SGI set to announce earnings for Q1 2010

If you’ve got money in SGI, or you are just interested in how the new team is doing with the turnaround, you’ll want to tune in to SGI earnings call, scheduled for the first week in November

SGI today announced it will report financial results for the Company’s first quarter of fiscal 2010 ended September 26, 2009 on Wednesday, November 4, 2009, at 2:00 p.m. PT (5:00 p.m. ET).

The public is invited to attend, call details in SGI’s announcement.

The attentive may well wonder why SGI is filing a Q1 2010 report in November for a Q1 that ended in September when SGI’s fiscal year has always ended on Dec 31? And if you aren’t attentive you’re now caught up.

On the 6th of Aug SGI filed an NT 10-Q with the SEC letting them know that their quarterly would be late. That filing had this explanation of the delay:

The Company is unable to file its transition report on Form 10-Q for the period ended June 26, 2009, within the prescribed forty-day deadline. On June 19, 2008, the Company’s board of directors approved a change in its fiscal year end from the Saturday closest to December 31st of each year to the last Friday in June of each year. Due to this change, the Company’s current fiscal year, which began on January 4, 2009, ended on June 26, 2009, triggering transition period reporting pursuant to Rules 13a-10 and 15d-10 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

That report was filed by Aug 10, the date SGI specified in their NT 10-Q, and is the report I commented on here. SGI wasn’t looking so good the last time they posted results; they only lost $814,000, but the company took a one time credit for buying SGI’s assets at a discount to their intrinsic value — an accounting trick (legitimate though not indicative of performance) that makes their results look about $19.8M better than they otherwise would have.

SGI has an exploding roadmap that is going to be difficult to sell and service effectively, and there are signs from within SGI that the company is struggling with communications about the new products to its own staff. SGI looks like a company that is trying to be all things to two markets right now (scale out enterprise — Rackable — and scale up HPC — old SGI), and is at risk of being nothing to either.

What they have to do now is get out a UV that works the first time. If UV is further delayed, or if the launch is clouded by non-functioning systems, the company could be in serious trouble in the HPC market.