Supermicro

Supermicro — developer of server solutions Building Block Solutions for information centers, cloud computing, high-performance computer centers, corporate IT, Hadoop / Big Data and the built-in systems.

News and indicators of activity

2020: A penalty in the amount of $17.5 million for frauds in accounting

On August 25, 2020 it became known that the producer of motherboards and other Supermicro component parts agreed to pay a penalty in the amount of $17.5 million the Commission of the USA on securities and the exchanges for claim settlement connected with financial statements.

The commission made a complaint to Supermicro after detected disagreements in its annual financial reports. As found out the regulator, the company at least within 3 years considered the postponed revenue which should not have been entered in the reports and also underestimated volumes of expenses. As a result there was an impression that the company generates more profit, than actually.

The producer of Supermicro component parts agreed to pay a penalty of $17.5 million for frauds in accounting

Within investigation financial statements of the company for 4 years — from 2014 to 2017 financial years were analyzed. To correct errors the vendor made changes to the annual report published in May, 2019 and the report published in June, 2017. The company said that in these changes considered all disagreements of previous years and further adjustments are not required.

In turn, the paid penalty was considered in the financial statement published in March, 2020. As told in Supermicro, the regulator could impose on them and more serious sanctions. For benefit of the company played that it at once agreed to promote, admitted the guilt and immediately took measures in order that similar errors did not repeat in the future. Additional mechanisms of control of accounting activity, reorganization of finance division and appointment of additional specialists for verification of the reporting were among these measures.

Besides, within settlement the chief executive and the chairman of the board of Supermicro Charles Liang agreed to compensate the companies about $2.1 million the saved means according to the law "Sarbeynza-Oxley" representing a set of standards for counteraction to abuses of top managers.^[1]

2018

Did not find espionage chips in Supermicro motherboards

The current and earlier models of Super Micro Computer motherboards (Supermicro) do not contain any harmful chips, showed the audit booked by request of the producer after the publication of the Bloomberg agency as which affirmed that the Chinese hackers installed special microchips on Supermicro motherboards for servers of the largest American companies for the purpose of espionage behind them. It is said^[2] in the letter directed to clients signed by the CEO of Supermicro Charles Liang and other top managers of the company^[3].

"After the careful analysis and a number of functional tests specialists did not find any proofs of presence of the harmful hardware at our motherboards", reported in the letter.

China spied on Apple and Amazon via chips in the equipment

At the beginning of October, 2018 it became known that China spied on Apple, Amazon and other technology companies, installing special chips in the equipment used in data centers. The Super Micro company could set these chips. Read more here.

In the popular Supermicro servers it is easy to deliver the "invisible" malware which cannot almost be deleted

In the integrated controllers of management used in the Supermicro servers the serious vulnerability allowing malefactors to install a malicious code on servers was detected. Removal of this code can be very difficult, almost impracticable task^[4].

The error of programmers became an origin of vulnerability: developers forgot to provide check of origin of software which is established on these controllers.

The Integrated Controllers of Management (ICM) are ordinary installed directly on the motherboard servers and used for management of different hardware components, irrespective of a host and the operating system, - i.e. actually function at lower level, than OS.

Using IKU it is possible to perform recovery, modification or reinstallation of the system software. Administrators can manage IKU through a local network or through allocated channel. Thus, employees of IT department can manage far off key hardware functions of a server system.

Naturally, it does IKU by the purpose, extremely interesting to hackers.

2017: Growth of revenue thanks to corporate clients

In 2017 financial year revenue of Super Micro Computer rose by 14.2% thanks to increase in number of corporate clients. At the same time the profit of the company was a little reduced.

For the 12-month reporting period which end fell on June 30, 2017 revenue of Super Micro Computer made $2.5 billion against $2.2 billion the previous year. Net profit fell from 72 to 69.3 million dollars in comparison of the same periods.

The scientific and technology park of Super Micro company on Taiwan

Super Micro created a strong basis for steady growth and increase in profitability. For the last we invested few years in expansion of production capacities at the global level, development, quality improvement of products, services, systems and the software for management of data centers much. These investments will strengthen the new Supermicro 3.0 program — the chairman of the board of directors and the CEO of the company  Charles Liang says. — Supermicro 3.0 positions us as the only leading supplier of IT infrastructure capable of an output to the market the innovation products, on global scaling and high quality, on provision of services and supports to fulfill the requirements of fast-growing base of corporate clients.

In 2017 Super Micro attracted 15 new corporate customers. In the 2018th it is going to increase base on 25-30 of the companies which as expects vendor, will stimulate the further growth of its revenue.

According to Charles Liang, large investments and a new product portfolio on the Intel processors Skylake should become the main catalysts of profit increase of the company.

Follows from the report that the dependence of Super Micro on server solutions continues to grow. In April-June, 2017 74.3% of revenue of the company against 70% and 65.5% three months and the previous year respectively were the share of them.^[5]

Notes