Tóm tắt Cuộc gọi Báo cáo Kết quả Kinh doanh Quý 1 Năm tài chính 2027 của NetApp

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) đã báo cáo kết quả quý 1 năm tài chính đạt mức kỷ lục, nhờ nhu cầu diện rộng đối với hạ tầng AI, lưu trữ đám mây, mảng lưu trữ all-flash và Keystone. Doanh thu tăng 30% so với cùng kỳ năm trước lên 2,03 tỷ USD, trong khi EPS phi GAAP tăng 66% lên 2,58 USD. Ban lãnh đạo đã nâng đáng kể triển vọng cho năm tài chính 2027.

Các Điểm chính

• Doanh thu Quý 1 Năm tài chính 2027 tăng 30% so với cùng kỳ năm trước và tăng 4% so với quý trước, đạt 2,03 tỷ USD. Nếu không tính tuần bổ sung, doanh thu tăng 26%.
• EPS phi GAAP tăng 66% lên 2,58 USD, trong khi biên lợi nhuận hoạt động phi GAAP mở rộng 6,1 điểm phần trăm lên 31,9%.
• Doanh thu đám mây lai (hybrid cloud) tăng 30% lên 1,82 tỷ USD. Doanh thu sản phẩm tăng 51% lên 987 triệu USD và doanh thu đám mây công cộng (public cloud) tăng 28% lên 206 triệu USD.
• NetApp đã giành được khoảng 350 hợp đồng về AI và hiện đại hóa hồ dữ liệu (data lake). Ban lãnh đạo cho biết quy mô hợp đồng đang gia tăng khi khách hàng chuyển từ triển khai thử nghiệm (proof-of-concept) sang giai đoạn sản xuất.
• Công ty đã nâng dự báo doanh thu Năm tài chính 2027 lên 7,975 tỷ–8,225 tỷ USD. Mức trung vị 8,1 tỷ USD cao hơn 650 triệu USD so với dự báo trước đó và đại diện cho mức tăng trưởng 17% so với cùng kỳ năm trước.
• Ban lãnh đạo cho rằng kết quả này chủ yếu nhờ sự cải thiện mang tính cấu trúc và diện rộng về nhu cầu, đồng thời ghi nhận một số lợi ích từ giá bán và hoạt động mua hàng đẩy nhanh tiến độ ở một số ít khách hàng lớn.

Kết quả Tài chính Cốt lõi

Tuần bổ sung đã đóng góp khoảng 65 triệu USD vào doanh thu, bao gồm khoảng 50 triệu USD từ dịch vụ hỗ trợ và 15 triệu USD từ đám mây công cộng. Tuần này cũng làm tăng thêm khoảng 22 triệu USD chi phí hoạt động.

NetApp đã hoàn trả 302 triệu USD cho các cổ đông trong quý, bao gồm 200 triệu USD mua lại cổ phiếu và 102 triệu USD cổ tức. Công ty kết thúc Quý 1 với 3,6 tỷ USD tiền mặt và các khoản đầu tư ngắn hạn, 2,5 tỷ USD nợ gộp và vị thế tiền mặt ròng đạt 1,1 tỷ USD.

Hiệu quả Kinh doanh và Hoạt động

Doanh thu mảng lưu trữ all-flash đạt 1,31 tỷ USD, tăng 47% so với cùng kỳ năm trước, theo ban lãnh đạo. Nhu cầu bao gồm các khối lượng công việc doanh nghiệp thiết yếu (mission-critical) và chuỗi xử lý AI sử dụng nhiều GPU. Ban lãnh đạo cũng báo cáo sự quan tâm trở lại đối với hybrid flash khi khách hàng tìm kiếm các cấu hình chi phí thấp hơn cho các khối lượng công việc ít ưu tiên hơn.

Tăng trưởng đám mây công cộng phản ánh sự đón nhận các dịch vụ lưu trữ chính chủ và trên thị trường ứng dụng (marketplace). NetApp nhấn mạnh việc di chuyển VMware sử dụng Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP và Azure NetApp Files là các trường hợp sử dụng quan trọng. Ban lãnh đạo cho biết mảng kinh doanh đám mây tiếp tục tăng trưởng ở mức tiệm cận 20% (high-teens) sau khi điều chỉnh cho tuần bổ sung.

Keystone, giải pháp Lưu trữ như một dịch vụ (Storage-as-a-Service) của NetApp, tiếp tục hỗ trợ sự tăng trưởng của dịch vụ chuyên nghiệp. Ban lãnh đạo cho biết Keystone tăng trưởng với tốc độ tương đương các quý gần đây và ở mức tương tự với mảng kinh doanh flash tổng thể.

Các hoạt động liên quan đến AI bao gồm khoảng 350 hợp đồng về AI và hiện đại hóa hồ dữ liệu. NetApp đã dẫn chứng các thỏa thuận liên quan đến Samsung Electronics, một môi trường AI thuộc khu vực công sử dụng NetApp AFX với NVIDIA SuperPOD, và một nhà cung cấp đám mây thế hệ mới (neo-cloud) ở châu Á. Ban lãnh đạo lưu ý rằng đóng góp doanh thu tổng thể của AI không thể tách rời hoàn toàn vì AI cũng đang thúc đẩy hiện đại hóa diện rộng đối với cơ sở dữ liệu và hạ tầng dữ liệu phi cấu trúc.

NetApp đã thâu tóm DataPelago trong Quý 1 để bổ sung năng lực xử lý dữ liệu AI tại chỗ (in-place) hiệu năng cao. Vào đầu Quý 2, công ty đã mua lại JetStream, đơn vị cung cấp giải pháp khôi phục sau thảm họa chuẩn đám mây (cloud-native) cho các môi trường VMware và hỗ trợ sao chép sang các dịch vụ bao gồm Azure NetApp Files.

Dự báo của Ban lãnh đạo

Ban lãnh đạo cho biết triển vọng cao hơn phản ánh nhu cầu mạnh mẽ, đà kinh doanh tiếp tục duy trì và sự tự tin gia tăng trong việc bù đắp chi phí linh kiện gia tăng thông qua định giá và các yếu tố vận hành khác.

