You for joining us for the SGH Analyst Day. To supplement this webcast, we will be referring to a presentation on the Investor Relations website. The matters that we will be discussing today will include forward looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the company. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that we will discuss in detail in our documents filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports on Forms 10 ks and 10 Q, which identify important risk factors, including those related to the COVID-nineteen pandemic that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward looking statements. We assume no obligation to revise any forward looking statements made during today's event.
At the end of the prepared remarks, we will be happy to take your questions. A number of you have submitted questions in advance. You may also enter questions in the chat window. And now we will begin our program.
Good morning and welcome to our twenty twenty one Analyst Day. We are excited to share with you the transformation we are going through at SGH as we advance our growth and diversification strategy. We are proud of our heritage as a designer, manufacturer and advanced packager of memory solutions. And as you will hear later, we will continue to invest and grow this part of our business. That being said, as the slide reflects, SGH is a whole lot more than a memory company.
Let me begin by reviewing our agenda for today. I will start by sharing my vision for SGH with an emphasis on how we will drive value operationally and how we think about future expansion. We will then hear from each of our business leaders about their individual strategy and growth plans, followed by Jack Pacheco, who will provide an overview of SGH's operational excellence framework. After Jack, we hear from Ken Rizvi, who will provide a deeper dive on our financials and go forward operating model. As the introductory video highlighted, technology is pervasive in everything we do.
It's really incredible how technology influences both our personal life and how we work. Technology has changed things such as how we teach, how we learn, how we communicate, how we perform our jobs, how we are entertained, how we shop, how we exercise and even how we plan our lives. We truly live in a connected world. The underlying technologies that empower this connected world are enabled by SGH. We provide integrated solutions that fuel our customers' innovation in areas such as AI, machine learning, data analytics, enterprise storage, cloud services and advanced lighting.
At SGH, we have a long history of understanding our customers' challenges, collaborating with them to design the right solution and then delivering the solution on time with best in class quality. As I have mentioned on our recent earnings calls, for me, success starts with people. I am proud to introduce our SGH management team, who will lead us as we embark on our next chapter. Starting with Jack Pacheco, who has spent over two decades at SMART and is our COO and President of Memory Solutions. Ken Rizvi is our CFO.
Ken recently joined us from Newtek, where he served as CFO, preceded by executive roles and finance at Onsemi and Micron earlier in his career. Ann Kai Kendall, our new General Counsel, was most recently GC at MariaDB. Ann previously held executive positions at Cloudera and Cadence Design Systems. Claude Dembe is the President of Cree LED. Claude has spent the last seven years at Cree.
Before Cree, he held numerous leadership roles at companies such as Procter and Gamble, GE and L and L Products. Thierry Pellegrino joined SGH as our President of our Intelligence Platform Solutions Group in early March. Prior to this, Thierry spent nearly two decades at Dell in executive roles focused on data centric workloads, high performance computing and AI. Bruce Goldberg, our former General Counsel, is now our Chief of Staff reporting to me, on building a winning culture. Valerie Sasani is our VP of Marketing and Communications.
Valerie spent the last nineteen years at Lam Research Building out their world class corporate brand. And Jean McDaniel, our VP of the Office of Transformation comes to us after twenty five years at Micron, where she led integration and other transformation initiatives. Next, I would like to share our mission, which drives everything we do at SGH. We are focused on enabling growth oriented companies and specialty markets by empowering them to solve our customers' advanced technology problems. How do we accomplish this mission?
We have a two pronged approach. The first is a rigorous commitment to our SGH operating system, which supports our portfolio companies' organic growth and then the second is the application of a methodical acquisition framework as we evaluate potential inorganic alternatives. Let me briefly describe both. We support our portfolio companies through the deployment of our SDH operating system that leverages core competencies in global manufacturing scale and efficiency, supply chain excellence, customer relationship management know how, industry leading quality systems and processes, our capital efficient model and perhaps most importantly, our corporate culture and human capital strategy. The SGH operating system based on lean principles drives a continuous improvement mindset in all aspects of our business.
With regards to future inorganic growth, we utilize a systematic approach to how we evaluate potential follow on acquisitions, the SGH acquisition framework. We solve for questions such as do potential acquisition target companies compete in high value specialty markets? Do they serve strategic customers and partnerships? Do they embody SGH corporate culture and values? Can we leverage our proven operating system to improve overall performance?
And ultimately, does the combination create shareholder value? Evolving from the standalone memory business known as Smart Modular, which was founded in 1988, we have grown and diversified over the last few years. Based on our track record, let me illustrate a few examples of how we added significant value in our past M and A. During the first twelve months of our Penguin acquisition, we were able to drive improved supply chain performance, which ultimately led to better customer service and an improved gross margin of over 400 basis points. In year one, we helped Artisan improve their manufacturing efficiency, resulting in a gross margin improvement of over 500 basis points.
In their first year as part of SGH, In force was able to leverage SGH's go to market engine, providing customer access, which resulted in a 50% increase in revenue. Claude will share with you the improvements Cree LED expects in their manufacturing transformation to support more flexibility, capacity and drive margin expansion. Going forward, we will now operate under three lines of business: Intelligent Platform Solutions focused on accelerating our customers' digital transformation LED Solutions under the Cree LED brand, which operates as a leading innovator of LED based advanced lighting solutions and memory solutions, branded Smart Modular, which manufactures memory based products that enable high performance computing power in segments ranging from legacy to today's most compute intensive applications. At SGH, we take great pride in our customer relationships. One of our biggest competitive advantages is how our SGH operating system has been implemented at large scale enterprises across each of our lines of business.
We have a long history of working with the world's biggest companies deploying advanced technology solutions in markets such as high performance computing, cloud, mobile, networking, enterprise storage, telecommunications and of course, in the federal sector. We are excited about our transformation, one that is well underway. When you look back to where the business was just five years ago and compare that with where we are today, SGH is clearly a different company. Our top line is growing and we are diversifying. Our memory business, which is 100% of our revenue as recently as 2016, is now roughly 55% today due to the strength of our Intelligent Platform Solutions and LED businesses.
Thank you again for joining us today. We are confident that you will gain more insight into the promise of our future at SGH. We will now hear from our three business leaders who will share a deeper look into their respective strategy, growth outlook and rationale for why we will win going forward. First up is our Intelligent Platform Solutions Group with our new leader, Pellegrino. Thierry?
Thank you, Mark. Hi, my name is Thierry Pellegrino. I lead Smart Global Holdings Intelligent Platform Solutions business. We recently changed the name of the business from Specialty Compute and Storage Solutions, SCSS, to more adequately reflect our solutions and platform business. So let's start with the Intelligent Platform Solutions Group's purpose.
Intelligent Platform Solutions aims at accelerating our customers' digital transformation with emerging technologies, innovative solutions that create value, improve competitiveness and unify edge, core and cloud. That purpose is reflecting the new dynamics of IT and OT in the world we live in. Today, more and more of the data that is being created is generated and processed outside of the conventional IT data center. When in the past most of the data was created in the data center, it now flows through all three, the edge, the core and the cloud. A lot of devices that we use every day, like a phone, a sensor or a tower on the network for five gs for example, all that data is being created at the edge.
That data needs to be computed, stored and moved from the edge to other areas of the continuum. We all know that the data center is still where most of the data and most of the infrastructure is being generated, but we've seen in the past few years that customers, our customers, everybody's customers are using the cloud more and more, whether it be their own private cloud or public cloud. That's why it's so important to keep this continuum in mind when we think about creating solutions and value for our customers. So what does the Intelligent Platform Solutions business of Smart Global Holdings offer today? We have a variety of capabilities and differentiators that cover all three of the elements of the continuum.
For example, on the edge, we have capabilities like application specific embedded platforms for near and far edge. We have solutions for industrial and consumer applications. Some of you have heard of the term IoT. We differentiate ourselves by having deep industry experience. We also have custom and rugged design capabilities.
We have full software and solution integration capabilities and all this is what our customers value at the edge. At the core, we have a complete set of design services. We have data center optimized solutions for HPC and AI, one of our key focus areas. We have managed and professional services for our customers. We have an extensive software portfolio for deployment, provisioning and cloud integration.
