Super Micro Guided Fiscal 2027 Revenue $16 Billion Above Wall Street and Missed the Quarter Anyway

Super Micro Computer (SMCI +19.02%) reported its fiscal fourth-quarter results (for the period ended June 30) after the market closed on Tuesday. Revenue of $11.1 billion came in below the $11.55 billion analysts polled by LSEG were expecting.

But the stock rose anyway, gaining about 7% in Tuesday’s extended session and about 19% on Wednesday as of this writing.

The reason is the outlook. For fiscal 2027, management guided revenue to a range of $65 billion to $72 billion. Analysts were modeling about $52.5 billion, according to LSEG. In other words, the artificial intelligence (AI) server maker just guided $16 billion above what Wall Street had penciled in, measured at the midpoint of the range.

The margin changed the quarter

The quarter itself was hardly weak. Revenue rose 93% year over year, from $5.8 billion in the year-ago quarter, and was up from $10.2 billion in fiscal Q3.

That brought fiscal 2026 revenue to $39.1 billion, up 78% from $22.0 billion in fiscal 2025.

The quarter’s standout figure, however, was gross margin. Supermicro posted a 17.5% gross margin, up from 9.9% in fiscal Q3 and 9.5% in the year-ago period. That’s above even the preliminary 15% to 17% range the company flagged in its July 21 business update. For context, management originally guided the quarter to a gross margin of just 8.2% to 8.4%.

That swing turned a modest revenue quarter into an enormous profit quarter. Net income came in at $1,178 million, up about sixfold from $195 million a year earlier. Management attributes the margin jump primarily to a richer mix of enterprise customers and broader adoption of its Data Center Building Block Solutions architecture.

Worth remembering: these results are preliminary, as the company’s financial closing procedures for the year aren’t complete. And Supermicro’s board is still conducting an independent review of certain transactions tied to alleged export-control issues. The company itself notes the outcome could affect its forecasts.

What $65 billion needs

A fiscal 2027 revenue range of $65 billion to $72 billion implies growth of 66% at the low end and 84% at the high end. Two things have to hold for that to happen.

The first is the order book converting. Supermicro received more than $60 billion of new orders in the fourth quarter alone, pushing its backlog to record levels entering fiscal 2027. So the guide has real order support behind it. Of course, orders can slip or shrink before they become revenue, and the company has noted some of those commitments may not be firm.

The second is the working capital to build it all. Servers get built and shipped before customers pay, and the balance sheet shows what that costs at this scale. Inventories ended the year at $12.9 billion, nearly triple the $4.7 billion of a year ago, while receivables grew to $6.1 billion from $2.2 billion.

And Supermicro finished the year with $7.5 billion of cash against $8.7 billion of bank debt and convertible notes.

Operating cash flow did swing positive ($747 million in the fourth quarter), but a guide this size could keep the balance sheet under strain for a while.

The first-quarter guide of $14.5 billion to $15.5 billion annualizes to about $60 billion. Even the bottom of the full-year range requires quarterly revenue to average about $16.7 billion after fiscal Q1.

Today’s Change

(19.02%) $6.01

Current Price

$37.61

Key Data Points

Market Cap

$20BMarket cap calculated using publicly traded shares outstanding only. Does not include unlisted, private, or dual-class non-traded shares. Implied market cap may vary.

Day’s Range

$33.94 – $38.15

52wk Range

$19.48 – $58.78

Volume

165.7M

Avg Vol

53.7M

Gross Margin

8.39%

Priced like the guide fails

Even after Wednesday’s jump, shares trade around $38. That’s about 11.5 times earnings, based on the $3.26 per share Supermicro just earned in fiscal 2026, and about 10 times the annualized earnings that the midpoint of management’s own first-quarter guidance implies for the year ahead.

Multiples like these usually belong to businesses the market expects to shrink — not to a growth stock guiding revenue up 66% or more.

I think the doubt is mostly about the margin. A mix-driven gross margin that nearly doubled in one quarter is a result, not yet a trend, and the fiscal 2027 profit story hinges on how much of it sticks. After all, Supermicro’s gross margin was 10.8% for the full fiscal year, slightly below the prior year’s 11.1%. The fourth quarter is the outlier, not the baseline.

So the revenue half of the guide has an order book behind it. The margin half has shown up for exactly one quarter, and that’s the number worth watching from here.