Điểm trung vị EPS Năm tài chính 2027 là 9,88 USD đại diện cho mức tăng trưởng 22% so với cùng kỳ năm trước. Công ty đã nâng dự báo biên lợi nhuận hoạt động cho cả năm dù dự báo tỷ trọng doanh thu sản phẩm cao hơn, vốn thường có biên lợi nhuận gộp thấp hơn so với dịch vụ hỗ trợ và dịch vụ đám mây công cộng.

Rủi ro và Các điểm cần theo dõi

• Biên lợi nhuận gộp của mảng sản phẩm giảm 150 điểm cơ bản so với quý trước xuống 54,6%, chủ yếu do chi phí linh kiện cao hơn, được bù đắp một phần nhờ cải thiện giá bán.
• Biên lợi nhuận gộp hợp nhất Quý 2 dự kiến sẽ giảm so với quý trước khi doanh thu sản phẩm chiếm tỷ trọng lớn hơn trong tổng doanh thu.
• Khách hàng có thể trì hoãn các dự án có mức độ ưu tiên thấp hơn hoặc chuyển từ các cấu hình all-flash sang hybrid flash khi giá gia tăng, ngay cả khi chi tiêu cho các khối lượng công việc AI và hiện đại hóa ưu tiên vẫn mạnh mẽ.
• Ban lãnh đạo thừa nhận có một số hoạt động mua hàng đẩy nhanh tiến độ trong Quý 1, mặc dù mô tả hoạt động này chỉ giới hạn ở một tỷ lệ nhỏ khách hàng và không ảnh hưởng đáng kể đến mảng kinh doanh tổng thể.
• Hàng tồn kho gia tăng do NetApp thực hiện các đợt mua sắm chiến lược và đảm bảo nguồn cung linh kiện nhằm đáp ứng nhu cầu cao hơn. Vòng quay hàng tồn kho giảm so với quý trước xuống còn 6 vòng.

Các điểm nổi bật từ Phiên hỏi đáp với Chuyên gia phân tích

Ban lãnh đạo cho biết sức mạnh nhu cầu trải rộng trên nhiều quy mô khách hàng, ngành nghề, khu vực địa lý, kênh tiếp cận thị trường và mô hình mua hàng. Phạm vi rộng lớn này, chứ không riêng gì giá bán hay các đợt mua hàng sớm, là nền tảng cho quan điểm của họ rằng nhu cầu đã cải thiện về mặt cấu trúc.

Về khả năng sinh lời của sản phẩm, Giám đốc Tài chính (CFO) Wissam Jabre cho biết triển vọng biên lợi nhuận gộp của mảng sản phẩm trong thời gian còn lại của Năm tài chính 2027 khả quan hơn một chút so với kỳ vọng của công ty 90 ngày trước đó. NetApp cũng đã rút ngắn khoảng thời gian từ khi điều chỉnh giá đến khi ghi nhận lợi ích so với mức độ trễ lịch sử là 2 đến 3 quý.

Ban lãnh đạo cho biết các đợt mua hàng đẩy nhanh tiến độ liên quan đến một số dự án nhất định được chuyển từ lịch trình triển khai nhiều quý sang Quý 1. Tuy nhiên, các giao dịch này không diễn ra diện rộng và một số khách hàng đã hoãn các dự án khác để tập trung cho các khoản chi tiêu có thứ tự ưu tiên cao hơn.

Sau khi điều chỉnh cho tuần bổ sung của Quý 1, ban lãnh đạo cho biết cơ cấu doanh thu nửa đầu năm và nửa sau năm về cơ bản phù hợp với tính mùa vụ thông thường. Ban lãnh đạo cũng nhấn mạnh rằng all-flash vẫn là nhân tố đóng góp chính cho sự tăng tốc kinh doanh, bất chấp nhu cầu hybrid flash cao hơn dự kiến.

Toàn văn Biên bản Cuộc gọi Báo cáo Kết quả Kinh doanh

Toàn văn cuộc gọi công bố kết quả kinh doanh

Phần trình bày của ban lãnh đạo

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the NetApp First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2027 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Kris Newton, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Kris Newton

Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining our Q1 FY '27 earnings call. With me today are our CEO, George Kurian; and CFO, was Wissam Jabre. This call is being webcast live and will be available for replay on our website at netapp.com.

During today's call, we will make forward-looking statements and projections with respect to our financial outlook and future prospects, including, without limitation, our guidance for the second quarter and fiscal year 2027, our expectations regarding future revenue, profitability and shareholder returns, the expected benefits from our acquisitions and partnerships, and other growth initiatives and strategies. These statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, which may cause our actual results to differ materially. For more information, please refer to the documents we file from time to time with the SEC and on our website, including our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. We disclaim any obligation to update our forward-looking statements and projections.

During the call, all financial measures presented will be non-GAAP unless otherwise indicated. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP measures are available on our website.

I'll now turn the call over to George.

George Kurian

Thanks, Kris. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We delivered a stellar start to the year, exceeding our Q1 guidance on every metric and delivering a record-setting first quarter. Revenue increased 30% year-over-year to $2.03 billion. Our disciplined approach converted robust top line growth into significant profitability even in a challenging component cost environment with gross profit growing 29% to a record $1.43 billion, operating margin reaching 31.9% and EPS up 66% from Q1 a year ago. Adjusting for the additional week in Q1, our performance still stands as 1 of the best in the company's history.

This quarter's achievements reflect more than just strong execution. They underscore NetApp's growing leadership in a rapidly evolving environment. Our broad-based success expand industries and geographies with multiyear agreements, expansion into new workloads and deeper customer engagement, all strong leading indicators of durable growth.

While we're seeing some accelerated purchase decisions and pricing benefits, we are also seeing a clear structural improvement in the underlying demand environment all of which contributed to Q1 strong results and are fueling our momentum. This exceptional quarter is both a testament to our execution and a clear signal of the expanding opportunities ahead.