We have differentiators too at the core. We have deep industry domain expertise. We have flexible and agile end to end design model. And we have a single point of ownership from design to deployment to operation to sustaining of the system that we design with our customers. We're also flexible in the consumption model.
You can purchase the infrastructure and the software stack directly or we can also create service models that allow you to consume it as an OpEx model. At the cloud level, we also have HPC and AI cloud integration services between public and private. We also have cloud native workload portability tools, where you can take your workload from your on premise infrastructure to public clouds back and forth and data gravity solutions. We have true cloud HPC and AI optimized platforms, we call that PUB, Penguin On Demand. We provide an ease of deployment and operation for our customers.
And lastly, we really integrate this hybridization of on prem, off prem, your own infrastructure, public cloud infrastructure for HPC and AI specifically. So those capabilities and differentiators have been recognized by a wide variety of customers. They have trusted our embedded modular and IoT solutions for the edge. They have trusted our HPC and AI optimized platforms at the core. And they've trusted our technical computing cloud services for the cloud.
Take a look at some of the icons and some of the logos that you see on the slide, you will recognize several of the names. At the edge, names like Nokia, Metaswitch or Canon, at the core names like Shell, Biogen or Raytheon and in the cloud names like Azure, Sure or even Mercy. So digging deeper into our offerings, we offer custom platforms, highly dense data center compute solutions, innovative end to end solutions, tying them to verticals. We offer software platforms to extend the data center. And lastly, we also offer services.
It's from deployment services to managed services, professional services. So let's talk about the market opportunities and trend that we see in those markets. As discussed earlier, the IT and OT continuum spans the edge, core and the cloud, but some trends are consistent across all three. Let's take the example of platform complexity, whether you're designing an embedded solution at the edge or increasing the size of your deployment to run some AI workload at the core or trying to navigate complexity of the cloud ecosystem, you're going to see that the solutions could be endless. There are so many technologies today that you have to analyze and optimize in order to meet the needs of your workload that it becomes clearly a daunting process.
Our customers feel that they need help, they need a trusted advisor and we see this across the whole industry. The second trend that we see is a lot of customers experienced an OpEx consumption model, especially last year with the onset of the COVID-nineteen virus. They were consuming IT and going about building their business on as a service models. And that trend hadn't started last year, but it really got accelerated. So we see that as another trend in the market that we want to integrate in our long term vision.
At the edge, if we start going across the continuum, we see explosion of data. We live it every day, number of pictures we take, a lot of data points that we collect and all that data needs to be reduced, but also there needs to be value taken out of the data. So that brings a lot of the compute storage networking capabilities at the edge. At the core, we see a lot of growth in HPC and AI. We see that data that was created at the edge or in the data center through simulations needs to be analyzed and value needs to come out of that data.
So that's growth in the core. For the cloud, we see a lot of cloud consumption model like we described earlier. We also see a level of fluidity between what's on premise and what's off premise. Cloud first is no longer what customers are asking for. They're looking for a more balanced view of where the data goes, where the compute, how to move that information across different paradigms.
And that's what we call Cloud two point zero. And you can see across those three, the growth that those will see is very, very impressive. Our objective is to address those trends by focusing on solutions, software and cloud. We see growth, we see opportunities to provide solutions for our customers and bring a lot of value to them. Today at all out, we will continue to invest and grow in the parts of the market where we have been successful today.
We're going to start our journey towards our long term growth vectors. But let's talk about growing our business today. At the edge, we will be focusing on foreign new edge, looking at areas that are vertically optimized around federal, industrial and consumer. And for the edge computing platforms, we will also look at those additional verticals that could benefit from value we'll bring to customers around telco, healthcare, retail, ad tech and surveillance. At the core and in the cloud, we have already started bringing additional value to our customers and we'll continue to look at specialized offers and solutions.
Energy FSI seem to be really growing at a rate that's interesting to us and we want to participate in that growth. Federal U. S. Government platforms are also going to be a focus area. And ready to run solutions will address that complexity we talked about before.
Customers need help, ready solutions are going to allow customers to get a reference architecture that you can start with, whether they understand all the intricacies of the solution or not does not matter as much as it does today, because they will get a starting point that they can build their business from. We'll have focused software platforms from VDI to private cloud. In the longer term, we want to continue having growth vectors, bridging from the edge to the core to the cloud. HPC and AI cloud services leveraging software investments we already made, but continuing that investment and around AI and ML having to look at the entire AI lifecycle of the infrastructure from the edge to the core to the cloud, from the sensor to the data center to distributing the workloads across public clouds and private clouds. We'll continue also to bring to bear managed services that help our customers and consumption models that will allow them to use the infrastructure they want when they need it.
I wanted to make all this more real for us by briefly covering a case study in the artificial intelligence machine learning space. So a social media customer was looking to deploy a very large AIML system and wanted to leverage the latest technology available, deploy it in a very, very short timeframe. So we collaborated with them, we defined the platform, we leveraged our many, many years of expertise in that space and provided a set of services and a timeline that was perfect for the deployment for that customer. Needless to say that our agility is what got us our customers trust, but our ability to provide a solution of high quality that met the needs of the workload is what keeps that customer with us. As we draw to a close, I wanted to give you a concise view of what the Intelligent Platform Solutions organization of SGH brings in terms of value to our customers.
We are focused, agile and quick to market, a lot quicker to market than some of the bigger players. We're innovative in our solution set. We have a very strong engineering expertise. We're highly collaborative. We work as a seamless team with our customers.
And we have end to end capabilities from the design to the deployment, to the support, to service and the entire life cycle of the solution that we bring to bear for our customers. Looking ahead, we see double digit revenue category opportunities for our business. Our path will include strong revenue growth, margin expansion, transformation via go to market changes and focused efforts on high growth verticals across the edge, the core and the cloud continuum investments in software, integration, platforms and services for our customers. We want to leverage best in class operational excellence across smart global holdings, promote the value of our integrated platform solutions and drive growth in the data center, the cloud, leveraging AI markets where we've shown a lot of expertise. And with that, let me introduce my esteemed colleague, Claude Denby, Head of Smart Global Holdings, LED Solutions business.
Thanks, Thierry, for that introduction, and hello, everyone. My name is Claude Denby, and I'm the President of the LED Solutions business. And I'm excited to spend time with you here today to talk about our business. We finally got the transaction behind us, and now we're part of Smart Global Holdings in their growth and diversification strategy. And I'm convinced that our efforts together and our strengths together will allow us to achieve some some great things, some things we hadn't been able to accomplish in the past.
So let's lean in and take a look at how we're thinking about the business right now. So first of all, the LED solutions business is the established technology leader in the LED space. Back in 1987, when the LED lighting revolution started, we were there, bringing the best technology, the very best technology that the industry had to offer, and we continue to do that today. And that has also enabled us to become the strongest brand in the industry. As we think about that, what's key about that is our technology.
The fundamental piece of our strength, the fundamental foundation of our strength is in our technology. It's over sixteen fifty patents and a global sales and distribution channel that enables us to reach our customers wherever they are in the world has really created a leadership position for us. And it really is based on and focused on our r and d centricity and our dedication and and what's in our DNA in and around our technology that's enabled us to deliver these core elemental technologies that drive performance across all the categories, making sure that we lead in the best in class products with respect to our high power products and bringing our broad portfolio of specifically designed products to meet our customers' needs and to help them deliver a differentiated value proposition to their end customers. That's fundamentally supported by our global footprint, not only with respect to our sales, but with respect to our manufacturing, not only in Durham and in China, but with our extended partners as we engage in a manufacturing transformation to become a fabulous deliverer of LED solutions. And what that's led to us and what that's created for us is is a brand advantage.
But the brand advantage is really a byproduct of the investment in technology that we've made, and that's fundamentally done by our people. 2,250 people strong around the world, 10% of which are r and d scientists that are really developing this key technology. As you can see over the last three to five years, we've received a host of awards, whether it's product of the year award, outstanding innovation, product innovation. The key is our people driving technology every day that solves our customers' problems and delivers a differentiated value proposition. It's enabled us to have the number one share position in high power lighting over the last twelve years, a leading patent portfolio that's recognized the world around.
