During the course of this meeting, we may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company in the industry. We wish to caution you that such statements are predictions and that actual events or results may differ materially. We refer you to the documents the company files on a consolidated basis from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically the company's most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. These documents contain and identify important factors that could cause the actual results for the company on a consolidated basis to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements. These certain factors can be found in the investor relations section of Micron's website. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements.
We are under no duty to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date of the presentation to conform these statements to actual results.
Well, good morning, everyone. I'm Bob Switz, welcome to Micron's 2012 shareholder meeting on this very balmy January morning. I think what I'd first like to do is introduce some of the Directors that are here with us today. I'd ask them to stand when I call their name. Bob Bailey, former Chairman and CEO of PMC-Sierra. Pat Byrne, Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, Chief Technology Officer of Danaher Corporation. Mercedes Johnson, former Senior VP and CFO of Avago Technologies Limited and Lam Research. Mark Durcan, CEO of Micron. We'll now proceed to the formal business of the meeting. In terms of the notice of meeting, I have received an affidavit stating that the notice of this meeting and a proxy statement have been given to all shareholders of record as of November 23rd, 2012.
The Inspector of Election, James Alden of Phoenix Advisory Partners, has signed the oath of inspection of election. The Inspector of Election has reported to me that we have present in person or by proxy, not less than 86% of the outstanding shares entitled to vote at this meeting, which does constitute a quorum. I therefore declare this meeting duly convened. On voting procedure, we'll vote by ballot today. If you have turned in a valid proxy and do not intend to change your vote today, it is not necessary for you to vote again. We will vote your proxy. If you did not turn in a proxy or wish to change your vote, please raise your hand now, we will distribute a ballot to you for your voting. Is there anybody that needs a ballot? We have one, two, three. Okay. Anybody else? Okay.
The proxy statement clearly defined the items to be voted on today. The first of those items of business is the election of directors. Bob Bailey, Pat Byrne, Mark Durcan, Mercedes Johnson, Larry Mondry, and I have been nominated to serve until the next annual meeting or until our successors are duly elected and qualified. Is there any discussion on this issue? Okay. Seeing none, would you please mark your ballots? The second item of business is the approval of the amended and restated 2004 Equity Incentive Plan. Any discussion on the equity plan? Okay. Seeing none, please mark your ballot. The third item of business is the ratification of the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers as the independent registered public accounting firm of the company for fiscal 2013. Is there any discussion on that item? Okay. Seeing none, please mark your ballot.
The fourth item of business is to approve a non-binding resolution to approve the compensation of our named executive officers as described in our proxy statement. Any discussion on this item? Yes. First, it's a choice of the company, and there is a trend and has been for some time now to take shareholder input as part of a non-binding vote. Yes, it's non-binding, but most companies, including Micron, choose to do this and value the input that they get as part of that process. May or may not always agree, but at least value the input and consider that in their deliberations on compensation. On your second question, this is a very cyclical company.
As we've seen in the past, companies in this industry tend to lose money, particularly during down cycles and recessionary periods. The one thing you cannot do is not be competitive in your ability to attract and particularly retain the talented people you need to drive the business, drive it successfully, take it out of those valleys, and build a business for the long run. Very often, compensation reflects more market than the actual conditions of a business during a single point in time. I think the compensation committee and the board believe it's in our best long-term interest to compensate our executives at appropriate market levels so that we do retain some of the best, if not the best talent, in the industry. Thank you for your question.
Finally, the company has not received any notice of any other matter to be presented and voted upon at this meeting. Therefore, this concludes the voting. I would ask you to please pass your ballots forward. In terms of the voting, results of the voting will be available in approximately four days, and you will see that reflected in the filing of an 8-K that details the voting results for this year. Thank you very much for attending. There being no additional formal business to be presented, I now declare the meeting to be adjourned. I'd now like to move to an interesting part of the meeting, and that will be a presentation by our CEO, Mark Durcan, and Mark will review the business performance of Micron. Mark.