Given our strong start and the success we're seeing across our business, we are materially raising our outlook for the year.

AI is no longer a future aspiration. It's a business imperative. As organizations move to operationalize AI, the challenge is not just compute but data readiness. NetApp is a key partner for companies making this shift, eliminating complexity and accelerating time to value at scale. The NetApp platform enables customers to make all data AI-ready in place, providing unified storage, robust security and a single control plane across hybrid multi-cloud environments, delivering capabilities that redefine expectations in the industry.

By removing the need for data movement, we empower enterprises to accelerate AI and analytics while maintaining governance and control, enabling them to transition from AI experimentation to production with confidence.

The strength of our platform is fueling both deeper relationships with existing customers and new customer acquisition. A recent win highlights this momentum in a highly competitive evaluation, a major U.S. utility chose NetApp over both legacy and flash-only competitors, displacing the incumbent and standardizing on our unified AI-ready data infrastructure. Wins like this where a customer and trust their most demanding workloads to NetApp are leading indicators of our expanding role in the market and set the stage for long-term growth.

Our record Q1 was fueled by robust growth in public cloud, all flash and keystone revenues, reflecting the momentum in our business and validating our strategy as we deliver meaningful results for customers.

Driven by strong adoption of our first-party and marketplace storage services, Q1 public cloud revenue grew to $206 million, up 28% year-over-year and up 19% adjusting for the extra week.

Customers choose NetApp for our secure, scalable, cloud-native storage services as they migrate workloads to the cloud. VMware workloads in particular, are among those increasingly being moved to the cloud, opening significant opportunities for NetApp. In Q1, a U.S. hospitality company adopted NetApp technology for the first time through Amazon FSX for NetApp on Tap, supporting its large-scale VMware migration to AWS. FSXN delivered superior performance lower cost and versatile workload support. Similarly, a U.S. public sector organization selected Azure NetApp Files as a part of its data modernization efforts. A&F overcame technical barriers found in other cloud services and enabled substantial cost savings. These wins highlight how NetApp's differentiated cloud storage solutions facilitate seamless, efficient VMware migrations, reinforcing our ability to drive sustained growth as organizations accelerate their cloud adoption. All-flash array revenue reached $1.31 billion in Q1, up 47% year-over-year. Customers are standardizing our NetApp for their most mission-critical workloads, including GPU-intensive AI pipelines that demand high performance, low latency and built-in cyber resilience. Our innovation and go-to-market execution continue to drive share gains in this part of the market.

In today's challenging cost environment, the breadth and flexibility of the NetApp platform stand as strategic advantages. We empower customers to optimize performance, capacity and budget requirements without compromising cyber resilience or operational simplicity. This value proposition is driving strong customer demand across our portfolio. And notably, we are seeing accelerating interest in our hybrid flash solutions.

Let me share recent examples of how the breadth of our portfolio has enabled us to displace competitors and win new customers. In its first engagement with NetApp, a European IT service provider for pension insurance, selected our unified storage to meet stringent security and resilience requirements for critical infrastructure. Our flexible architecture not only supports the availability and integrity of highly sensitive data today, but also provides a secure, efficient and sustainable foundation for future AI workloads. NetApp recently displaced a competitor at a leading transportation agency. Our solution combined all-flash arrays for high-performance processing of massive video files with hybrid flash arrays for reliable, cost-effective long-term retention. Our ability to deliver the scalability reliability and performance required for advanced analytics and ongoing infrastructure maintenance was key to the win.

AI is powering a new wave of growth for NetApp, momentum that has been building and continues to accelerate. In Q1, we won approximately 350 AI and data lake modernization deals, up significantly from a year ago. Importantly, deal sizes are increasing as customers move from proof of concept to production. Initial wins in prior years are expanding into production-level workloads, reflecting confidence in NetApp's ability to support large-scale AI environments. Our solutions are enabling customers to activate data in place for AI, accelerate time to insight and achieve real business outcomes, putting NetApp at the center of their journeys.

Here are a few examples from Q1. We signed a significant agreement with Samsung Electronics to support its EDA environment and AI Center of Excellence. A public sector organization awarded NetApp a strategic deal to modernize and expand its intelligence capabilities and deliver real-time analytics, leveraging NetApp AFX integrated with NVIDIA Superpod. AFX's disaggregated architecture provides the flexibility and performance required for advanced AI workloads and provides a future-ready foundation, delivering the power and scalability needed to meet evolving requirements as data demands grow. NetApp secured a significant win with an Asian neo cloud provider, supplying high availability, secure and scalable storage for new customer-facing AI services. Our robust multi-tenancy and deep expertise in large-scale Kubernetes and OpenStack environments set us apart, helping the provider to modernize its infrastructure and support demanding AI inference workloads. This win displaced existing vendors and established a strong foundation for NetApp in 1 of the providers' most strategic AI initiatives.

We are strengthening our leadership through strategic acquisitions that expand the capabilities of the NetApp platform and broaden our addressable market. These investments position us to stay ahead as customer needs evolve, deepening our differentiation in cloud and AI.

In Q1, we acquired DataPelago, a recognized innovator in AI data infrastructure. Their nucleus software engine enables high-performance in-place data processing, eliminating costly data movement and streamlining AI readiness. With this technology, we believe we can unlock additional value from the vast unstructured data already managed on our platform, giving customers fresh opportunities to accelerate their AI initiatives and maximize the potential of their existing data assets. This positions NetApp as the company that makes zero-copy activation of enterprise data for AI real, helping customers drive AI initiatives improve efficiency and unlock more value from their data.

At the start of Q2, we acquired JetStream, a leader in cloud native disaster recovery for VMware environments. JetStream enables continuous protection and recovery of VMware workloads across diverse storage environments with seamless replication to NetApp cloud offerings like Azure NetApp Files. This acquisition will allow us to offer a simpler, more flexible path to cloud modernization and positions NetApp as the recovery destination of choice for VMware deployments, even when production data originates from competitors' infrastructure.