And so we believe that while we have a brand advantage, our brand advantage is the byproduct of the fundamental investments we make in people, the fundamental investments we make in technology and and the fundamental reach that we have with our customers around the globe. So what's our strategy? Our strategy isn't complicated. In fact, it's simple. But I don't mean to say that simple is easy.
We have to work hard to execute this, and I think our combination with smart global holding is gonna help with this. But the first thing is that we're gonna do is we're gonna use the very best technology and develop the very best technology to deliver a differentiated value proposition to our customers in select markets and the markets that they serve. We're gonna continue to lead in high power general lighting where we're the share leader today. We're gonna extend our reach and and and drive our technology into the mid power market, leveraging and really developing our joint venture partnership with Sanan, who happens to be the largest chip manufacturer in the world. And then we're going to extend off of those platforms and the technology we develop off those platforms into higher growth segments into the video market and into the specialty market that includes horticulture and architectural market.
If we focus on those markets and then we support that with the manufacturing transformation, transitioning our products from silicon carbide to sapphire and then leveraging the sapphire platform to use existing capacity in the world with key partners driving a fabless model that will ultimately be able to leverage an OpEx lean, CapEx light business model. And what that will enable by leveraging this manufacturing transformation and focusing on those markets is it will enable revenue growth with strong gross margin expansion. And so we're pretty excited about it. Again, a simple strategy and what our team is being charged with is executing against that strategy. We believe, first off, is that you have to be focused on attractive markets.
So when we look at our markets, we see over the forecast horizon market growth of $4,300,000,000 to $5,000,000,000 at a 4% CAGR. And we're going to focus first and foremost on where we're strong, our high powered general lighting market. Even though that market is growing at 2%, we believe through our technology leadership and our manufacturing transformation that it's going to enable us to deliver a differentiated value proposition and also see some share shift in that space. We'll also be able to lean off of that platform into the mid power space, scale very nicely with our JV partner, and to grow that business and have some share shift as well. And fundamentally, while engaging and developing that technology, we'll be able to continue to improve our technology and our product road maps to lean into higher growth segments and the video screens and fine pitch video and in the specialty market and horticulture where we see faster growth.
So we believe, first of all, we're going to focus on attractive market opportunities. The second thing that we're focused on is we have a really diverse customer base, key marquee customers in each one of the market segments that we target, where our technology delivers a differentiated value proposition. First of all, they lead in the market segments that they participate in. Second, they really shape the game of the market, really shape the landscape of the market. So as we work with them and we develop application optimized solutions for them, it enables us to not only deliver marquee solutions to our global customer base around the world, but once developed, it enables us to also proliferate those designs and to proliferate those solutions to our more than 25,000 customers across the globe.
And at the same time, we recognize that we need to lead in technology and deliver that technology. And going back to 1987 when Cree was one of the key leaders in the in the lighting revolution, in the LED lighting revolution, we'll continue to develop our technology. We've been busy throughout the years. Going back to the first blue LED light where it was where we provided the backlighting for the instrument cluster for the Volkswagen, all the way up to forward headlighting that we're seeing now for highly pixelated light sources that enhance the safety of the automobile driving experience. We recognize that the very foundation of what we do is to continue to lead in technology.
It is one of the reasons why intellectual property portfolio and our technology portfolio is recognized worldwide. So where are our growth initiatives? We talked about the attractive markets. We talked about the customers. We talked about the technology.
The first thing is we're going to do a great job at integrating this business with Smart Global Holdings operating principles. We think that our competency and their competencies brought together drive an execution framework that will really allow us to leverage each other's strengths. The second fundamental piece that we have to do during this transformation and integration is making sure that we have our global sales and distribution networks aligned with the markets that we're really going after. And then the third thing that will enable that is the fundamental manufacturing transformation to a fabulous organization that enables us to engage in OpEx lean, CapEx like business model that further enables us to deliver a differentiated value proposition to our customers. And if we do that well and we leverage that well, then the focus on key growth, scaling with our joint venture partner, scaling with our partners that will enable us to create a fabulous organization should ultimately lead to growth over the forecast arising for us, and all of that fundamentally has to be founded by our continued investment in our technology.
So we can talk about the blocking and tackling associated with how we grow about customers, about markets. But I want to spend some time to show you what we get excited about. So I know we've been all cooped up with respect to COVID and the pandemic, but let's go on a world tour together, give you a sense of the kinds of things that we see in our LED business and the kinds of solutions we've delivered around the world. So the Chase Center at in San Francisco or the Arena State Farm Arena in Atlanta, some of the things in Colorado, the iconic Times Square that we see this this this opportunity that we're seeing to really deliver spectacular solutions through light and through LED lighting in some of the most famous and iconic landscapes around the world. As we are able to participate in this, and and drive these kinds of solutions in difficult applications, it further strengthens our brand in terms of what we can do.
And I think, you know, as as some might say, the world is a stage, and it and it appears that all of that is being played out through light and video. And so we are so happy to be a part of the game changing kinds of applications that light up the world in this way. There's one particular application I wanna wanna bring to your attention, the LA Rams stadium. What the LA Rams wanted to do was to make sure whether you bought a $50 ticket or a thousand dollar ticket, you know, could the user still have the same experience? And so they wanted to create a three d experience where you could see where the user had the same view no matter where they sat in the stadium.
And so we were able to help them create this opportunity, if you will. So how do you create a 360 degree two sided visible ring where everybody could have the same four k ultra high D resolution view. I mean, what an experience to create. And we created a a unique solution with our three in one red, green, and blue LED solution that is a three in one solution in and of itself that created uniform visual intensity, visual lighting intensity that gave it a uniformity that people could enjoy to deliver a four k picture. In the past, this would have been done by individual LED stuck through holes, red, green, and blue, singularly at one time.
And our three in one solution not only brings the right intensity to this to to this application, but does it in a more efficient in a more efficient way. So So we're excited about how we deliver that solution to these guys. So in the end, what is it that we do? Why is it that we win? Why do we think that we win with the strategy?
First of all, we're gonna focus really on attractive markets where we think our technology delivers a differentiated value proposition, working with the right customers who really set the standard in those markets. The second piece is we're really gonna leverage our global presence with all of our stakeholders, our joint venture partner, with our fabulous partners, with our distribution partners, with our direct sales folks to really reach our customers. And all of that is gonna be fundamentally founded by our manufacturing transformation where we transform from a captive manufacturer to a fabless manufacturer that allows us to deliver a more resilient and agile business model leveraging an OpEx lean and a CapEx light mindset. If we do that, we do all those things and we transform this business, we leverage those things that we put in place. We think we see mid single digit growth over over the forecast horizon and strong gross margin growth over the forecast horizon from 21% to 30 plus percent.
I think that, that's a very exciting outlook for our business. I think that we our our combination with SMART will enable us to do that in a over this forecast horizon. And I'm looking forward to this team executing against these challenges and, and doing it well. So thank you. Up next, I'd like to introduce you to the head of our memory solutions business, Jack Pacheco.
Thank you, Claude. I'm extremely excited to have you a part of the SGH family. And welcome everyone to the SGH's Memory Solutions Group. I'm Jack Pacheco, the President of the Memory Solutions Group. Now the Memory Solutions Group is comprised of our memory businesses.
We're focused on the industrial markets, industrial, defense as well as our AI cloud markets and our business focused on the local market in Brazil. Now we're a leader in the design development and advancement of packaging of current next generation memory modules, legacy support, memory components and embedded flash and SSD solutions for our global customers. Now we offer a broad portfolio of memory and storage products to a broad set of customers. Customers need a memory supplier that can support a full range of memory solutions, all the way from legacy requirements to the far end of the leading edge solutions. Now legacy products can be both DRAM and flash based products.
Now typically, these products have very long product life cycles, come in many form factors, densities and use cases. Now these customers need a supplier who can help them manage a very complicated supply chain. This can encompass many suppliers and we often change suppliers multiple times during the product life cycle. Supporting all this though is a global customer focused engineering team with very strong capabilities. Now our Brazil business model supports our standard solutions of DRAM and mobile products, which are targeted at PCs, notebooks and smartphones.
