Something to keep in mind with Super Micro is they are investing massively in research and development and have been for many years. They’ve mentioned many times that over half their employees are engineers and with a total of 6,000 employees or so, they hire nearly 3,000 engineers.
Breaking it down by spend metrics for the last quarter,
R&D 109M
Sales and marketing 47M
G&A 38M
So they company is spending more on research and development, then the rest of the company combined!
Gross profit for the company was 564M so the company is already GAAP profitable by a wide range.
The low margin of this business is not attractive for competitors. Super Micro is undercutting themselves on price somewhat to gain market share. I believe on the call they are even taking on some loans or leverage to try and gain further market share.
Their competitive advantage lies in their building blocks solution which was developed in house by all these engineers. The components can be put together in anyway the customer specifies. They also have about 20 predefined machines for specific use cases. One of these is an AI optimized server. This technology put together is more advanced than just a GPU being stacked together. They lead the industry in cooling and energy efficiency.
They can effectively build specs with any chip maker. If Nvidia is no longer the leader in 5 years, Super Micro could be partnering with that new chip maker.
This technology can not simply be copied as some are suggesting. It’s the work of a massive R&D team building a competitively superior product over the long term. They can provide the best product in the market and the lowest total cost of ownership for the server. It’s no wonder Meta is coming to them for what sounds like most of their next gen compute needs.