Company Profile: SMART Modular Technologies

Company:
SMART Modular Technologies, subsidiary of SMART Global Holdings, Inc.

Locations:

• HQ: in Newark, CA.
• Other offices: in Tewksbury, MA, home to one R&D centre; East Kilbride, Scotland, European planning and sales center; sales offices in New Taipei City, Taiwan (also does R&D); Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Irvine, CA (also does R&D); IC packaging and test, module manufacturing center (also does R&D) in Atibaia, Brazil; outsourced VAD center in Prague, Czech Republic; manufacturing and development in Penang, Malaysia; Advanced package engineering office in Gyeonggi, South Korea (also does R&D).

Date founded:
1998

Milestones:
$163 million IPO in 2006; acquired in 2008 Adtron, provider of SSDs, for $32 million.

Revenue and profitability:
Here for SMART Global Holdings that includes subsidiaries SMART Modular Technologies and acquisitions Cree LED Business last October for $300 million, Artesyn Embedded Computing for $80 million, and Inforce Computing in 2019, as well as subsidiary Penguin Computing, acquired in 2018 for $85 million, in Linux infrastructure, including Open Compute Project and EIA-based HPC on-premises and in cloud, AI, SDS, and networking technologies, coupled with professional and managed services including sys-admin-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service, and hosting:

The holding disclosed last September 17 its 4F20 financial results. Revenue was $297 million, up 5.6% from 3FQ20, 12% representing servers and storage, with net income of $20.4 million.

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Main executives:

• Ajay Shah, executive chairman, also founding managing partner of Silver Lake Sumeru

• Mark Adams, president and CEO, board’s member of Seagate Technology since 2017, and also Cadence Design Systems, Team Whistle

• Other ones:
  Jack Pacheco, EVP, chief operating and CFO, president of SMART memory solutions business
  Bruce Goldberg, VP, chief legal and chief compliance officer
  Alan Marten, SVP, speciality memory
  KiWan Kim, EVP, SMART Global Holdings, president of SMART emerging markets.
  Rogerio Nunes, VP and GM, SMART Brazil
  Anjali Reddy, VP WW Materials
  Mike Rubino, VP WW engineering
  Frank Perezalonso, VP business development, memory business unit

Number of employees:
1,052, according to LinkedIn

Technology:
DRAM, advanced memory, flash storage and ruggedized SSDs

Flash storage products:

• Embedded – commercial and industrial temp embedded flash-based products:
  eMMC
  eUSB
  M.2 PCIe NVMe
  M.2 SATA
  mSATA (MO-300A)
  SATA DOM
  Slim SATA (MO-297)
• Removable – industrial temp removable flash memory products in variety of form factors:
  2.5-inch SATA SSD
  CF Card
  CFast Card
  microSD Card
  SD Card
  U.2 PCIe NVMe
  USB flash Drive
• Ruggedized SSDs:
• T5E SSD
  S5E SSD
  M4P SSD
  M4 SSD
  M1HC SSD
  M2 SSD
  M1 SSD

These SSDs are used for OS boot code and data logging in servers. SMART Modular announced last May an enterprise SSD in EDSFF E1.S form factor, the MDC7000, that is applicable as the main flash media in storage servers and in HPC systems, to fill up to 32 8TB E1.S SSDs in a 1U server for up to 256TB total capacity.

Distributors:
Among them Avnet, Falcon Electronics, Future Electronics, Phoenix Electronics

Applications:
Automotive, defense, networking, storage, communications, gaming, printers, computing, industrial, servers

Target market:
Telecom, networking, data center and computing, industrial and embedded, as well as defense segments of the market, in DRAM IIoT, HPC, AI, ML data centers, as well as embedded and industrial computing

Competitors:
In DRAM modules Kingston, Ramaxel, Adata, Tigo, Powev, Transcend, Apacer, Team Group, Innodisk; in SSDs around 200 firms around the world