Now these products are typically used in the latest mainstream memory, have much shorter product life cycles, but we have to team up with our design centers in Korea and Brazil, and we have to make sure we meet our customers very fast product release cycles in this segment. As we get out to the right to our advanced products, here we start development very early with our partners. When the technology is emerging, we utilize FPGAs, microcontrollers along with memory from variety of silicon partners to create leading edge memory products. Now these can range from NVDIMM, which contains both DRAM and flash and is really targeted at storage customers to memory based on very new emerging standards, things like Gen Z, CXL, OpenCAPI. We've also developed a data center product utilizing Optane memory.
Now we tend to develop our module solutions before our memory silicon partners as they typically want to wait to see where the volume is going to be. Once they know where the volume is, that's when they want to get into the large volume production and really serve the mass segment of the market. If you look at the market, it's a large and growing market. So as AI and cloud computing grow, the need for more and more specialty and standard memory products will continue to drive demand in this market over the next five to ten years. We expect this market to be $150,000,000,000 by 2024, driven by AI, cloud, big data.
They continuously need more and more memory to keep up with the processing power being developed along with different types of memory solutions, including a serial attached memory, memory utilized in the PCIe slot, even user programmable memory. Now some use cases require very large densities of memory, even up to 24 terabytes per server. Now as AI, machine learning and data analytics continue to evolve and adoption grows, the need for memory will continue to expand and become even more important. Now these use cases require a multitude of solutions to fill their requirements from many different solution providers. Now our share of this large and growing market is projected to be around 4,000,000,000 to $5,000,000,000 and it's growing much faster than the overall memory market.
Now we service a broad range of Fortune 1,000 customers across multiple growth markets. These customers are all leaders in their industries and they really rely upon us for their memory needs. We go from a Dell and PCs to Samsung and smartphones, along with a Cisco and Arista networking all the way to like a Rockwell and Siemens in the industrial market to IBM for their server and storage products. Now the need for memory continues to grow for these customers. Their end applications continue to evolve, they become more and more complicated and they really need to be able to support the large amounts of data that's being generated and processed all of their equipment.
What do these customers require? They require great technical expertise, high quality solutions, but they also need standard and unique applications along with a global manufacturing support organization to make all this work. Now we have been with these customers for many years. We work very closely with their engineering teams to design our solutions into their end product. Now this qualification to take us many months, but it really allows us to partner with their engineering teams to create the best solution to fit their needs.
Now this tends to create a really sticky relationship with this customer base that continues to grow year over year as we continue to work on new applications and new solutions with them. Now we have memory solutions for many different types of applications and form factors. Now in DRAM on the bottom left of the slide, we go from a JET X standard module for servers, PCs up to more application specific solutions. Now these are tailored for our networking, industrial, defense and storage customers. At the top, you're going see our latest technologies we've been talking about.
These really are focused on AI and cloud and data center applications. We're talking serial attached memory with our OpenCAPI or CXL, where the protocols are still being established, but we're working with leading edge customers on these protocols to help solve their needs. Now our fabric attached memory allows memory to be hot swappable and even programmable by the end user. If you look at SSD products, here we have a variety of form factors. These are targeted in many different verticals from low density boot drives, which have been replacing hard drives over the past few years to very rugged, high reliability solutions for customers whose products operate in harsh or very extremely difficult environments.
We've also been developing a line of SSDs using our own firmware to better serve our customers by offering drives that even more suit their unique cases. Now on the right, we talk about our advanced packaging capabilities. Here, we're bringing world class packaging to Brazil for the packaging of DRAM and flash into state of the art products for PCs, notebooks and smartphones. Now these products are utilizing some of the most advanced die stacking and packaging technology in the world to meet the needs of our in country OEM partners. So we're excited by our prospects for growth as the growth in AI, machine learning and big data is not only driving increasing need for memory, but also the need for more complicated solutions to meet the needs of these new evolving applications.
All businesses and consumers are beginning to utilize new application on the cloud or in their own data centers. Now we have great aspiration for growth in these markets. With our controller based DRAM products, I mentioned earlier, targeted at the composable data center. This requires a flexible adaptable infrastructure. We have serial attached memory for easy accessibility, fabric attached memory for hot swap ability and even memory that can be programmed at the data center to perform inline compute functions.
The goal here is to keep the servers running even as a data center is changing its configuration. We're also seeing that server density is no longer scaling at historical rates. So to solve this problem, we have new buses, form factors, protocols, all these are being developed. We've spoken about them earlier, but we're talking about OpenCAPI, Gen Z, CXL. We have new interfaces for multiple memory types and still there is a need to move data faster and faster by utilizing memory accelerator cards.
Now all this adds to complexity of the data center. This is going to allow for many different types of solutions to meet the evolving needs of these customers. Now managing this complexity is what we do well and we have done well for over thirty years at Smart. Now our locally packaged and assembled SSDs in Brazil will satisfy demand for a fast growing market as the attach rate is expected to triple in three years and it really plays to our strengths in the market, locally packaged flash, local module assembly, OEM quality. Now this allows our customers to meet their local obligations and continue to benefit from manufacturing their products in Brazil.
Now as I mentioned earlier, we serve many large customers across many end markets. I just wanted to touch on a few use cases, kind of highlight the breadth of our product offerings across some of these end markets. In the industrial market, where we serve a diverse set of customers who demand great quality performance and technical support, we provide both DRAM and flash solutions to a large industrial customer across many of their end products to satisfy their computing and storage needs in a variety of end applications. These can include oil and gas, factory automation as well as data center monitoring. Now their products need to operate in a variety of conditions from sub zero to extreme heat.
So they need solutions that are reliable and rugged and can keep up with their end products. Now in storage, we not only provide our customers memory for processing data, but also to ensure that data is not lost. Now storage customers are looking for unique solutions to differentiate their products in a highly competitive market. Our NVDIMM solution is designed to ensure that data will not be lost if their system loses power, as the data in the DRAM is written to flash in the case of a power loss. Now with SSDs in Brazil, we are bringing high quality solutions manufactured locally for our in country OEMs.
We're providing the latest NVMe, PCIe SSDs to our OEM customers. They're looking for an in country manufacturing partner that they can trust for performance, but also reliability and also trust in the delivery. And how do we win? We win by creating value for our customers, whether it's with our decades long experience in memory solution development and test or a highly proven and reliable manufacturing across the globe. We enable our customers to get to market with products tailored to their needs as their deep understanding of their requirements allows us to work with the engineering team to create solutions that will best fit with their expectations.
Now these products need to meet their exact specifications, whether it's density, speed, form factor or reliability. We ensure that our customers get the performance they need along with all the service and qualities our customers expect and trust. So as we say, you buy from smart and you can sleep at night. Now we have a path for revenue growth, but more important, gross margin expansion. And we will grow gross margins faster than our revenue.
And how are we going to do this? We discussed a little bit previously, but we've got our controller based DRAM products. This position us very well to drive growth and gain share in the data center, AI and cloud market as we're providing many leading edge applications as I discussed. We're also manufacturing our DRAM and SSD products in a new facility in Manaus. This will add to our capabilities in Brazil, but will also help us improve our gross margins as we utilize the benefits of being in Manaus.
Now as we develop products, as we canvas opportunities, we do have an overarching focus for higher value added products to drive our improved gross margins across all of memory solutions. From the controller based DRAM products I mentioned earlier to SSDs with their own developed firmware to manufacture them in house. All of these things we're doing are here to help us improve our gross margins. We're also going to look to drive scale in memory solutions and continue for ways to be the most efficient developer and provider of memory solutions across all of our product categories. Our long term target is to grow revenue in the low to mid single digits with gross margins improving back into the low 20% range.
I also want to thank you all for taking the time to learn more about our Memory Solutions Group. Now before I turn this over to Ken, I want to spend a few minutes on our operational excellence. We strive for operational excellence each and every day in all facets of our operations. And I wanted to touch on some key themes you'll hear from me during this presentation. Cost effective manufacturing, best in class quality, leading edge manufacturing with Industry four point zero manufacturing lines and automation to reduce cost, increase quality, but also allow employees to continue to learn, develop and increase their skill sets.
