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Dot Hill Jumps on Preliminary Q4 Results
HILL
January 10, 2011
The price of Dot Hill stock is soaring today (up $0.46 per share to $2.35, or 24.3% as I write) after preliminary Q4 results were released that exceeded prior guidance. See my Dot Hill Q3 analyst conference call report for Q3 results and Q4 prior guidance.
Dot Hill has been trying to rebuild its data storage hardware business for years, following the demise of its relationship with it former major client, Sun. Its products are mainly sold to OEMs that relabel them or incorporate them into larger systems. Its main client is HP, but it has won a swarm of smaller OEMs and system integrators in the past 3 years. Margins, however, were a problem. Hill's second largest client, NetApp, refused to negotiate prices that allowed Hill to make a profit, so that relationship was terminated as of December 1.
Anticipation of a decline of revenues due to the NetApp termination has been a major reason for Hill's low stock price. Instead, in even with 2 final months of NetApp included in the quarter, revenues increased from $62 million in Q3 to about $65 million in Q4. Keep in mind that for enterprise data storage systems Q4 is typically the best season. Even so, Hill's new line of data storage products must be selling extremely well to hit $65 million with NetApp out of the picture.
And those sales have higher profit margins, allowing Non-GAAP earnings per share to be in the range of $0.02 to $0.04. After years in the red, this is great news for Dot Hill.
Profit margins should continue to expand in 2011 because Hill should be selling an increasing amount of software along with its hardware offerings. Software, in this case storage management software, carries much better profit margins than the hardware.
Q1, 2011, will be a bit tougher. It will be the first full quarter without NetApp revenues, and it is traditionally a seasonally weak quarter. Dot Hill has a new relationship with Lenovo which should ramp in 2011, but apparently that won't affect Q1 much.
Good work and thanks to the entire crew at Dot Hill!
William P. Meyers
See also: www.dothill.com
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Copyright 2010 William P. Meyers