Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Micron Technology Inc. MU -1.54% has resumed some shipments to Huawei Technologies Co. after determining that they didn’t fall afoul of U.S. curbs on exports to the Chinese telecom giant, the memory chip maker’s chief executive said Tuesday.
Micron had stopped all shipments to Huawei after the Commerce Department in May added the Chinese company to a blacklist, a move the Trump administration said would prevent U.S. technology from being used to undermine U.S. security and policy interests.
The company, however, found that it could actually ship a subset of its products that weren’t subject to restrictions on blacklisted companies, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a call with analysts after Micron reported quarterly financial results on Tuesday.
“We have started shipping some orders of those products to Huawei in the last two weeks,” he said. He added that uncertainty surrounding the business with Huawei hadn’t abated, and it was unclear how many products the company would be able to ship to Huawei and for how long.
Mr. Mehrotra didn’t say which products it could continue to ship, or how much the resumption would affect Micron’s revenue.
While the U.S. Commerce Department put Huawei on its so-called entity list, forbidding American exports to the Chinese company without a license, there is an exception for foreign-made products that include no more than 25% U.S. content.
Major suppliers to Huawei have been stung deeply by the blacklisting, resulting in a wave of reduced revenue expectations.
Broadcom Inc. cut $2 billion from its annual revenue guidance earlier this month in part due to the curbs on exports to Huawei. Micron derived 13% of its revenue from Huawei in the first half of 2019, according to its financial statements, and on Tuesday gave guidance of $4.5 billion of revenues for the current quarter, down from the $4.79 billion that the company reported for its fiscal third quarter.
Micron, based in Boise, Idaho, said it is reducing capital expenditures amid growing tensions with China, the most critical market for its DRAM and NAND memory products. About 57% of Micron’s total revenue comes from China, according to data from S&P Global.
Despite a sharp year-over-year drop in both revenue and profit for the fiscal third quarter, Micron’s results exceeded Wall Street expectations. Quarterly profit came in at $840 million, or 74 cents a share, compared with $3.82 billion, or $3.10 a share, a year ago.
The company reported adjusted earnings of $1.05 a share. Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting earnings of 79 cents a share on an adjusted basis.
Revenue fell to $4.79 billion from $7.8 billion a year earlier. Analysts had expected $4.7 billion of revenue in the quarter.
Micron shares rose nearly 9% during aftermarket trading.
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