The factory of today needs to be efficient, highly productive and produce quality second to none, no matter where in the world it's located. The way you do this is by having a well trained workforce, state of the art equipment and automated processes. At SGH, we are continually investing in technology, automation and training to ensure that we are best in class. We will touch on this during this presentation. Now we're a global manufacturer with multiple operations in North America, South America and Asia.
We provide high quality products to a very diverse set of end customers from memory to high performance computing, along with the new acquisition of Cree LED. I want to touch a little bit here on the pandemic. Our operations teams around the world have done and they continue to do a fantastic job in servicing our customers while keeping our employees safe during the COVID-nineteen pandemic. We operated nonstop during the pandemic, providing our networking, telecom, defense and other essential businesses the products they needed to keep their operations running and powering the world. Our teams really stepped up around the world and met the challenge of serving our customers along with keeping our journey of trying to be the best we can be.
An example of this is we installed the first Industry four point zero line in the Western U. S. During the pandemic in our Newark facility, and we did it without any on-site support from any vendor. The team utilized their skill set along with becoming masters of Zoom to bring up many new pieces of equipment and get this line operational to support our business. You've all heard the terms AI, machine learning, big data analytics, virtual reality.
These are themes we all hear every day. But I'm really excited to say that here at SDH, we are using these to drive our factories as well as our supply chain. We have Industry four point zero manufacturing lines with predictive analytics, remote monitoring in multiple factories. It's not only to drive quality, but it helps reduce our manufacturing costs and it continues to meet the needs of a very diverse customer base. These lines also they play well into our low volume, high mix build to order manufacturing capabilities.
So we are putting AI machine learning to use as we automate our final inspection using an IBM machine vision learning system along with a very own Penguin Computing Inferencing Servers that powers our vision inspection system. We also utilize robotics to automate the handling of the material being inspected. Now how about learning a mechanical assembly process using what virtual reality? Here you get real time instructions tailored to the process you're performing, up to date real time, working to improve the efficiency as well as our customer quality. Big data and even analytics is not being used just to automate reports, but to do it with intelligence.
We want to enhance decision making. We want our people to make decisions, not generate data. Now we are using these new tools to make our factories better, our people better and also provide more cost effective solutions for our customers. Enabling our operations is our global supply chain. As an operations, we have capabilities worldwide to serve our customers from purchasing to warehouse and fulfillment locations.
We purchase and we fulfill where our suppliers are and where our customers are located. Now to enhance the logistical support of our factories and customers, we're vertically integrated with the freight and customs brokerage service, which allows us to meet our transportation requirements. Now you've all seen everywhere and heard on the news about all the shortages in the supply chain. But here, our supply chain teams are continuously working to anticipate the shortages, position material and also ensure that we can meet the expectations of our customers. So here we need to know what are the lead times, what material do we need, when do we need it.
And we need to know that 20, seven days a week. All of this is powered by our integrated IT system or as we call it here at SDH, one version of the truth and it's the backbone of our global supply chain. Now our single source of truth is built on an SAP on HANA platform. Our worldwide manufacturing systems, our customer portals, our supplier portals, every one of them is connected to SAP system on HANA. All of this is connected to our planning engine, which allows our analytics and business intelligence all from one integrated system, which allows our supply chain people, customer service teams and operations to understand the status of orders, when are we going to ship them and when can customers expect them.
All of this is powered by our single version of the truth. Now to continue our journey as best in class, we're embarking on a lean transformation. Now lean is a process, a methodology on how we will continuously work to improve every facet of our operations from manufacturing to supply chain. We strive to optimize costs and continuously improve our efficiency across all work streams. We want to do this by incorporating what we call the Smart Workforce Concept.
We will empower cross functional teams at all levels, all locations to learn, to improve, but most important to change. We want to ensure that we have the correct resources in place. They're well trained as we strive to meet our goal of a predictable smart factory. A predictable smart factory will allow us to continue our journey to be best in class and meet the needs of our customers in all the different verticals we serve around the globe. Thank you for the time today.
Let me now introduce Ken Rizvi, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Ken?
Thank you, Jack. What an amazing day we've had thus far. I hope you as our shareholders are able to better understand the strategy and vision outlined by Mark. At SGH, our value creation strategy is simple. We intend to grow and diversify through the plans and strategies outlined by Claude, Thierry and Jack and use our proven M and A framework to enable growth oriented companies to solve our customers' advanced technology problems.
One of the core capabilities at SGH is our operating system, as outlined by Mark earlier. We will continue to leverage our operational expertise and the SGH operating system to drive further improvements to the businesses we own and to our overall revenue, margin and cash flows. Our focus on the SGH operating system also encompasses our Industry four point zero initiatives and harmonized systems that Jack outlined earlier to enable efficient and cost effective solutions for our customers. And finally, we are focused on driving and delivering to our key constituents, our customers, our suppliers, our employees and most importantly, our shareholders by executing on both our organic and inorganic growth objectives, leveraging our proven M and A framework strategy. If we look back at SGH in our history, not too long ago, we were primarily a memory solutions provider with a serviceable addressable market, or SAM, of approximately $4,000,000,000 Since then, we've expanded our SAM by an additional $9,000,000,000 by adding incremental technology, solutions and capabilities to address the growing edge, core and cloud markets with our intelligent platform solutions.
In addition, with the recent acquisition of Cree LED, we've further expanded our SAM by another $4,000,000,000 to address the growing LED markets, which include our leadership position within specialty LED product lines such as high power general lighting. Through our growth and diversification strategy and purchase of growth oriented businesses at reasonable prices, SGH has the opportunity to address a market that's north of $17,000,000,000 from which to further expand our business. Since 2016, we have grown our revenues by approximately 20% on an annualized basis, in part driven by a growth in our Memory Solutions group as well as the growth from new businesses we have purchased, which form our Intelligent Platform Solutions group and more recently, our LED Solutions Group. Further, as part of our overall diversification strategy, back in 2018, our Memory Solutions Group encompassed approximately 96% of our overall revenue base. Today, our expansion into new market segments and businesses have enabled SGH to grow our Intelligent Platform Solutions and LED Solutions Group to approximately 45% of our pro form a revenues based on our Q3 guidance, positioning SGH with a more balanced mix of overall revenue.
In addition to our strong revenue growth and diversification, we continue to focus on growing both our gross profit and adjusted EBITDA, both of which have grown north of 20% on an annualized basis from '16. In addition, we have generated over $1,200,000,000 in gross profit and over $680,000,000 in cumulative adjusted EBITDA since 2016. Our strategy to grow and diversify our business has enabled SGH to grow our adjusted EBITDA by approximately threefold since 2016 levels. And now with the addition of Cree LED, we have the opportunity to further enhance and grow our gross profit and cash flow generation on a go forward basis. As part of our capital allocation priorities, we have been focusing on three primary areas.
First, we continue to invest in growth and margin expansion in our core business. Cumulatively, since 2016, SGH has invested over $05,000,000,000 into research and development, sales and marketing efforts and capital expenditures. These investments have helped fuel our growth while also ensuring our manufacturing and technology remain at the leading edge for the markets we service, including investments in Industry four point zero initiatives. Secondly, part of our strategy is to find growth oriented businesses at attractive valuations. Since fiscal twenty seventeen, we've spent approximately $325,000,000 on four key acquisitions that have expanded our capabilities and enabled us to create two new business lines, Intelligent Platform Solutions and LED Solutions.
We have a track record and M and A framework that enable us to successfully integrate and efficiently capture synergies. We are also disciplined in our M and A approach. We focus on businesses that can grow under the SGH umbrella, businesses where we can expand their margin profile and businesses where we can improve their cash flow generation. Over the last few years, including our most recent acquisition of Cree LED, on a pro form a basis, we've added approximately 700,000,000 of annualized revenues. In aggregate, we've acquired these businesses at approximately half time sales and EBITDA multiples approximately five to seven times.