Thank you, Bob, thank you all for coming. I'd like to start by recognizing a few additional folks in the audience tonight, this morning. First of all, Larry Westall, Principal Audit Partner, PwC. Secondly, the officers of the company in attendance today. I'll start with Mike Sadler, VP of Corporate Development. Mike Bokan, VP OEM Sales. Scott DeBoer, VP Process R&D. Rod Morgan, Vice President of Procurement. Pat Otte, Vice President, Human Resources. John Schreck, Vice President, DRAM Design. Brian Shirley, Vice President, DRAM Solutions Group. Glen Hawk, Vice President, NAND Solutions Group. Steve Thorsen, Vice President, Worldwide Sales. Jay Hawkins, Vice President, Consumer Products Group. Dean Klein, Vice President, Memory Architecture. Kip Bedard, Vice President, Investor Relations. Ed Mahoney, Vice President, Information Systems. Brian Shields, Vice President, Worldwide Manufacturing. Mike Rayfield, Vice President, Mobile Solutions Group, Wireless Solutions Group. Tom Eby, Vice President, Embedded Solutions Group.
Mark Adams, President. Ron Foster, Chief Financial Officer. Ken Rizvi, I think on his first week on the job, Treasurer. Finally, Rod Lewis, General Counsel. Thank you all. Finally, I'd like to recognize my lovely wife, Shelley Bedke, without whom I wouldn't be as capable of running this company as I am and who always keeps me on the straight and narrow. Thank you, Shelley. I'd like to start off by just commenting on the macroeconomic climate we experienced during 2012. Obviously, it was a pretty tough year around the world with negative growth in many areas, including Europe, and relatively slow growth here in the U.S. As we look to the future, I think we can see the light to a slow and steady recovery, although the recovery remains fragile.
This is important to us because, really, at the end of the day, memory products today go into all applications that are electronic in nature, or almost all applications electronic in nature, and go all over the world. If there's one parameter that we can say correlates well with the overall end demand for our products, it's what's going on with global GDP growth. We're happy to see what appears to be now a steady recovery moving forward. Although memory products go all over the place, without a doubt, the historical engine for consumption of memory bits has been personal systems and PCs in particular. This chart here will show you that 2011 and 2012, historically, slow years in terms of unit growth for PCs.
Really just a recognition of a maturing market and a shift in the types of applications that people now use in their daily lives on an ongoing basis, not only for computing but for communications and tracking of all types of data. The issue for us as we deal with an environment like this is that these historical personal computing systems have consumed lots of DRAM memory and consumed lots of memory at that lowest tier, which while not the only segment that Micron focuses on by any means is a segment that has historically soaked up a lot of capacity. When you have a lack of health in the PC segment, it does ripple through to other end markets over time and on a lag basis.
As we've grappled with a changing PC market, as many other companies have, it has impacted our business from a demand perspective in the short term. With that as a backdrop, I'd like to take a couple of minutes to review our financials from 2012. Net revenue dropped despite significant incremental additions of manufacturing capacity in both the NAND and the DRAM arena. Approximately 6% drop in revenue led to a net income line of -$1.03 billion, as we factored in lower gross margins and equity investment losses at our joint ventures, principally Inotera in Taiwan.
From a balance sheet perspective, however, the company remains very strong with $2.56 billion in cash and investments, $5.7 billion in total current assets at the end of the fiscal year relative to an equity position of $8.4 billion, keeping us roughly in the range of 25% short-term current assets to equity. Or let me say that again, with total current liabilities of $2.2 billion, the current liabilities to equity running about 26%. I mentioned that our products go in many markets besides PCs. We remain very focused as a company in continuing to drive our products into these diverse markets, that can consume bits, but more importantly, can also provide us the opportunity to differentiate the value that we're delivering to our customers and therefore add more value for our shareholders.
