Nvidia quarterly results notes

by Kris_Tuttle on May 7, 2009

One can’t help but notice a major rev­enue upside ($664M vs $514M con­sen­sus) along with a major inven­tory reduc­tion.  The rev­enue upside didn’t show up much on the bot­tom line which was only ahead of con­sen­sus by 2c.

Call focused beyond GPU mar­ket share and talked about the increas­ing adop­tion of PhyX tech­nol­ogy to develop the mar­ket for Nvidia prod­ucts into mobile and gam­ing mar­kets.  Touted that GPU com­put­ing will be incor­po­rated into the OS with the next releases of MacOS and Windows. 

Describes Tesla as a “green­field oppor­tunty” for them­selves in a multi-billion dol­lar mar­ket.  Also touted the Aspire ION based machine as being a game changer for con­sumers in afford­able machine per­for­mance.  Expected to be part of every major PC com­pany offer­ing before YE. 

Moves on to Tegra for the portable and smart­phone space where they claim many design wins that will emerge.  Claims that Tegra gets them into another mar­ket with a TAM on the order of $10B.

Desk­top sales were up strongly QoQ and it now appears that Q4 suf­fered as inven­tory was worked down and rev­enues in Q1 start to look more like run-rate lev­els based on con­sis­tent inven­tory levels.

Gross mar­gins were lower than expected due to busi­ness mix (-4pts) and the sell-off of older 65nm parts. 

Bal­ance sheet met­rics were good.  A/R was down 18 days to 42 DSO.  Inven­tory lev­els dropped from 145 days to 64 days.  Cash was up sequen­tially despite the pay­outs for the options repricing.

For Q2 the com­pany sees rev­enues up 5% or so sequen­tially and gross mar­gins to be up; puts the num­ber around $697M ver­sus cur­rent con­sen­sus of $536M. 

Lots of ques­tions around 65nm ver­sus 40nm ramp and 55nm.  ION is on 55nm.  Sug­ges­tion is that about 25% of pro­duc­tion will be 40nm by end of year. 

Pric­ing is described as “aggres­sive” but rel­a­tively stable. 

With respect to ION the num­bers sug­gest about $100M of rev­enues in the quar­ter with a lit­tle over 50% of that being Apple. 

Inter­est­ing to con­sider the strat­egy of giv­ing away Tegra-based devices as part of a com­mu­ni­ca­tion plan.  The ARPU can be attrac­tive rel­a­tive to a $200 device.

Says they would be dis­ap­pointed not to do $50M in Tegra rev­enue this year and should exit the year at some­thing like a $100M run rate.

In sum­mary the com­pany report increases rev­enues by $320M for this year and out­lines the evolv­ing suc­cess of sev­eral new ini­tia­tives into main­stream com­put­ing.  We cer­tainly liked it but we are long Nvidia stock in our fund.

For us this was a quar­terly report very much “on the path” based on our longer-term thesis.

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