NetApp's strong Q1 results underscore our leadership in a transformative era shaped by accelerating AI and cloud adoption. The strength and flexibility of the NetApp platform allow us to support a diverse and growing customer base. By winning new business, deepening partnerships and investing in innovation, we are building a durable foundation for continued leadership and long-term growth. We are executing with discipline and vision and building on our leadership to deliver sustained value for our customers and shareholders.

We are excited to host our annual customer conference, NetApp Insight in September. We will showcase substantial innovation throughout the NetApp platform, delivering new value for AI and addressing the unique needs of high-growth markets like neo and sovereign clouds. We also will host an investor session to provide more detail on our strategy and solutions, and we hope you will join us.

In closing, I want to thank our employees for their dedication and focus. Our record start to the year is a testament to our team's commitment to our customers and to driving NetApp's continued success.

I'll now turn it over to Wissam.

Wissam Jabre

Thanks, George, and good afternoon, everyone. In the fiscal first quarter, we delivered exceptional results exceeding the high end of all our guidance ranges. Revenue for the quarter was $2.03 billion, up 30% year-over-year and 4% sequentially. Non-GAAP earnings per share was $2.58, up 66% year-over-year. Revenue growth was driven by broad-based momentum across the business, highlighting the strength of our portfolio. This quarter's results reflect a healthier demand environment as customers invest in AI and modernization as well as some accelerated purchases and pricing benefits. As a reminder, Q1 included an additional week. Revenue was up 26% year-over-year, excluding the effect of the extra week, which contributed approximately $65 million to revenue, primarily in support and public cloud.

Looking at revenue by segment. Hybrid cloud revenue of $1.82 billion was up 30% year-over-year and 27% adjusting for the additional week. Product revenue of $987 million was up 51% year-over-year. Support revenue of $720 million was up 11% year-over-year and up 4%, excluding the extra week, which contributed approximately $50 million. Professional Services revenue of $112 million was up 15% year-over-year, mainly driven by continued robust growth in Keystone, our Storage-as-a-Service offering. Q1 public cloud revenue of $206 million was up 28% year-over-year and up 19% adjusting for the extra week, reflecting strong demand for first-party and marketplace storage services. The additional week contributed approximately $15 million to public cloud. We exited Q1 with $4.85 billion in deferred revenue, an increase of 7% year-over-year. Remaining performance obligations were $5.65 billion, up 14% year-over-year.

Moving to the rest of the income statement. Please note, my comments will be related to non-GAAP results unless stated otherwise. Q1 gross margin was 70.6%, exceeding the high end of our guidance and down 50 basis points year-over-year driven by greater product revenue mix compared to a year ago. Product revenue in the quarter was 49% of total revenue compared to 42% in the same period last year. The headwind from revenue mix was partially offset by year-over-year gross margin expansion across product, support, professional services and public cloud. Gross profit was $1.43 billion, up 29% compared to Q1 2026. Hybrid Cloud gross margin was 68.8%, down 20 basis points sequentially and reflecting lower product gross margin and partially offset by improvement in support and professional services gross margin. Product gross margin was 54.6%, down 150 basis points sequentially, mainly driven by higher component costs and partially offset by better pricing. Our recurring support business continues to be highly profitable with gross margin of 93.2%. Professional Services gross margin was 36.6%, improving 4.5 percentage points sequentially. Public cloud gross margin was 86.4%, up 70 basis points sequentially and over 6 percentage points year-over-year benefiting slightly from the additional week. The public cloud business has operated above the high end of the 80% to 85% long-term target range in the past 3 quarters. Operating expenses of $784 million were up 11% year-over-year and 5% sequentially, driven primarily by variable compensation and the impact of the additional week, which added approximately $22 million. Operating income was $645 million, up 61% compared to Q1 2026, and operating margin was 31.9%, up 6.1 percentage points year-over-year.

Earnings per share exceeded the high end of the guidance range at $2.58, up 66% year-over-year, more than double the growth rate of revenue, highlighting the operating leverage and our ability to translate that into earnings power.

In Q1, cash flow from operations was $503 million and free cash flow was $401 million. During the first quarter, we returned $302 million of capital to our shareholders with $200 million in share repurchases and $102 million paid in dividends of $0.52 per share. Q1 diluted share count of 200 million decreased by 3 million shares or 1.5% year-over-year.

Our balance sheet remains very healthy. We closed the quarter with $3.6 billion in cash and short-term investments and $2.5 billion in gross debt outstanding, resulting in a net cash position of $1.1 billion. Inventory expanded both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter as we manage supply and inventory levels to support growing demand. Inventory turns were 6 down sequentially.

Overall, Q1 was an excellent start to the fiscal year, highlighted by strong revenue growth amid heightened AI and cloud-driven storage solutions demand. Combined with our disciplined execution, our revenue growth drove meaningful operating margin and EPS outperformance and robust cash flow generation.

Now turning to non-GAAP guidance, starting with Q2. We expect revenue to be $2.1 billion, plus or minus $75 million. At the midpoint, this implies 23% year-over-year growth. We expect gross margin to be in the range of 67% to 68%, sequentially lower, primarily driven by higher product revenue mix as a percentage of total revenue. We expect operating margin to be in the range of 30.9% to 31.9%. We expect earnings per share to be in the range of $2.54 and $2.64 with a midpoint of $2.59.

Turning now to full year fiscal 2027. We remain confident in the strength of our portfolio and our ability to execute in the current environment. Strong demand and continued business momentum reinforce that confidence and support our increased outlook for the year. We are raising our fiscal year revenue and EPS guidance. We now expect fiscal year 2027 revenue to be in the range of $7.975 billion to $8.225 billion. At the $8.1 billion midpoint, this represents 17% year-over-year growth and an increase of $650 million compared to our prior guidance. We expect gross margin to be in the range of 68.1% to 69.1%. The revised range primarily reflects a higher expected mix of product revenue compared with our prior guidance. At the same time, our fiscal year 2027 product gross margin expectations have improved slightly, while the underlying gross margin outlook for the rest of the business remains largely unchanged. We are raising operating margin to be in the range of 30.3% to 31.3%. We are raising earnings per share to be in the range of $9.73 to $10.03. At the $9.88 midpoint, this represents 22% year-over-year growth.