And finally, we continue to maintain a strong balance sheet. Over the last several years, we have continued to invest in our business, purchase growth oriented assets at attractive valuations, all while maintaining a prudent balance sheet. And in addition, given the limited capital intensity of our business, our minimum cash balance requirements are currently in the neighborhood of 80,000,000 to $100,000,000 Over time, you can expect us to grow our cash balances to provide us with continued M and A flexibility and investment flexibility. On a go forward basis, we are focused on driving continued improvement to our overall margins. As Thierry, Claude and Jack have highlighted in their presentations, each business has a strategy and plan to expand their revenues as well as the margins in their overall business.
We have several vectors to improve our gross margins over time. For SGH overall, Jack has highlighted our Industry four point zero initiatives, our lean initiatives and BOM cost reductions. In the Memory Solutions group, Jack is also focused on optimizing our product portfolio to help improve our overall gross margins. Within Intelligent Platform Solutions, Thierry has highlighted, we have a great opportunity ahead of us to deliver additional value to our customers through solutions and softwares in that business line. And finally, Claude has outlined our ability to improve our gross margins through silicon carbide to sapphire, while further leveraging our unique fabless model within the industry.
All of these initiatives will help us drive non GAAP gross margins to north of 25% over the long term. In terms of our operating margins, we are also driving towards a 500 basis point improvement over the long term. And while we will continue to invest in R and D, sales and marketing and back office to drive gross margin improvement over the next several years, we will remain disciplined in our operating expenses and strategically reallocate our operating expenses towards higher growth opportunities and away from lower ROI segments. The net result of these actions from our business lines as well as our disciplined approach to operating expenses should help us drive and deliver non GAAP operating margin expansion over the long term. We are disciplined in our approach to inorganic growth.
Our financial criteria in evaluating acquisitions is focused on growth oriented businesses targeting attractive markets at reasonable valuations. Equally important is identifying businesses where we can grow revenues within the SGH umbrella, businesses where we can expand margins, leveraging the SGH operating system businesses that we can grow and generate positive free cash flow and businesses that are accretive in the first year, all while maintaining a prudent balance sheet. Over the last few years, we've acquired four key businesses, which have expanded the markets we can address and utilize SGH's operating system to drive improved financial performance. The journey is still in front of us, and we believe, as has been highlighted by Thierry, Claude and Jack, that there remains further potential to expand and drive value from LED solutions, intelligent platform solutions and memory solutions. In addition, with our M and A framework, we believe there will be further opportunities to grow and diversify.
As part of our strategy, we continue to focus on maintaining a prudent balance sheet. And since 2016, we have reduced our leverage from approximately 4.5 turns on a pro form a basis, all while having purchased four businesses. In addition, we have been able to grow our cash and equivalents during this period. So how does this translate into our long term financial targets? We believe we have a roadmap to leverage SGH's operating system and acquisition framework to deliver long term value for our shareholders.
Based on the consensus estimates for fiscal twenty twenty one as a starting point, we have the ability to further grow our revenues in the high single digit CAGR range over the next several years. Importantly, by delivering on our margin expansion initiatives within Memory Solutions, Intelligent Platform Solutions and LED Solutions, we have a path to grow our non GAAP gross margins by over 500 basis points and non GAAP operating margins by greater than 500 basis points over the next several years. And finally, in addition to our focus on operating excellence in the businesses we own today, as part of our strategy, we continue to seek growth oriented businesses targeting attractive markets at reasonable prices via our M and A strategy. We will continue to focus on businesses that can deliver revenue growth under the SGH umbrella, where we have the ability to expand their margins, generate improved free cash flow and are accretive to our non GAAP earnings per share, all while maintaining a prudent balance sheet. We have strong financial momentum in the three businesses and will leverage the SGH operating system as well as our M and A framework to drive long term revenue growth, gross margin expansion, operating margin expansion and cash flow generation.
And with that, let me turn the presentation over to Mark Adams for closing comments.
Thank you, Ken, and thank you to all in attendance today. I hope you are as excited as we are about the future at SGH, a future based on our growth and diversification strategy, operational excellence and long term value creation. With that, we'll take your questions.
Okay. Thanks everybody for joining us. In terms of our first question, it comes from Kevin over at Rosenblatt for Thierry. So Penguin Computing has a few ARM based processor announcements in the past. What is your current view on using ARM processors in high performance compute systems?
Thanks, Ken. So as you stated, we've had designs and solutions for customers based on undesigned AUR already. And we've looked at the ability to continue to provide a really, really varied set of processor technologies for our customers. The reality is that the processor technology landscape is continuing to evolve quite a bit. As some of you may have heard from NVIDIA, for example, they as a company are also moving forward with their own ARM processor, is going to continue to drive demand from customers, from all the ARM processor vendors.
So at the point that we are today, the complexity of solutions and workloads require multiple technologies. We have designs based on AMD, designs based on Intel, and we will continue to look at ARM as a valid solution for our customers.
Thanks, Thierry. From Tom at Barclays, this is for Claude. Can you help us define the opportunity size of the high power market versus the mid power market in LED? And can you highlight any margin differences in those areas as we drive for more growth?
Yes. So thanks for that question. So high power is where we lead in the marketplace today. And when you go back to that slide, certainly the mid power market is more than twice the size of the high power market. So first of all, we'll continue to lead in the high power space.
The mid power space is a new space for us. We have less than 5% market share in a market that size over $2,000,000,000 in that space. So we believe there's tremendous opportunity in that market, especially in the higher ends of that market. As we look at the margin profiles in that business, certainly, it's more competitive in the mid power space, especially in the lower end, smaller, dimmer products in the mid power space. But what we do know is that there is an extension in the bottom end of the high power space into the upper end of the mid power space where we believe we can deliver proposition.
That coupled with the scale of our joint venture partner should create margins that are accretive to where we are today, certainly still not at the high end of the high power market, but accretive to our overall margins in our business today and of course, accretive to the overall margin profile with Smart Global Holdings.
Thanks, Claude. Next question from an investor for Mark. Thank you for the content on today on the company's strategy and operational direction. Can you comment on the broader governance issues, Board composition and specifically how you see Silver Lake's involvement in the company going forward?
Well, thank you very much for asking. Very important topic for all of us. I was going to include some commentary around this in my closing, but let me address it in responding to your question. In addition to our increased focus on diversity and broader ESG initiatives within the company, which we're working on pretty hard day to day. We're also making great strides on advancing board level and overall corporate structure type activity to complement SGH as we evolve in this new chapter for our company and the focus on corporate governance.
One example of that, for those of you who are familiar with our proxy, we announced the appointment of a Lead Independent Director this year in Sandeep Nayar. Sandeep, who also serves as Chairman of our Audit Committee, has been invaluable to Jack, Ken and myself as we look forward to partnering with him going forward. With respect to Silver Lake, we currently have nine board members overall, included three nominated by Silver Lake, who happens to be our largest shareholder. Those are Ajay Shah, Ken Howe and Jason White. As a byproduct of Silver Lake's recent share sale in January, Ken Hau will be stepping down from his Board position.
Additionally, Ajay will be in transition from Executive Chairman to Chairman. Both of these changes will be effective immediately. Ajay and Ken have been instrumental in positioning the company for
our future success. And on behalf
of the SGH Board, we thank Ken for his contribution to our Board and Ajay for serving as Executive Chairman since August. So overall, as I think about the question at hand, we're very positive about the direction of the company, but also as we evolve our board and overall governance at SGH, we feel we're well positioned for the future growth that we articulated today in our presentation.
Thanks, Mark. From a number of investors for both Mark and myself, how would we define the long term target in terms of timeframe and what are the top three drivers for gross margin expansion? So if we look at the long term timeframe, typically it's in that five year range. Obviously, as a company and under Mark's direction, we'll try to obtain these goals at a faster clip and at a faster rate. But the reason we provided this long term framework is a way to judge our performance over an extended period of time in our business.
In terms of the gross margin profits and the expansion opportunities, we highlighted that in our presentation earlier today. You can see that for each of our business lines being led by Claus, by Piri, by Jack, there are margin opportunities and opportunities to expand the gross margin over not only the short term, but over the mid and long term period for our business. And part of that will be driven by the portfolio optimization and focus on lean initiatives, BOM cost reductions Part of that will be driven by some of the addition in terms of software and services into our IPS platform that Thierry highlighted. And part of that will be the transition, as Claude highlighted during his presentation, in terms of expanding and moving from silicon carbide to sapphire as well as leveraging our unique model and capabilities in this fabless or fab light model.
