senior Director of IR for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, Jeremy K. Cox; Senior VP, Controller, Chief Tax Officer, Principal Account Officer & Interim CFO for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, A.M. Sacconaghi; Senior Analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC., Research Division, Michael Ng; Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Research Division, Michael Tsvetanov; Associate Equity Analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division, Samik Chatterjee; Analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division, Shek Ming Ho; Director & Senior Analyst at Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division, Simon Matthew Leopold; Research Analyst at Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division, Timothy Patrick Long; MD and Senior Technology Hardware & Networking Analyst at Barclays Bank PLC, Research Division, and Wamsi Mohan; MD in Americas Equity Research at BofA Securities, Research Division.

Good afternoon, my name is Gary, and I’ll be your conference moderator for today’s call. (Operator Instructions). As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the presentation over to your host for today’s call, Jeff Kvaal, Senior Director of Investor Relations at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Please proceed.

Thanks, Gary. I’m Jeff Kvaal. I’d like to welcome you to our fiscal 2023 4th quarter earnings conference call with Antonio Neri, HPE’s President and Chief Executive Officer; and Jeremy Cox, HPE’s Senior Vice President, Controller, and Interim Chief Financial Officer.

Before I hand the call to Antonio, I want to remind you that this call is being webcast, and a replay will be available shortly after the call concludes. The press release and slide presentation accompanying the release have been posted on our HPE Investor Relations web page. The financial information referenced on this call is forward-looking and based on our best view of the world and our businesses as we see them today. HPE assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. We note that the financial information discussed reflects estimates based on the information available at this time and could differ materially from the amounts ultimately reported in HPE’s annual Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2023. Please refer to HPE’s filings with the SEC for a discussion of these risks. For financial information expressed on a non-GAAP basis, a reconciliation to the comparable GAAP information has been provided on our website. Please refer to the tables and slide presentation accompanying today’s earnings release for details. Throughout this conference call, all revenue growth rates, unless noted otherwise, are presented on a year-over-year basis and adjusted to exclude the impact of currency. Finally, Antonio and Jeremy will reference our earnings presentation in their prepared comments. And with that, let me turn it to you, Antonio.
Continued content from Antonio Fabio Neri:
Our strategy, portfolio differentiation, and strong execution led to an incredible performance in fiscal year 2023, delivering record-breaking financial metrics and gross margin expansion. We have focused on accelerating revenue diversification through our growth engines in Intelligent Edge and HPC & AI, as well as our HPE GreenLake platform.

I am particularly proud of our results in fiscal year 2023, which demonstrate the relevance of our strategy, portfolio differentiation, and strong execution. We achieved our highest gross margin, operating profit, and revenue in 4 years. Our non-GAAP diluted net earnings per share and free cash flow were also record-breaking, reflecting our commitment to driving profitable growth.

We are confident in our ability to generate further value for our shareholders, as evidenced by our decision to raise dividends in 2024. Our deliberate alignment with significant market trends around edge, hybrid cloud, and AI has positioned us as more relevant than ever to our customers.

Despite an uncertain macroeconomic backdrop, we saw continued demand across our portfolio, with a significant acceleration in AI orders. In Q4, orders for servers that include accelerated processing units represented 32% of our total server order mix, up more than 250% from the beginning of fiscal year 2023. This strong demand in our AI solutions drove a 25% year-over-year growth in revenue for our HPC & AI segment.

We continued to innovate and expand our collaborations, such as our turnkey preconfigured supercomputing solution for generative AI in partnership with NVIDIA and the delivery of the U.K.’s fastest supercomputer, as well as other initiatives aimed at speeding up the training and fine-tuning of AI models.

We are confident in our ability to sustain this strong demand and look forward to further expanding our success in fiscal year 2024. Thank you for joining us today, and we are excited about the future of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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