In closing, as we look ahead to the rest of fiscal year 2027, we remain confident in our strategy and disciplined execution. Our focus stays firmly on delivering strong revenue growth and profitability strengthening free cash flow and building long-term value for our customers and shareholders.

With that, I'll now turn the call over to Kris for Q&A.

Kris Newton

Thanks, Wissam. Operator, let's begin the Q&A.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Joseph Cardoso with JPMorgan.

Phần hỏi đáp

Joseph Cardoso

Maybe for my first, if I could. George, you called out accelerating purchase decision and pricing benefits as well as structural improvement in underlying demand at the same time. Can you maybe just help us through the key drivers that is helping to distinguish between those dynamics? And what drives your confidence around maybe the more durable demand part of that? And just particularly in the context of the outlook, which implies at the time heading into the second half of fiscal year? And then I have a follow-up.

George Kurian

Thank you for the question. We had an exceptional start to the year. The demand profile was broad-based and we saw strength across every customer type, by size, medium, small public sector. We saw it across all the geographies, and we saw it across industry verticals, workload solutions, on-prem, Keystone, cloud. So super strong broad-based portfolio strength. I think when we distinguish the 3 buckets, clearly, what we saw in the quarter was counter to what we see typically when prices of silicon and commodity costs go up dramatically, customers generally lean into tech refresh. We saw into maintenance and non-refresh. We saw the opposite. We saw much higher than the anticipated strength across all classes of customers. Within the largest customers we saw some pockets of accelerated purchasing. But in many of those customers, we also saw them for less priority workloads and use cases be more moderated in their buying behavior as is typical. And then we saw clearly as commodity prices have gone up, we have adjusted our pricing, and you could see that in the outperformance in our product gross margin relative to our guidance, which is reflected in our ability to capture higher pricing.

Joseph Cardoso

No. Got it. George, I appreciate the color there. And maybe just a quick follow-up on the last comments you made. I just wanted to get a update or a clarification on how you're thinking about. I think you believe -- I believe you guys called out product gross margins troughing in the first quarter itself. Is that playing out? And then maybe more specifically, are you realizing the full benefits of the flow-through of the pricing actions you've taken and whether that's already played now in 2Q? Or should we expect that to there will be a tailwind going out into the 3Q or 1 of the subsequent quarters?

Wissam Jabre

Yes, great question. And so in Q1, we did outperform our expectations with respect to the product gross margin, as George mentioned. We did have a bit of a favorable product mix associated with the various customer types and the geos that we serve. And so it did help us a little bit.

As we think and we look forward to Q2 and the rest of the year, the outlook very much on product margin has improved slightly relative to our prior guidance that we've provided 90 days ago. And so that's sort of an incremental positive, which basically says we have a bit more confidence in our ability to recoup the incremental costs that we're paying albeit probably won't be at the same levels we saw in Q1, but I would stress that it would be -- we're anticipating or -- and projecting it to be better than we thought it would be 90 days ago for the rest of the year.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Mehdi Hosseini with Susquehanna Financial Group.

Mehdi Hosseini

Yes. I also have a question with 2 parts. Georgia, help me understand how would you break up your customers' investment and splitting modernization, upgrade of existing installed base of storage from incremental capacity added due to AI inferencing?

And my second question is for Wissam. I'm a little bit confused with the product gross margin trajectory. I think expectation was for gross margin -- private gross margin to be ramping in the mid-50% and improve from there. But your Q2 guide implies that we actually may see a Q-over-Q decline. If you could clarify, it would be appreciated.

George Kurian

With regard to your first question, Mehdi, we have seen super strong growth in our product portfolio as well as offerings like our all-flash array, Keystone and our cloud storage. Pretty much across the board, we were well ahead of our expectations. And we continue to see that strength durable for multiple quarters, which is why 1 quarter into the year, we have raised the full year materially, including the second half, right? So really, really strong momentum in the business.

With regard to what we saw, there are AI-specific build-outs, which are, for example, GPU as a service cloud, GPU environment within enterprises and data lakes and modern data lake type environment being built, particularly for GPU usage and for AI analytics. There is, however, also as other people have noted, including the hyperscalers, a broad-based modernization of a variety of adjacent workloads and infrastructures, right? So when you use AI, you also want to modernize your databases, you also want to modernize your unstructured data environment to get them ready, and we saw that happening pretty much across all the industries and all the customer segments. So really strong momentum. We're excited for the year, super confident about our position in the market and the alignment to where customers are prioritizing spending.

Wissam Jabre

And to the second part of the question, Mehdi. Look, we did anticipate -- so maybe I'll explain how we anticipated the product gross margin to be shaped throughout the year, 90 days ago. We said that we would see a trough in Q1, and we anticipate a slight improvement for the rest of the year or gradual improvement for the rest of the year.

Now fast forward to today, we did manage Q1 product gross margin in a really great way. I think we did a great job in execution and we outperformed our expectations for Q1. So that's sort of the first point I want to make.

The second point is when we compare now Q2 to Q4 for the rest of the year to where it was 90 days ago, we're now expecting it to be slightly better. So if you think of the prior guidance had product gross margin in sort of the low 50% range if you sort of -- even though we don't guide every number, but that's why I was implied in the guidance, what's implied now in the updated guidance for the rest of the year in product gross margin is slightly better than that. That's really the -- hopefully, that clarifies and answer to your question.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Amit Daryanani with Evercore.

Amit Daryanani

I guess just 2 questions from my side as well. I think 1 of the big things that investors are trying to figure out is just the durability of growth that you and everyone also seeing. And if I think about your fiscal year guide, you're also going to do a 26% growth in Q1, ex extra week, you're going to 23% in Q2. And I think it's like 9% or 10% in the back half of the year. Can you just talk like what is driving that sort of deceleration? And is that exit rate in the back half of 9%, 10%, sort of a wide way to think about what the long-term growth should be for the company?