So those will be the drivers. Obviously, we put a stake in the ground over the long term, and we'll do our best to outperform that. Next question for Jack. Can you elaborate on the product differentiation that Specialty Memories provide our products give to IPS? And what percent of Specialty Memory revenue is derived from overall AI applications?
Sure. Thanks, Ken. Let me start with the AI part. Right now, we probably derive less than 5% of our revenues from AI. I mean, is a growth initiative for us as we kind of laid out.
Our new products that are in development over just released and really targeted at that market. So we expect to be really one of our large growth initiatives here going forward. On the products for IPS, I mean what we do provide for IPS today is we do test memory for them. We provide them very high quality memory go into their large systems. But we also over time believe we'll be able to offer them products that will help them differentiate their systems from their competitors with advanced memory designs like CXL.
We can also come up with lower cost memory modules for them. And also having access to their systems is also going to help us in our specialty memory area, come up with advanced memory solutions that we can test, we can prove out and then we can offer them into this data center AI market. So they're going to be a great resource for our memory solutions business here over time. Thanks, Jack. This question comes from Brian from Stifel for Thierry.
What are the key areas of differentiation for the IPS Group against some of your competitors?
Thanks for the question. The key differentiator is really revolve around several factors. One of them is our ability to be very consultative with our customers. It's a very complex market out there, as you probably heard in the presentation. And all the different technologies, all the elements of the software stack, all the different enablers that allow our customers to use the infrastructure, the solution, the systems are getting more and more complicated.
We spend a lot of time with each one of our customers going through the exact needs of their business, understanding that and leveraging prior knowledge in that industry in order to work with them for something that's really optimizing their investment. The second thing is our ability to move a lot quicker than some of the other players in the market. We are calling ourselves nimble. And some of the recent customer business that we've received really reflected our ability to deliver in a short timeline versus some of the other competitors. I'll call out those two and give you back
the next question. Thanks, Kyrie. And a question for Claude from Kevin over at Rosenblatt. After the Cree LED products have been transferred to Sapphire wafers, are there additional levers to further expand gross margin? And what does the capacity utilization look like for the overall LED sector worldwide?
Kevin, thank you for the question. Yes, we're really excited about the manufacturing transformation from silicon carbide to Saphyr and then to a fabless organization. So first of all, we think that we've chosen some great partners. And so with the lead partner, we believe that in the beginning of this process and over the forecast horizon that we get to the 30 plus gross margins, just transforming the platform. As the pandemic moderates and we're able to put our engineers on the ground at those partners will drive gross margins even more.
So first of all, I think we have a conservative estimate with regard to the outcomes on that. So there is going to be lift as we drive the model to partner with our supply partners outside as we drive gross margin. So more to come on that, but certainly we see some upside just in the execution and establishing a relationship with partners. Secondarily, obviously going back to the structural reset that happened in the market with respect to some of the tariffs that happened and also the pandemic, we're seeing capacity utilization worldwide and with some of our partners in the 68% to 72% range across a broad spectrum of chip manufacturers. So we believe there's tons of excess capacity vis a vis our markets for us to really leverage brownfield sites that are already in place around the world without adding any additional capital inside of SG and H and really enabling us to drive a CapEx light business model.
Thank you, Claude. So this question comes from Kevin Cassidy at Rosenblatt for Jack. What is the current forecast or view in terms of the transition to higher density handsets in Brazil? And if NAND flash prices increase, will the transition to higher density modules slow for handsets in Brazil? Great.
Thanks, Kevin. Yes, I think as we go forward here, I do think the NAND flash price will have some impact on this transition, Kevin, also the real in weak also makes phones more expensive. So I think we are seeing that some of the lower density products will continue longer and the higher density ones will take longer to transition in the Brazil market. Thanks, Jack. This question is for Thierry from Raji.
Could you describe the basic sales process in the IPS segment? How do we sell? What services do we provide? And who the end customers are, broadly speaking? And how would you characterize the overall competitive landscape as we enter into new markets?
Okay. Thanks for the question. Let's start with the end customer. We really categorize our end customers in two large categories. We have federal or U.
S. Government type customers and we have commercial customers. And in both categories, there's really a plethora of types of customers. But that's a good way to just start characterizing the type of customer. Just going back to the beginning of the question around the sales motion.
As I stated earlier, there's a lot of quotation that goes around understanding the customers' needs, the workload, the environment. The constraints can be around the deployment location, the deployment size, power delivery, cooling, all those technical challenges that our customer faces. What we end up with as a next phase in the process is deploying a small element of the solution for the customer within our environment, understanding the performance, and it sometimes goes through raw performance. It could be around the high compute elements, but it could also be a price performance aspect that we have to look into. A lot of the customers we work with have fixed budgets, and they're really trying to get the most technology for their budget.
Once we've established the fact that our technology and our solution is going to be meeting the customers' needs, we end up going into a deployment with our customer, which can be a small scale to prove out the technology and then expand into the large scale deployment. There's a lot of services opportunities, a lot
of
continued support beyond the initial deployment. And usually those customer engagements lead to repeat customer engagements over time. As far as the competitive landscape, I already stated that we're smaller than some of the competitors in that market. It makes us probably a little bit more nimble than the competition. But we also have a really strong passion to deliver what the customer really wants.
We have that infinite flexibility given that we're able to leverage technologies and building elements that are not limited to only one set of elements.
Thanks, Thierry. This question is for Mark from Mark Lapassas at Jefferies. Would SMART be a potential beneficiary of the subsidies that are identified in the CHIPS Act or the Endless Frontier Act? And if so, how could it be a beneficiary?
Mark, thanks for the question. Some of you may know, I was actually involved in a committee as an advisor prior to joining SMART on this lobbying for such an act and got to know a little bit about the thinking behind it. Of course, certainly this is primarily driven around semiconductor production and
overall
capacity available to serve our federal and government needs across all bodies of government. It's interesting fact actually that 80% of our semiconductors for defense systems, for example, are made outside The U. S. And so this motivation is pretty interesting to see how much support we'll get via the chip stack. Now, pursuant to smart, I think it's very natural that as the semiconductor industry gets that type of support, there will be a demand and a need for in country capacity here in The U.
S. And I think we're positioned fairly well there with the operations both in Fremont and in Newark and Arizona. So that is something that as you can see in our overall business, our federal business is a very big part of that across all three lines of business and across intelligent platforms, memory, and even to a lesser extent LED, we can benefit from the strength and capabilities we have in The U. S. And it's certainly going to be a key part of our focus.
Thanks, Mark.
This is a question from an investor for Jack. What gives you confidence that the Memory Solutions Group business can grow on a go forward basis? And how are you seeing the supply constraint in the overall chip sector impacting your business? All right, great. Thanks, Ken.
So we'll touch on the growth. As I discussed earlier, we actually have actually four vectors should we think for growth for the next few years. The first one is targeting these new vertical markets that we've discussed, which would be AI, the data center, the hyperscale and even HPC market. Here we're talking about our higher capacity products, our new OpenCAPI, the CXL, the modules of the densities modules can get us to 128 gigabyte where typically if you look at our current business and some of industrial networking, we play much lower capacity products. We discussed the SSDs in Brazil.
Here we're looking at an attach rate that has been around 20%, 25%, 75% we think by 2023. So a huge opportunity for growth with our SSD products in Brazil. And then coming in 2023, five gs will hit Brazil as well and we expect the five gs in Brazil to increase our memory content for phones down in Brazil, which will drive growth. And we also expect to see DDR5 come out in 2023, which will affect Brazil from a PC and server with higher densities. But then it will also make DDR4 a legacy product, which will be good for the specialty group and we think that will also help us drive growth.
Now the second part of the question, which were the supply constraints, we see them across all of our business, not just specialty memory, but we've been working diligently to go and get our components. We have supply we need to meet the numbers that we're talking about. The benefit right now is we are seeing much more forecasts and POs from our customers. So our visibility of what our customers need is much greater today because of the supply constraints. But the numbers that Ken has mentioned, we have factored that into our business here going forward.
