Super Micro just handed Wall Street a number so large the analysts had to read it twice, and the stock did the rest.
The AI server maker reported its fiscal fourth-quarter results on Tuesday night, and the shares climbed about 9% in extended trading. Decent going for a company that spent much of 2024 fending off accounting questions and a delisting scare.
The headline number
Analysts had modelled adjusted earnings of $0.71 per share on revenue of $11.7 billion. Super Micro came back with $1.70 per share on a non-GAAP basis, more than double the target. On a straight GAAP basis it still booked $1.62 per share. Revenue landed at $11.1 billion, which technically missed, but it was up more than 90% on the same quarter a year earlier.
Gross margin nearly doubled to 17.6%. The company also produced $722 million of positive free cash flow in the quarter, which matters, because across the full financial year Super Micro burned roughly $6.65 billion in cash stockpiling parts to feed AI server demand.
The orders are the real story
Here is the figure that got people out of their chairs. Super Micro said it booked more than $60 billion in new orders during the fourth quarter. For a sense of scale, the whole company was valued at around $19 billion when that order number first surfaced in late July. A backlog several times your market cap tends to concentrate the mind.
Chief executive Charles Liang guided fiscal first-quarter sales to a range of $14.5 billion to $15.5 billion, with GAAP earnings of $0.89 to $0.98 per share. Management also floated full-year fiscal 2027 revenue of $65 billion to $72 billion, comfortably above the roughly $53 billion analysts had pencilled in.
Why the caution flag stays up
Liang did not offer free cash flow guidance for 2027, and analysts polled by S&P Global still expect the firm to burn cash again next year as it funds the growth. Building servers at this pace costs money up front, and the margins, though better, are thin next to the chip designers whose silicon goes inside the boxes. Super Micro is a systems integrator, so it lives on volume and flawless execution. Rising memory prices are not helping the cost side either.
Then there is concentration. A large slice of that backlog rests on a handful of giant customers putting up data centres. If even one trims an order, the arithmetic shifts fast. The stock still sits well below its 52-week high near $59, which tells you the market has not fully forgotten the governance wobble.
Even so, a 90%-plus revenue jump, doubled margins and a $60 billion order book add up to a serious quarter by any yardstick. Whether the cash actually follows the orders is the question that settles the next move. (Not investment advice.)
Did you know: Super Micro ran a 10-for-1 stock split in late 2024, which is why a firm turning over tens of billions trades for less than the price of a night out.
Sources
- Yahoo Finance: Super Micro discloses $60 billion in new orders
- Motley Fool: Why Super Micro stock popped
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