And then George, you sort of talked about you're seeing clear structural improvement in the underlying demand environment. Can you maybe just help us appreciate like what metrics are you looking at or tracking to give you confidence that this is a structural shift versus perhaps prebuying given all the price increases?

George Kurian

I think, first of all, we are 1 quarter into our fiscal year and our approach has been to provide guidance that we feel confident about. We have raised the year materially to reflect the strength of our position and have raised the second half of the year right at the start of the year, right? And so I would not say that we are being cautious about the year. We feel really strongly about the performance. I think as I noted, with regard to what gives us confidence, it is the fact that all of our product lines, all of our customer segments by size, all of the types of commercial vehicles we use multiyear agreements, storage as a service, traditional CapEx transactions as well as the performance through all of our routes to market have outperformed materially and the outlook for the year is very strong. So we feel really, really good about our position both in terms of alignment to customer spend, the overall customer discussions we're having and the expanding opportunities we see across all kinds of customers.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Krish Sankar with TD Cowen.

Sreekrishnan Sankarnarayanan

Congrats with good results. George, my first question is that you kind of closed like 350 AI and data lake deals this quarter. Last quarter is more like 500. I understand the deal sizes are getting bigger. Is there a way you can quantify how much was the deal size of revenue dollars in the July versus April quarter? And from a bigger picture perspective, how much of your revenues is driven by AI? And then I had a quick follow-up for Wissam after that.

George Kurian

I think it's hard to quantify specifically what percentage of the revenue is driven by AI for 2 reasons. One is there are customer specific AI-specific environment, right, which is what the 350 deals that we said count toward, these are typically GPU connected AI stack connected deals.

That being said, as we and others have noted, AI is now driving a broad-based modernization and replatforming of the data infrastructure stack, so that you can support the needs of high-performance, inferencing use cases, the ability to build cross-application kind of data infrastructure and that is reflected across the strength of our business. So 350 were AI stack specific use cases, but the overall performance of the business reflects the influence of to modernize the entire data infrastructure. And we had since many years ago that we had started to see that momentum acceleration. We saw that in Q4. We are off to a super start in Q1. Our outlook for the year is very positive, and we see really good momentum across our entire portfolio.

Sreekrishnan Sankarnarayanan

Got it. And then Wissam, a quick question. Your component costs are going up. So is your inventory levels. I'm just wondering, when you look at your products, you kind of spoke about the product gross margin, what is the equation you're solving for? Is it managing product mix or price capture to generate more gross profit dollars? And where are most of the inventory dollars spent on?

Wissam Jabre

Yes. So Krish, we did exit Q1 with a slightly higher inventory, but that's because, obviously, we continue to manage our supply and secure supply to be able to secure product for the demand growth that we're seeing. What we're basically focused on is the total gross profit for the company. We managed the total gross margin, but also the total gross profit dollars. And as you can see, as the top line grows, we're seeing gross profit dollars growing almost a similar pace. That's because this is what drives really the earnings power of the business. The -- I think this is best demonstrated when you also sort of take it down to the operating margin line. And you can see how basically any time where we upsided gross profit and gross margin, we tend to generate quite a bit of operating margin leverage. So I hope, this answers your question.

George Kurian

I think 1 of the things we have also -- one of the things we worked on to provide customers with the right solution for their use cases, I think we have started to see again the resurgence of hybrid flash in our portfolio and we anticipate a much stronger contribution from hybrid flash. So we're, as Wissam said, we're trying to solve as many customer problems with the right mix of portfolio and manage the overall business for gross profit dollar growth.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Asiya Merchant with Citigroup.

Michael Cadiz

It's Mike Cadiz for Asiya Merchant at Citi. So my first question is regarding pricing. So as pricing actions begin to flow through and materialize in the quarter -- in quarters, how much of the expected pricing benefit do you think has been realized? And are you seeing any change in demand elasticity albeit early on?

George Kurian

I think with -- I'll take the demand question and Wissam can address the pricing capture. I think with regard to demand, listen, we have always believed and continue to believe that customers budget in dollars. What we are seeing reflected in the market is that the overall budget priority for data infrastructure and storage has gone up significantly in our customers. Within customers, for example, there are use cases where even at a higher price, they will be prioritizing spending on that. But within the same customer, they may defer until a future quarter a less priority use case. And we have seen that in our customer base. In some of those customers, they have also decided to go from a flash-based solution to a hybrid flash-based solution for the lower value use case, right? And so I would say that the most important thing that we have seen is unlike in prior cycles with the significant increase in pricing, we are actually seeing broad-based infrastructure spending, and we believe that it is correlated with and the modernization requirements of AI.

Wissam Jabre

Yes. And with respect to the delay between the pricing actions and when we start seeing it. Look, we've taken actions to be more agile in this environment. So the impact of price increases should materialize sooner than in the past. In the past, for instance, it would take probably 2 to 3 quarters to start seeing it. But now we're seeing it much earlier.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley.

Erik Woodring

George, I just want to maybe press you as a follow-up to Amit's question earlier, which is I realize we're just 1 quarter into the year, it's early, but your second half revenue is usually like high single digits versus your first half. And you're guiding it down. And so I understand the desire to remain conservative and provide a guide that you can hit. But given your qualitative commentary about demand, like why couldn't you beat those expectations by 10%, 20%? I just want to make sure we're not missing anything, just as we think about seasonality from the first half to the second half and anything that could be maybe an offset to way that -- to a way that we're thinking about normal seasonality? And then a quick follow-up, please.

Wissam Jabre

Yes. So Erik, this is Visa. When we think of the seasonality, if you adjust for the extra week in Q1, we are now roughly seeing -- looking at 50-50, maybe a little bit -- when we're talking around in here, a little bit more than 50% in the second half, a little bit less than 50% in the first half. I mean you can do the math. But that's just basically based on our visibility at this time. We do, however, see as George mentioned in his prepared remarks, a really strong structural improvements in the demand. It's broad-based. It's driven by AI workloads. It's driven by modernization, and we basically are looking at that being the driver of revenue for the rest of the year.