Listed here, you see a number of different end markets that are large consumers going forward, not only of our DRAM or dynamic random access memory products, but also NAND storage and NOR storage. Each of these market segments has different care abouts and different ways that we can add value. If you start at the top and look at automotive, many things there revolve around reliability of supply chain, differentiated and broad product offerings. The storage guys care about, to a large extent, endurance and reliability, graphics and consumers, bandwidth, networking, latency, servers, reliability, mobile, low power, industrial, medical, system-level reliability, service and software, firmware, et cetera. Within these markets, we have lots of different ways of adding value for the company and continuing to drive growth despite a slowing PC market.
When we look at one big macro trend in the world today, I think only Rip Van Winkle could fail to notice the change in the way we use electronics and the large move to mobile applications and supporting cloud infrastructure for that data. This trend relative to one of our major products or technologies, DRAM, is driving on an ongoing basis, significant bit demand growth. You see here over the 2012 to 2016 period, almost a 4x growth in the amount of memory that will be consumed in these end markets, driven by this major macro trend. As we look at this, growth really across all the segments in terms of the memory consumed, but in particular, a turbocharged growth in the mobile and tablet, smartphone arenas.
We remain very bullish on memory. That's why we continue to invest and have our focus firmly on memory solutions for the future. That confidence gives us the impetus to continue to engage in memory industry consolidation and to begin the process in 2012 of acquiring a large Japanese competitor, Elpida Memory in Japan. Elpida is a pure-play DRAM company. As we bring that company together to Micron, with the close of this acquisition in the first half of 2013, we believe we will better position the company, relative to our competition, by bringing their product portfolio in close proximity with ours and by leveraging the synergies that we can get through manufacturing scale, through their R&D team in collaboration with our R&D team, and through the attractive economics of the asset acquisition itself.
Overall, we believe that this acquisition will position Micron well for the future vis-à-vis the remaining competitors in the memory space. Looking at this chart here, you'll see really the remaining competitors, some much more significant than others. Unique among this set of competitors other than Samsung now is Micron, with coverage for both NAND, DRAM, NOR, phase-change, as well as sufficient capacity and scale and technology development resources to really meet the needs of our customers moving forward. I want to stop here for a minute, turn it over to Mark Adams, tell you a little bit about what we're focused on internally. Then I'll come back and talk a little bit more about the future. Thanks.
Thanks, Mark. As Mark said, I want to just make a few comments about our internal focus as a company and how we're trying to both operate more efficiently, yet position ourselves to take advantage of the great opportunity in the memory sector going forward. When we think about how we operate today, I just want to articulate that we still operate as four business units today. The best way to think about this is that we have two technology business units, that being DRAM Solutions Group, otherwise referred to as DSG, and our NAND Solutions Group, NSG. Again, those are more technology-related business groups going out to the core business segments around DRAM and NAND. We also have two market-facing business groups. One is WSG, which refers to Wireless Solutions Group, and one is Embedded Solutions Group, ESG.
The way to think about those two groups is that they take our core technology, whether it be NOR or DRAM or NAND, and come up with innovative solutions to address the high-growth market opportunity in wireless and the custom higher-margin opportunities around the embedded segments. I said I want to talk about two things. One is how we're operating the company and how we're trying to focus our efforts around driving more efficient operations, as well as position ourselves for the future that Mark articulated in some of the more diversified market segments and the growth. On the efficient side of the operations, we need to, as a company, run ourselves more effectively on a day-to-day basis to generate better financial performance to be able to invest in our business long term.
One of the ways we're doing that this year as a corporate goal is that we're trying to drive spending lower than our rate from last year, even though we project to grow the company through additional capacity with Elpida and the previously announced or prior announced Inotera restructure. When you think about that, the idea of trying to reduce our spending in that environment is tough, but it's a mandate we must do to improve the financial performance of the company. I show you here that the goal is in place, and so far, year-to-date, we can say that we're actually performing to beat the goal of spending, again, less than we did last year to run the company as a way to drive better operating performance on the bottom line.
