QMCO Reports Q4

Quantum (NASDAQ: QMCO ) released fourth-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Monday. Read the complete transcript below. This content is powered APIs. For comprehensive financial data and transcripts, visit View the webcast at Summary Quantum Corporation reported Q4 2026 revenue of $78 million, surpassing guidance by $10 million and showing a 27% year-over-year increase.

The company faced supply chain constraints but expects better backlog conversion in the latter half of fiscal 2027, with a current backlog of $45 million. ActiveScale solutions revenue tripled year-over-year, driven by AI and large-scale data management demands. 9 million post-transaction. Quantum plans to maintain flat non-GAAP operating expenses year-over-year and targets a recovery in gross margins towards 40% amid ongoing component pricing challenges.

The company provided guidance for Q1 2027 with expected revenue of $75 million, reflecting 17% growth year-over-year. Full Transcript OPERATOR (Operator) Ladies and gentlemen, greetings and welcome to the Quantum Corporation Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2026 Financial Results Conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow a formal presentation.

If anyone should require operator assistance, please press Star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Quantum's Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Corporate Secretary Tara Ilges. Please go ahead.

Tara Ilges (Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Corporate Secretary) Good afternoon and thank you for joining today's conference call to discuss Quantum's fiscal fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2026 financial results. With me on today's call are Hughes Mayrath, Quantum CEO, and William White, our Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the call up to questions from analysts. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that comments made on today's call may include forward-looking statements.

All statements other than statements of historical fact should be viewed as forward-looking, including any projections of revenue, margins, expenses, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, cash flows, or other financial, operational, or performance metrics. These statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that we refer to as risk factors. Risk factors may cause our actual results to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the detailed descriptions we provide about these and additional risk factors under the Risk Factors section in our 10K and 10Qs filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Company does not intend to update forward-looking statements once they are issued, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except where required by applicable law. Please note that today's press release and management statements during today's call will include certain financial information in GAAP and non-GAAP measures. We will include definitions and reconciliations of GAAP measures to non-GAAP items in our press release. With that, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Quantum CEO Hughes Mayrath.

Hughes Mayrath (Chief Executive Officer) Thank you, Tara, and good afternoon everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. I'll start with an overview of our fourth quarter. I'm pleased to report that we delivered a strong close to fiscal 2026.

Our fourth quarter revenue of $78 million was $10 million above our guidance midpoint, up 5% quarter over quarter and 27% year over year. Demand was solid across our storage solutions, driven by continued growth in data and increasing AI-related workloads. Our ability to grow faster was limited by supply chain and fulfillment timing, particularly around disk and tape drives, which continues to be a factor for us in the near term. That said, we expect greater backlog conversion heading into the second half of this fiscal year.

What we're hearing from our customers is very consistent. They're dealing with much higher data volumes and looking for better ways to manage at scale. Rising primary storage costs and lengthy supply chain for flash and disk are affecting their ability to grow within budget. Our constraints are increasingly putting their growth at risk, especially in AI, HPC, and research verticals.

That's where we're seeing increasing demand for our solutions. Our ongoing focus is to support our customers' need to manage the right data for the right workload at the right cost. With our portfolio across Scalar, DXI, ActiveScale, and StoreNext, we can support both high-performance requirements and long-term lower-cost storage in a single integrated approach. This is a critical priority as customers look for practical ways to manage both growth and cost in their environments.

We're seeing very strong momentum in object storage with revenue from our ActiveScale solutions tripling year over year driven by new use cases around large-scale data management and AI workloads. Adoption of ActiveScale cold storage solutions continues to ramp and we expect ongoing strong demand due to our unique capabilities and performance. We're also seeing more customers actively moving data out of primary storage and adopting tiered storage architectures. That's driving increased interest in tape and object storage, particularly in large-scale environments where cost and power really matter.

As an example, we recently announced a partnership with Pink Elephant. Pink Elephant is a sovereign MSP in Europe. We're using our solutions to deliver cost-ef