George Kurian

We have 1 quarter in, Erik. We feel really good on our business. We've raised Q2 guidance. We've raised the full year guide. We'll tell you more as we play through the year. We are super confident about our position in the market, and we'll get more as we play through the year.

Erik Woodring

Awesome. Thank you, George. I can hear it in your voice. So I appreciate that, guys. And then Wissam, just 1 clarification point. The comments that you make about product gross margins and your ability to maybe get a little bit better capture here in the first quarter, is that purely a function of pricing and pricing confidence and kind of confidence in the demand in elasticity response there? I just want to make sure that we think about your ability to maybe capture slightly better product gross margins, it's because it's a function of price and not necessarily the other side, obviously being the [ bomb ] inflation.

Wissam Jabre

Yes. Look, I mean, my comment is based on everything we see. As we look at -- as we form our outlook and we look and we project the business, we put everything that we know in our numbers. And that's really what my comment is about. It has to do with pricing. It has to do with [ banks ]. It has to do with multiple factors that basically go -- and of course, the cost side of the equation, that basically goes into forming the funnel, basically product margin.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Param Singh with Oppenheimer Inc.

Paramveer Singh

So you've done a couple of acquisitions -- niche acquisitions recently. And I wanted to understand where do you see gaps in your technology portfolio today? And where does this make sense to buy versus build? And then I had a follow-up.

George Kurian

I think we are disciplined in our approach to acquisitions. The 2 that we have talked about are tied to cloud and AI. And they provide us with differentiated offerings to accelerate our position in each of those use cases.

With regard to DataPelago it is really about AI-driven analytics and the inferencing where we can accelerate the application processing adjacent to storage providing customers a better inferencing solution top to bottom.

With regard to JetStream, which we acquired at the start of Q2, it really strengthens our already strong position in VMware migrations to the cloud. We have really good solutions for customers that want to use NetApp to migrate. But for customers that are non-NetApp on-prem, we have a really good starting point with a DR in the cloud solution. So those are the 2 areas, AI and cloud that we're focused on, and we feel good about the technology portfolio that we have and we are doing tough ins to enhance the overall solution value to customers.

Paramveer Singh

Understood, George. And then as my follow-up, your guidance implies that OpEx would go up as a percentage of revenue from the Q2 level in the back half. So I want to understand why there is an increase in investment in the back half? And then where would that actually go with it, is it R&D or sales and marketing? So if you could give some color on the investments that you're thinking about for the rest of the year, that would be great.

Wissam Jabre

Yes, Param, this is Wissam. So the increase is driven really by a couple of areas. One, as we outperform, we're getting -- we have a slightly higher variable compensation accruals. And then the second is really continuing to invest in our AI solutions. But when you look at the overall OpEx for the year and you sort of look what is implied in the guidance, year-over-year is still a -- year-over-year increase for the full year, it still shows basically that the increase is less -- much less than the half of the revenue -- projected revenue growth. So we continue to be very disciplined in how we invest and how we look at our OpEx. That's, of course, because operating leverage and driving operating margin is a key element of our business model.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Wamsi Mohan with BofA.

Wamsi Mohan

I have a couple of clarifying questions. I think as you sort of think about the full year, a, would you say that your expectation of hybrid versus all-flash is similar versus your prior expectations? Would you say that given what you're seeing with supply that the upside that you're guiding to would be more driven by 1 versus other? And I have a quick follow-up, too.

George Kurian

Listen, I think that if you look at the overall business, all-flash performed exceptionally strongly in Q1, right? It was up 47% year-on-year. So when we look at the overall year, all-flash still blows out our prior expectations. Hybrid flash, when we had planned the year, we were cautious about customers' spending on non-mission-critical workloads. That is typically what they do, right? When you see price increases, customers pull back on capital equipment spending, we are seeing broad-based acceleration in capital spending across the board. And we are -- which is a sign of the AI super cycle, but then we are also seeing customers buying more hybrid flash. I would say if you look at the relative comparison. Listen, all-flash is super strong and will still be the predominant part of the acceleration in our business.

Wamsi Mohan

Okay. And as my follow-up, just is there any way you could give us some sense of this magnitude of these accelerated purchases. Going back to Erik's question on half over half seasonality, you guys obviously sound very confident on the outlook over here. But could you just help us through -- think through mathematically, how large was the accelerated purchases or the contribution there, which we should factor in as pull forward? Or is that just acceleration of demand that is coming not necessarily from the second half?

George Kurian

I think first of all, we're not going to break it out, right? I think what I would tell you is the number of customers and the percentage of our customer base that have the financial flexibility to do accelerated spending is very small, right? These are very large private companies usually, not even public sector organizations have the flexibility to do accelerated purchasing. So it is a much smaller percentage of customers than you would imagine, right? Very small percentage. What we saw in the results in Q1 was certain transactions that we expected to be built out over multiple quarters happening within a quarter. That doesn't mean that those same customers didn't defer other projects to accommodate these projects, right? And so I would tell you that it's a percentage of our business, we did not see it in Q4, but we saw it in Q1, and we felt like it was appropriate for us to acknowledge it. But it is not a material part of the overall business. In certain clients, as we talk about they are kitting out multiple data centers. They wanted to kit out -- they said, let's do 2 of the 4 that we want to do faster this calendar year and we'll come back for the other 2. We had expected kind of a more gradual build out of those. That is not common and widespread across the customer base.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Steven Fox with Fox Advisors.

Steven Fox

I was curious if you could talk a little bit more about new customer wins. You mentioned that, that was also contributed to growth this quarter. I was curious from the standpoint of what maybe you're leading with and whether it's what kind of products, et cetera, and whether you're having success in certain verticals that we should be aware of?