Jack. So a question for me here from an investor. Can you achieve your gross margin targets sooner? So as a company, we will always try to do better than the targets that have been outlined today, the targets that we set. But we do also feel it's a fair financial framework as we see the business today.
Our goal is to put out targets that we believe are achievable and hopefully targets that we can outpace over time. The next question is for Thierry from Kevin over at Rosenblatt. As we what is SGH's data center services TAM overall? Do we have that? And who are the competitors in that segment?
Thanks for the question. It's a little bit difficult to create an assessment of the TAM for the data center services overall. So what probably want to direct your attention to is what our overall services attach rate is for our business across software, cloud and solutions, we're about 25% of our business currently. I think that seems like a reasonable number for us to achieve. And as we continue to scale the Intelligent Platform Solutions business, we hope to retain that attach rate.
We have several services offerings today, and we're actively working to increase the number of offerings for the different parts of our business, whether we look at what we're doing with the embedded compute into the edge part of the continuum or into the data center or also with some of the services offers that we're bolting onto our cloud offering. So continue to see this as an area that we want to focus on. Hopefully that helps answer some of the questions.
Thanks, Jerry. So this question is for Mark from Sydney at Deutsche Bank. What are your priorities for future M and A? And given our M and A strategy, how do we think about the revenue and cost synergies or other advantages for the businesses that can be different in nature, but on the same platform?
Well, pursuant to the M and A overall strategy, we've got these three lines of businesses that we've articulated today. I think first and foremost, we will continue to evaluate alternatives and opportunities around strengthening those businesses, whether it be in go to market or manufacturing synergies or product portfolio expansion. And then on a go forward basis, we will look beyond to enable the future growth in areas such as cloud, enterprise storage, edge computing, high performance computing, advanced memory solution. And then of course, some of the market opportunities that Claude articulated and evaluating potential lighting end market growth. Those are all things that are on our kind of menus of products and companies that we might evaluate for future M and A.
The platform, when you think about what would make sense to us and the criteria we've articulated today, it's really the things that we think we can influence by this operating system at SGH. What do we add value to, to create value for a combination of sorts? And so it starts with the manufacturing supply chain, obviously great enterprise world class relationships with customers and the people side of SMART, which I've articulated is a high priority for us to continue to grow and develop. And if you look at people and customers and operations, it's in the eye of that, we complement our business opportunities to grow and scale. And we think that's what we're going to stay close to as we think about an M and A strategy.
Thanks, Mark. This question is for Claude. Do you see any competition from China headquarter players in the LED business?
Every day we compete with many global players. The larger players are not our larger competitors are not largely Chinese. They're the usual suspects, the names you hear, the Osrams, the Lumilegs, the Nachias, MLS. We see those at Seoul Semiconductor, Samsung. We see those in our larger high power markets and we continue to have share leadership there because of the technology.
Gets more competitive in this space, especially in Asia. There are a number of nameplates that we see there. And so we anticipate that we'll see continued competition. What distinguishes us though is it matters which markets you focus on. And that's what we led with when we talked about how we're going to win in this space, right?
How we're going to win in the spaces that we choose to participate in. We choose our markets carefully. We engage with the right supply partners. We engage with the right partners that enable us in those markets for us to maintain leadership. We also recognize that the strength of our brand that there are partnerships that we can make in the marketplace where we don't actually have to manufacture the product, but we can use our IP to enable some of those players to participate in the market with our brand where we're able to monetize it where it may not generate the kinds of margin profiles that we would otherwise generate if we went into those markets directly.
So there's a way for us to also partnership with some of those competitors that are in the marketplace in China who need the IP and the IP protection. So we think we got it. We think we have a pretty good approach to even our competitors in that space as well.
Thanks, Claude. This question is for Jack from Kevin Rosenblatt. Can you address the COVID situation in Brazil and any impact thus far? Sure. Thanks, Kevin.
Yeah, mean, Brazil, as you can read, it's having some of the worst COVID, had some of the worst COVID outbreaks again anywhere in the world. Manaus, where we're trying to set up a new facility, we're late because COVID has shut Manaus down for a while, but started to reopen. Sao Paulo is coming back. We've not seen a lot of detriment to demand because of COVID in Brazil. Products are very necessary down there that we go into phones, laptops are very necessary for the work from home, even in down in Brazil.
So we haven't seen a big impact on that, but we also are starting to see Brazil get better. They seem to be coming out of this. And so we look for them to improve here over the next few months. Thanks, Jack. So question for Carrie from an investor.
Is there a path to greater than 30% gross margins? And how would you get there? And what other levers can you utilize to drive gross margin improvement within the IPS group?
Thanks, Ken. So echoing what you said earlier in one of your answers, Ken, we're always looking to go beyond what we hope or we have an aspiration to get to. So 3% has been one of the numbers that we've stated for Intelligent Platform Solutions. So I would say short answer, yes, there is a path. The elements I want to share are the ones that could help increase that gross margin rate.
One of them is the continued investment in services for our customers and we talked about it in the prior question that I answered. Another one would be to continue to innovate in the way we make consumption models reachable to our customers. In the presentation I made, talked about how COVID changed the world and a lot of customers are looking to consume as a service or through OpEx type of models. We have offers today. Penguin On Demand is one of the examples, and we're trying to we're working on expanding that across the portfolio of intelligent platform solutions.
As far as the additional value that we can bring to our customers that will help our gross margin expansion is the combination of all the elements. We talk about the continuum. We have a pretty rich portfolio between the edge components where we design in technologies for embedded, the data center type of offers that we have with the work that team for Penguin Computing puts in front of our customers and then our inroads into the cloud environment where we already have offers. If we look ahead to better gross margin, combining value across all three will be a unique proposition to our customers and really at the core of what they're trying to achieve, leveraging their data sets and creating value across this continuum, not just one of them. So that would be one additional way that we look to increasing our gross margin rate for the Intelligent Platform Solutions.
Thanks, Thierry. Appreciate that. And for our final question from Mark Lapacis at Jefferies. This is a two part question for myself and for Mark. One, can you characterize what the market or can you characterize the market environment for acquisition targets that fall into your sweet spot?
How is that market? And two, to the extent that you can't find attractively valued targets, would your appetite be to return capital to shareholders or let that cash build on your balance sheet and potentially go after some larger targets? So I think thanks, Mark, for that question. But let me take the first crack at this one. So if we look on part one of your question, I would say that the market environment for acquisitions, especially in our sweet spot, is pretty good.
We found, as you know, Cree LED, that was consummated here in March. We announced that transaction back in October. We feel like there's other opportunities in the space, whether that's private companies or other carve outs that are available. But I think first and foremost, it's important to go back to what I said earlier that we are very disciplined disciplined in terms of how we're going to look at opportunities. We want companies that can deliver growth underneath the SGH umbrella, opportunities and businesses where we can expand margins, businesses that we can improve the free cash flow generation and that are accretive on a non GAAP basis within the first year, all while maintaining a prudent balance sheet.
So that's key and critical. I know Mark and the team were all focused on being very disciplined in terms of our approach. In terms of the second question, one, we do feel like we will find targets out there, but they have to fit the profile that we've highlighted. But we also highlighted that over the near term and midterm, we will build up some cash on our balance sheet. And we think that's prudent to do.
We think that provides us some flexibility as we look at some opportunities in the future. So I would expect us to, as we highlighted in my presentation, continue to build the cash a bit. So with that, let me turn it over to Mark for some closing comments. Mark?
Great. Thanks, Ken. And thank you all for attending our Analyst Day presentation. We are excited as we begin our next chapter. And let me emphasize, we are just beginning.
We couldn't be more excited about our future growth opportunities. We are super focused on taking advantage of opportunities and really attractive end markets. We feel like we're in a very competitive, strong position in each of our lines of business. And I'd like to thank all of our worldwide team members, including our leadership team with us today. We are operating in an unprecedented time and we're delivering great results and we will continue to focus on delivering strong results going forward to take advantage of the opportunities we have.
Thank you.