The second area is an example, not necessarily the only metric we have in place, but an example of one that's critical, again, for driving better operating performance. There's a number of levers in an income statement in running the business from an operating model that generate cash or better financial performance. Inventory is one of them. That's one we had in place in 2012, and over the course of a very challenging year, as Mark articulated, we were able to drive our inventory value down 10%. In the spirit of time, there's a whole host of other operating metrics we run our company on. I use this as an example to let the shareholders know that we're very focused on driving better operating performance as we prepare the company for long-term growth. Mark talked about diversifying market segments. This is something that is evolving.
It's not something radically new that just showed up in 2012. Matter of fact, if you look back in 2007 and compare the market segments that we're in and the overall trends, we use the PC as a proxy of where we used to be as a company, selling pretty much commoditized parts to a PC manufacturing base. That today is a much smaller part of our business. On the more positive side, you look at the high-growth wireless business, and you can see even SSDs today, storage devices that are really more solutions-oriented, driving a much higher percentage of our growth. We continue to position our company in terms of the investments we make from an infrastructure and from a resource standpoint around these new market segments, which again, diversify the risk of being in necessarily one market segment commodity business.
Where that also shows up in is how we engage with our customers. With memory going in new markets and new segments, the number of customers and the type of customers that we engage with is dramatically different than it was, say, five to 10 years ago. You can pick almost any one of the segments on the slide here today. Take wireless. New players. One of them happens to be a memory competitor, but also is a customer of Micron's. If you take servers, the leading search company in the world happens to be the number 5 server customer today in Google. A number of examples here of how our engagements are expanding, but giving us the opportunity to go engage with customers for more strategic partnerships in terms of supply and product development initiatives to drive our business.
When I talked about optimizing our performance, it's both for getting better bottom-line performance on the financial side of the business, but also gives us the ability to continue to invest in our business long term. One of the aspects that's actually interesting about our business is it's no longer about just shrinking die to get better cost in a commodity business. We are now becoming more of a solutions-oriented business. The solutions take core technology, and we wrap things around, like controller development or firmware or software development to bundle a solution. Couple of examples for that. If you take a look at high-performance DRAM applications with 2.5D and Hybrid Memory Cube that we're working with large computing companies to implement that technology. If you look at enterprise storage devices, enterprise solid-state drives, we're actually selling a full solution of storage products. Thank you.
We're selling a full solutions of storage products to the end-user application as opposed to going through our direct OEM engagements. Even in the automotive place, we're taking packages of DRAM and NAND and making solutions, not just selling raw components or standard modules.
This gives us the ability to differentiate ourselves and generate higher margin opportunities for us downstream. Again, if you look back, driving our operations on a day-to-day to be more efficient and actually using that capability to drive financial investment into our future, that's what we're focused on as a management team. Thank you.
All right. Before I open it up for questions here in a minute, I'd like to just wrap up with a couple of thoughts on the future and then play a quick video for you about one of those segments Mark was talking about a minute ago. First of all, without a doubt, there's a revolution going on around us right now in terms of the way and the scope with which data is used.
It's not just that you're carrying around in your pocket a smartphone that has the power of a PC just five or six years ago. It's the way the data is stored out in the net, it's the way it's used from all around the cloud in order to do analytics that wasn't even thinkable five years ago, and to solve problems and provide information to all of us in ways that we couldn't even contemplate. What that means is that there's huge opportunities for those companies that figure out how to add value by not providing just necessarily more bits, but different ways of using them in all the various applications where they reside. It's not just that we're seeing this big trend in terms of the things that we can do with data.
At the same time that's happening, we're seeing a dramatic change in the way electronics is scaling and the way, in particular, the memory industry is going to grow moving forward. For 30 years now, we followed an axiom called Moore's Law, which said that we would deliver more performance at less cost year after year after year. As we think about the future, those trends are starting to break down so that the rate of scaling for DRAM is slowing and the rate of scaling for NAND is slowing. That's a challenge because it will make it harder to build in more value for less money for all of us next year, if we just focus on how do we deliver more bits or more information.