George Kurian

Thank you for your question. We saw strength, as we said in our prepared remarks, in new customer acquisition, a new workload expansion within existing customers and stronger-than-expected tech refresh in our business. With new customers, we typically attack from 2 different vectors. Ones are kind of cloud-based solutions or our purpose-built block optimized solutions for the corporate and mid-market customers and with our unified sort of simplify your infrastructure, unify it on 1 platform solution for the enterprise. And we feel really good about our position with both new customer counts, new customer dollars as well as expansion within existing customers we're all as well ahead of our internal forecast.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Katherine Murphy with Goldman Sachs.

Katherine Murphy

In lines with the following question regarding new customer acquisition through new workloads and new product categories, can you talk more about the success you're seeing in the AFX platform? I know you highlighted a public sector win in the quarter, but anything to share just on the momentum there and how that may be contributing to outlook for the full year?

George Kurian

AFX is built for the very high end of the performance and scale environment. So the number of transactions are not as many but the size of the transactions are material. We have really focused it on the AI GPU as a service category, and we're seeing good progress. We talked about neo clouds. We talked about the government agency that's building a private AI cloud. And so good progress. It is being certified across a large number of customers, and we're excited to continue to make progress on the solution.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Tim Long with Barclays.

Timothy Long

Yes, maybe a follow-on, and then the second one. On the public cloud business, 19% growth ex the extra week is still very good growth rate. We've seen it kind of around that number for the last 1.5 years or so. So just curious, is there anything in the pipeline or new solutions or customer bases or anything that could maybe accelerate that number?

And then second, on Keystone, I did want to touch on that, you talked about growth and strength there. Looking at the professional services line and backing out an extra week, it doesn't look like it grew that much and we're kind of seeing or hearing about more as-a-service purchases in that area instead of paying up for more expensive hardware-based solutions because of the NAND price increases. So just talk about what you're seeing with those as-a-service solutions surprised we're not seeing a little bit more acceleration in that.

George Kurian

I think with regard to the public cloud business, listen, it stayed in the high teens as we have scaled the business. So I'm encouraged by the sustained momentum of the business. Obviously, the cloud storage business performs at a much higher level than that. And so we continue to see strengthen the [ 1P ] or the first-party end marketplace storage services.

With regard to the things that we're bringing out, please come to Insight. We have more AI solutions with the hyperscalers. We have more use cases combining data on-prem with hyperscale cloud and we have brought block storage and lower cost price points in multiple clouds, including Google and Amazon. So really good progress across the portfolio in cloud.

With regard to Keystone, without giving you a specific number, I will just say our Keystone business grew roughly in the same ballpark as prior quarters and in the same ballpark as our overall flash business, which is a really strong number. So we're excited about the progress of the business. We are seeing more new customers that we are targeting with Keystone, and we are bringing more capabilities to that part of our portfolio.

Wissam Jabre

And Tim, just to add to what George said on Keystone, keep in mind, Keystone didn't really benefit much from the extra week, it benefited a very, very minimal amount.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Victor Chiu with Raymond James.

W. Chiu

So inventory nearly doubled sequentially. Just kind of wondering, is that a function of trying to secure NAND and other components against expected demand? And maybe how much you have the inventory increases earmarked to specific customer orders and backlog. And a follow-up there, does the inventory buildup kind of give you better visibility into the remaining year and into next year?

George Kurian

Yes. I didn't get the second part of the question. But on the first part of the question, most of the inventory [ with that ] some strategic purchases and basically us managing inventory to be able to ship to our customers based on the strength of demand. So I wouldn't say -- in my mind, this is a positive. We're really making sure that we have the supply to continue to drive the growth in the business. I'm sorry, could you please repeat the second part of the question?

W. Chiu

Yes. Does the inventory buildup kind of give you better supply and cost visibility, I guess, throughout this year and into next year?

George Kurian

Yes, typically...

W. Chiu

You know, pricing is going to be less of a function in healthy growth, I guess.

George Kurian

You're correct. Typically done.

Operator

Your final question today comes from the line of David Vogt with UBS.

David Vogt

Great. So I'm going to keep it brief words. You've answered a lot of questions. But just a question on demand as we think about the next couple of quarters, is there any sort of seasonality that you saw in the most recent quarter, particularly as we go into subsequent quarters from industry verticals? I know if we go into the October quarter, obviously, there are customers that have different fiscal year-end. Did you see any sort of demand maybe slightly different seasonal demand patterns in the quarter? Because I know I think Wissam mentioned that there was a little bit of a pull in. I'm just trying to get a sense for how do we think about sort of the normal seasonality? Maybe this isn't normal, but how do we think about the seasonality of demand as we move through the back half of this year? .

George Kurian

Listen, I think our outlook, if you adjust for the extra week in Q1 is roughly in line with typical seasonality. And as Wissam mentioned, second half and first half are within spitting distance of our typical seasonality, right? I think we have a really broad book of business, David. And so the movement of any 1 customer is not going to affect the broad book of business. I think the 1 exception to that is typical U.S. public sector seasonality, right? And that you are quite aware of. So we feel really good about the momentum in the business. Listen, as we said, exceptional start to the year, we had strength across pretty much every part of our portfolio across every customer type, on-prem and cloud, every geography, we've raised the full year guide. We've raised Q2 guide. We feel really good about the momentum of the business, and we'll tell you more as we get through the year. So super excited.

Kris Newton

Thank you, David. I'll pass it over to George for closing comments.

George Kurian

Thanks, Kris. With broad-based momentum, we delivered an exceptional start to fiscal year '27, exceeding our guidance on every metric, strengthening our conviction in the durability of demand and underpinning our confidence in our materially higher expectations for the year. The NetApp platform addresses a wide range of customer requirements, helping to operationalize AI workflow and accelerating cloud journey, driving new customer wins and deepening existing relationships. Our ongoing innovation continues to strengthen the value of the NetApp platform and at our upcoming Insight conference we'll showcase new solutions that unlock value for AI and in high-growth markets. We're building a durable foundation for long-term success, delivering sustained value for our customers and shareholders.

Operator

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.