21st Century Business Herald reporter Kong Haili reports from Beijing
On November 18th local time in the United States, Supermicro Computer (SMCI) announced the hiring of BDO USA (Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu) as its new auditing firm and submitted a compliance plan to Nasdaq to support its request for an extension of time to maintain compliance with Nasdaq listing. Stimulated by the news, the stock price of Supermicro Computer closed up 15.93% and surged nearly 40% after trading.
November 18th is the final deadline for Supermicro Computer to submit its delayed 2023 fiscal year 10-K annual report or compliance plan to meet Nasdaq listing requirements. If the submission is not made on time, it will result in a series of consequences: the company may be delisted, removed from the list of S&P 500 index constituent stocks, and required to repay $1.725 billion in bonds in advance.
The submission of the 10-K annual report requires the signature of the auditing agency, and on October 24th, Ernst&Young, the original auditing agency of Supermicro, resigned from the audit committee of the board of directors, which directly led to the difficulty in producing the annual report of Supermicro.
Prior to this, on August 28th, short selling firm Hindenburg Research released a short selling report on AMD, accusing the latter of financial fraud related to related party transactions. Later, the judicial department intervened in the investigation. All of these have caused a sharp drop in the company's stock price.
It is not common for audit firms to resign on the way, and whether there are bold audit firms to take over this "hot potato" has become the most concerned issue for investors.
Supermicro submitted its compliance plan by the final deadline and found the auditing agency to take over, but only managed to secure a few months of buffer time for itself. There is still uncertainty about whether Lixin can complete the audit and provide compliance opinions on schedule, and whether the 10-K annual report can be submitted on schedule.
It is worth noting that AMD, which heavily relies on Nvidia GPU chips, has been accused of financial fraud, forcing Nvidia to make a certain degree of "cutting" and transfer some orders to other suppliers. However, Nvidia's Blackwell chips for the next year have already been sold out. In this situation, even if the suspicion is cleared, it will be difficult for AMD to obtain saturated orders again.
At the same time, AMD's two competitors in the data center field, Dell Technologies and Huawei Technologies, have begun to divide its territory. Musk's construction of the world's largest data center is their common target of competition.
Even if the stock price continues to rise sharply and rises above $30 per share, there is still a long way to go for Supermicro Computer to reach $122 per share in March, let alone rebuild people's trust.