It's a great opportunity also because it means that the barrier to overcome in order to deliver value with a differentiated solution is now lower, so that a customer out there can take a value-added, differentiated memory solution like a 2.5D Hybrid Memory Cube with software and firmware and other functionality incorporated and have confidence that it's not going to be leapfrogged by just another dumb memory chip next year or just another slightly faster processor next year. That's changing the way we think about the company, as Mark said.
We are very focused, moving forward, not only on continuing to advance our technology but on continuing to figure out new ways to marry the memory with the end-user system to create additional value and to thereby allow ourselves to build in stickier products that over time have more margin and are less susceptible to this volatility that Bob Switz talked about earlier on today. A couple of examples, the Hybrid Memory Cube, all the work that's going into storage solutions, whether they're SSDs or network attached storage, et cetera. Finally, as the historical incumbent memories start to experience difficulties in scaling, it opens the window for new types of memories that have new attributes, that can serve in systems in different ways as well.
Maybe variable persistence memories that are not quite like a DRAM, but not quite like a NAND flash, but offer some other functionality in terms of power consumption or other types of things. It's a very interesting time. It's a very exciting time to be in the memory business. Change brings opportunity. What we want to do is make sure we're very focused on that, and that's what we are. The change can come or the value can come in all sorts of different ways.
As we look at the landscape, what we know for sure is that this plethora of end applications gives us lots of different ways to optimize our systems, whether it's around performance or power, whether it's around combining non-volatile memory with volatile memory, or combining or getting the memory closer to the end processor or to the end network through things like 3D or 2.5D integration. A very exciting time. We're well on our way. We continue to grow our SSD business, which is a memory system. It's a bunch of NAND flash memory that we build with controllers that we design and software and firmware that we put together. Continuing to grow that business very rapidly, and continuing to grow our market share as we do that.
We're very excited about the progress to date and the future that this continued trajectory can bring for us. I'm going to stop right here and roll a little video about how the automotive segment can deliver new ways for Micron to add value, and then come back and answer whatever questions you might have. Thank you.
Day after day, in city after city, 1 billion cars take to the roads as drivers around the world face the strain of gridlock, long commutes, and lost time behind the wheel. Change is on the way. Technology is reshaping the very concept of driving, the beginnings of which can be seen in advanced driver assistance systems.
In simplest terms, these tend to be applications where you take pictures or video streams and apply number crunching to do things like enhance the driver's ability to recognize signals or signs at night, to recognize lane drift if you've fallen asleep.
Automakers are developing countless new technologies to assist drivers, including active safety systems, powertrain controls, as well as advanced information and entertainment systems. This is just the beginning. The vehicles of tomorrow will be smart, green, connected, and most incredibly, drive themselves.
The future of autonomous driving is certainly incredibly enticing in terms of what it can bring. It's not going to happen tomorrow, but already, in terms of the capabilities of the car, you're seeing increasing amounts of capability.
The autonomous vehicles of the future will be able to plan better routes, cooperate with other vehicles, and accommodate increased capacity, all while providing a safer, more comfortable ride. Cars will become supercomputers on wheels, but with even greater intelligence. Micron is among an elite group of manufacturers who are rising to meet these computing challenges. At its state-of-the-art facilities in Europe, Asia, and North America, Micron produces a full lineup of ISO TS-certified memory products, including NAND, NOR, PCM, and DRAM. As one of only a handful of suppliers who both design and manufacture their own memory products, Micron has an intimate understanding of how different technologies are best applied in specific automotive applications.
It affords them the comfort that recommendations we are making, we do so based on the fact it's the best solution for the problem the customer is facing, not because it's the only technology we have in our bag.
