Penguin Solutions Lifts Fiscal 2027 Sales Growth View To About 40%, From 30%, As CEO Says Neocloud Projects Are Underway
CEO Kash Shaikh said the neocloud AI projects are already running, and the interim CFO guided fiscal 2027 net sales growth of about 40%.
Penguin Solutions raised its fiscal 2027 net sales growth outlook to about 40% at the midpoint, from the roughly 30% preliminary view it gave a quarter earlier, Interim CFO Aaron Johnson said on the company's fourth-quarter earnings call Tuesday. CEO Kash Shaikh told analysts on the same call that the neocloud projects behind the raise are "not future, they are already happening."
What management said on the call
Johnson guided for fiscal 2027 net sales growth of about 40% at the midpoint, plus or minus 10 percentage points, or roughly $2.43 billion. The company framed that as above its earlier preliminary view of about 30% growth for both net sales and diluted earnings per share.
Shaikh said a Needham analyst asked when the neocloud projects would show up in results. He declined to give timing. He said most of the projects he cited have started, with the company managing or building data centers and some still in procurement, and that the work ran for several months before bookings accelerated.
Asked by a Rosenblatt analyst about the earlier 30% figure, Shaikh said it was only "more of a color and preliminary outlook." He said bookings and visibility into conversion now make this a formal outlook.
The wins Shaikh listed included a neocloud with $10 billion in contracted compute from a leading AI lab. Penguin was selected to deploy and operate a 36,000-GPU AI factory in Norway for it. He also cited a publicly traded neocloud with more than $3 billion in signed multi-year AI infrastructure contracts, and a neocloud backed by a leading South Korean technology company.
The quarter behind the raise
Net sales in the fourth quarter were $567 million, up 68% from a year earlier, and earnings per share were $1.00, up 133%, according to Shaikh. Seeking Alpha carried the same headline figures. Full-year net sales were about $1.73 billion, up about 26%.
Sales were roughly flat in the first half of fiscal 2026. Growth then reached 48% in the third quarter and 68% in the fourth, for 58% across the second half, which Shaikh tied to the launch of the AI factory platform strategy. Integrated memory sales reached a record $341 million, up 158% from a year earlier. Shaikh also said the company ended the year with record backlog.
Shaikh also announced that Stephen Cumming has joined as the new chief financial officer. Johnson, who has been interim CFO since July, returns to his role as vice president of finance and accounting.
What to watch
The open question is whether neocloud bookings turn into reported net sales through fiscal 2027. Shaikh declined to give timing for that conversion on the call.
PENG shares were up 4.33% in Tuesday after-hours trading, at $66.99, according to Benzinga.
Penguin's own test is conversion: Shaikh gave no date for when the neocloud projects will appear in net sales.
Sources
- Penguin Solutions Stock Pops on Q4 Earnings Beat, Strong Guidance — benzinga.com
- Penguin Solutions Non-GAAP EPS of $1.00 beats by $0.23, revenue of $567M beats by $46.01M (PENG:NASDAQ) | Seeking Alpha — seekingalpha.com
- Penguin Solutions Sees FY2027 GAAP EPS $2.80-... — benzinga.com
- Penguin Solutions (NASDAQ:PENG) Reports Strong Q3 But Inventory Levels Increase — Yahoo Finance
- Penguin Solutions Stock: Raised Outlook Sends Shares Higher — Barron's