Micron has also developed a Product Longevity Program, or PLP, to ensure component availability for extended periods of time.
The product life cycles are very long, 10-plus years, and the cost of change at a component level can be very high. The PLP is a roadmap of safe choices that our customers can choose. With the scale we have, the full breadth of the technology, we can go toe to toe with the best in the industry, in terms of performance, in terms of economics, in terms of availability of volume.
Day after day, in cities around the world, the power of progress is driven by Micron.
All right. For those of you that didn't recognize that good-looking guy in the leather jacket, that was Tom Eby, our vice president of embedded systems. Front row here. I'd like to open it up and take whatever questions we might have from the audience. Yeah, Randy.
Thanks, Mark. A couple comments and a question. One, I strongly support stock options for all the employees given out equally. I think it aligns the interests of the employees and the stockholders, and hopefully in the future, a rising tide will raise all of our boats. I strongly support that and like to see more of it, even through the joint ventures, if you can. The other thing, I know that Elpida is a big thing, and I think it's going to be a good thing for Micron this year. We've done a lot of big things over the years, and that it haven't alleviated our struggle for survival and really brought us to assured long-term prosperity. I would suggest that we potentially look at something a little different. I think Micron has the capability to do multiple things and do other things out there.
Something that would inspire the employees and the stockholders. My recommendation for this is the emerging consumer medical industry. I think that with Micron's world-class technologists developing small wireless sensors, we could partner with a smartphone provider and the internet, we could provide a data platform out there that would revolutionize healthcare and put the information into the hands of the consumer and their providers directly. With continuous real-time data, we could revolutionize healthcare around the world, make much higher profits, and do a great service to humanity in the bargain. All I ask is that you really look at it. Look at developing something different to get us into that prosperity mode that would inspire and bring the best and the brightest into Micron, lead us towards prosperity as we move into this century. Like you mentioned earlier, change brings opportunity.
I think Micron has a good opportunity to put their talent to a really good use. With that, my question is, what can we as stockholders do to help invigorate Micron in the communities that we work in?
Thanks for your comments. Those of you that don't know Randy is a former Micron facilities manager. Appreciate the comments and the input. First of all, relative to the medical arena, it is an area that we're very engaged in right now in terms of making sure we're putting the right resources in place to support and add the differentiated products that can help that area grow. We are, however, very focused on memory at the moment. In the past, we have built sensors. We were in the image sensor business. We still build some imaging sensors as a foundry. Internally, from a development perspective, we have so many opportunities in the memory market right now that that is where our focus is, and I think really needs to be going forward.
To your question as to what can you do as shareholders to support Micron and its communities, I would say, first of all, you're already supporting us as a shareholder, and we greatly appreciate those of you that have stuck with us through the volatility and through the trials and tribulations of this business. I will say that there's been a lot of consolidation. I think when we complete this Elpida acquisition, we will be the second-largest memory manufacturer in the world, and we may be the fourth or fifth largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world. We have had growth, and we think that this consolidation process will eventually lead to a more stable market and a market that has a better return for everyone, a better future for our employees, and a better return for the shareholders. Just being a shareholder is much appreciated.
We continue to listen to your inputs. Those are always valuable, as we discussed earlier in the meeting. Your support for our employees out in the community, in whatever way you intersect with them, is greatly appreciated because they're all working very hard for the company and for the shareholders. Yes. He'll bring you a mic here in just a second.
I'd just like to know what the company is trying to do to raise the value of the stock that we hold, that maybe we bought many years ago at quite a higher price than what it's valued at today. Are we doing anything to try to raise the value of the stock?
Yes
For those of us that still hold it?
Yes. We come to work every day trying to improve the competitiveness of the company and its ability to add value for the shareholders. This has been a tough market, we have had our ups and our downs. We continue to believe that over time, we will be rewarded and that we will be able to build in more sustainable long-term value for the shareholders. I think this change that is going on right now in terms of the end markets that our products go into, that we are working hard to service, will make a difference over time. The extent to which we are able to continue to differentiate our products so they look less like commodity substitutes will add value for the company and for the shareholders as well. In the back.
Good morning. On such a cold morning and not so sunny day. My question relates to the recent closure of the solar panel manufacturing division and whether Micron may, in the future, revisit this option of either making panels or components for panels, particularly in light of the cost reduction for solar panels in the industry. Thank you.
The solar power company, Transform, that was closed, I think had very good technology. I'm sorry it wasn't able to grow to success in the marketplace. Our view today is that the solar business is just not, and in particular, solar module manufacturing, is just not a good way to return value for the shareholders. It's a very tough market that is highly subsidized in certain parts of the world. The end markets are subject to swings in demand as government subsidy plays into the demand side of the equation as well.
While we felt that that was very compelling technology and had an opportunity to be successful in the marketplace, given the state of the solar business today, we just don't think it's investable, and we have no plans, given all the opportunities we have in the memory space, to put more shareholder money to work in that area.
Hello. As I was watching the slides, I noticed that a lot of the historical comparison year-over-year went back sometimes even six years. Slide number 15 on controlling costs only went back four months. That's a third of the year that we're here representing. I was just curious why that didn't have a whole year comparison.
That's a good question. It was just a matter of Mark trying to communicate to you some of the things we're focused on this year and the progress we've made relative to that relatively aggressive goal we had set for ourselves relative to cost containment and reduction in fiscal 2013. It's not that this is new to Micron in terms of controlling costs. We have had, in years past, cost control targets, a target on different parts of the company, particularly SG&A and R&D. If you read the proxies, has historically been an area of focus for us in terms of our overhead expenses. This particular goal that the whole company is driving towards this year is much more broad-based in terms of its applicability to all spending, whether it's in the manufacturing areas or the overhead areas such as finance or Information Systems or R&D.
Maybe we have time for two more, then we should wrap it up.
Does this national thing called the cliff that keeps going on and on, how does that affect? I realize Micron is worldwide, Samsung is over there, we're over here.
What can we look for in the future with this cliff hanging on us?
Well, it's very worrying to us because the health of the worldwide economy, as I commented earlier on, is a key determinant in terms of what the end demand for our products will be. Anything that threatens that is a threat to the prosperity of our business. We were actually quite concerned that we would have a sudden disruption in the world economic climate that might lead to a slowdown in global economic growth. It looks like that was avoided temporarily and that we are on a fragile path to recovery.
I do think that the overall question about American competitiveness and the stability of the environment of the economic system here longer term is something that we have to continue to be concerned about, whether it's fiscal policy or other things, other government actions that are taken that impact our cost structure and competitiveness relative to, in particular, the companies in Korea. Last question in the back here.
This actually isn't going to be a question, but I think it's the appropriate time to say it. I couldn't be happier with management and the people who work at Micron for what they did year to year. They have kept a strong balance sheet. They've been competitive. They've diversified. They've done everything they said they would do for us. Eventually, if you've done this for 30 years, you realize the price per share is directly related to buy and sells and what analysts do. They have been working hard. They've been doing everything they're supposed to do, and it's paying off. I think the analysts will eventually figure out how strong this company is and compare it to their peers. They have a balance sheet where they can buy an Elpida. No one else really could.
In the last year, what I've seen is a lot of really hard work and some really trying markets, and I will guarantee you that this company had some very trying emotional challenges with management to get through and some of the changes they needed to do over the last year, and they did it. I am very grateful for everybody in here who works with Micron and pass it on to your employees. You've made me an incredibly happy shareholder. I, too, was involved in the bubble. I've had both sides of this, but you've got management that's so strong. Eventually, Wall Street analysts will figure it out again. That's all I got to say. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for your comments. Thank you all for coming today. We greatly appreciate your ongoing support of the company, and we'll continue to make all efforts to grow our success together. Thank you.