NVIDIA Announces Record Q4 2018 Results
by Brett Howse on February 8, 2018 10:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- NVIDIA
- Financial Results
This afternoon NVIDIA announced yet another record quarter, with revenues of $2.91 billion, which is up 34% from a year ago. Gross margin was 61.9%, and operating income was up 46% to $1.07 billion. Net income for the quarter was $1.12 billion, up 71% from a year ago, which provided diluted earnings per share of $1.78.
| NVIDIA Q4 2018 Financial Results (GAAP) | |||||
| Q4'2018 | Q3'2018 | Q4'2017 | Q/Q | Y/Y | |
| Revenue | $2911M | $2636M | $2173M | +10% | +34% |
| Gross Margin | 61.9% | 59.5% | 60.0% | +2.4% | +1.9% |
| Operating Income | $1073M | $895M | $733M | +20% | +46% |
| Net Income | $1118M | $838M | $655M | +33% | +71% |
| EPS | $1.78 | $1.33 | $0.99 | +34% | +80% |
For their 2018 fiscal year, NVIDIA racked up $9.71 billion in revenue, which is up 41% from a year ago. Earnings per share for the year were $4.82, up 88%.
NVIDIA has kind of hit a magic sweet spot, where they had been diversifying into growing markets, but have found themselves also swept up in the GPU fed craze of cryptocurrency, feeding their core business as well.
Gaming, which is their GeForce lineup, had revenues for the quarter of $1.74 billion, up almost $400 million from a year ago. But for the entire fiscal year, they haven’t even refreshed their lineup, although the Pascal series of GPUs have certainly been strong in terms of performance and efficiency. But you’d be lucky to find any in stock thanks to the copious number of GPUs purchased for mining coins. It’s not been ideal for gamers, but for NVIDIA’s R&D, and their investors, it’s been welcome news.
Professional Visualization was also up about 13% to $254 million. Growth here was attributed to the ultra-high-end and high-end desktop workstations, such as the Quadro GP100 launched earlier in the fiscal year.
NVIDIA’s foray into the datacenter is also paying off with substantial growth. Datacenter includes Tesla, GRID, and DGX systems, and for the quarter, NVIDIA saw revenues of $606 million, which are up 105% from a year ago.
Automotive was up a more modest 3% to $132 million, and we’ve seen NVIDIA get some big design wins with large automotive companies with their DRIVE platforms.
Automotive is powered by Tegra, and including the automotive sales, Tegra brought in $450 million this quarter, and the very popular Nintendo Switch is likely a nice chunk of that.
OEM and IP was $180 million for the quarter, which is up about 2.2%, and NVIDIA stated their licensing agreement with Intel concluded in the first quarter of fiscal year 2018.
| NVIDIA Quarterly Revenue Comparison (GAAP) ($ in millions) |
|||||
| In millions | Q4'2018 | Q3'2018 | Q4'2017 | Q/Q | Y/Y |
| Gaming | $1739 | $1561 | $1348 | +11% | +29% |
| Professional Visualization | $254 | $239 | $225 | +6% | +13% |
| Datacenter | $606 | $501 | $296 | +21% | +105% |
| Automotive | $132 | $144 | $128 | -8% | +3% |
| OEM & IP | $180 | $191 | $176 | -6% | +2% |
For Q1 2019, NVIDIA is forecasting revenues of $2.9 billion, plus or minus 2%.
Source: NVIDIA Investor Relations
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CiccioB - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
More than half of their revenues come from the Consumer market as you can see in the last available quarter report.Of course, if you consider that they surely do not have a 60% margin on consumer products you can expect that the margins for the other half of the revenues are really rally large, so they make more money with the revenues of the smaller but high specialized business.
jmunjr - Saturday, February 10, 2018 - link
How is the Shield not an actual product? I've had my Shield TV for a couple years now and it's by far the best streaming media player there is. It's available all over the place as well, including local stores like Best Buy.mode_13h - Tuesday, February 20, 2018 - link
Did you... um, time-warp from the 1950's... or something? I guess you think mining, agriculture, and manufacturing are the only sectors of the economy that actually matter?Just try typing that on a keyboard plugged into a PC with a blank slab of silicon for a CPU. And no OS, software, or websites to visit, either. And I hope you like driving to all the factories that make the parts, because delivery companies don't "make" anything, either.
webdoctors - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
Net Income $1118MGross Margin 61.9%
Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.
CiccioB - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
The gross margin is incredible.That's what sums up the differences with respect to AMD.
Sn3akr - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
"We don't like miners sucking up all the GFX available"(But we sure do like the profit more, so we're not gonna do anything about it, but we'll still pretend to feel bad for gamers)
souperior intellect - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
Market forces dude - suck it up!mapesdhs - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
And as long as increasing supply means risking a glut of used cards in the future, damaging the current product lineup at the time, they will not make more cards to ease pricing. I refuse to call them GPUs, because they're not anymore (as the opening of the vid ref'd below shows); modern designs are AI/compute engines (hence the good matching for mining), with the table scraps coupled to a display output for gamers. We haven't had new 3D realism feature innovation in gaming for years.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkeKx-L_E-o
Plus, the modern fad for high frequency displays and VR, and gamers themselves focusing so much on games that don't need new features, means game devs are loathe to make games that are significantly more taxing than previous titles; we'll never see another Crysis, such frame rates as there were in reviews of the time would be viewed most poorly by modern tech sites, erring as they do to the vocal and wealthy crowd who use freesync/gsync on high res displays, or VR. It's a vicious circle which won't be broken until gamers start demanding different types of games that need new new features to support more immersive worlds, such as properly modelled fluids and malleable environments (mud, fire, water, lava, smoke, flood, tsunami, volcano eruption, earthquake, etc.), the sort of thing that would make games like Tomb Raider much more interesting. So many combat games, but none yet that allow one to dig pits or tunnels, construct roads, etc.? IMO the original Red Faction was more interesting in that regard than newer games. Typical AAA FPS titles don't need anything more than is already available, especially since the marketing focus is so much on online deathmatch and now also microtransactions, instead of a genuinely engaging single player experience.
In theory there's a market opportunity for a 3rd party to design an all new GPU that focuses on *gaming*, but I can't see that happening, not unless a company with money to spend decides it's worth creating something worthwhile. IBM could do it, they could hire the talent, etc., but it's not a market level they care much about.
Collectively, the only thing gamers can do that might make any difference is to simply not buy the products at the currently inflated prices. To some extent this is happening, used pricing on ebay has shot up recently (used 980 Tis are fast approaching their original MSRP), but not enough to persuade AMD or NVIDIA to change their approach. NVIDIA could certainly design a new, genuine gaming GPU if they wanted to, but I don't think they care.
The giddy heights of the money available from Enterprise/AI/compute markets reminds of the way SGI became so obsessed with the big lucrative sales, ignoring mass market opportunities for cheaper products that would provide a sustainable product line and user base in the long term; back then, NVIDIA stepped in and grabbed the limelight. Now it seems NVIDIA is chasing the same money rainbow. Understandable, as it's great for shareholders, but in the long term, who knows, and in the meantime it's driving gamers nuts, making PC building very expensive. The staggering increases in RAM pricing add fuel to the fire, ditto the degraded value of modern SSDs.
CiccioB - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
Your comment is a complete clueless rant.What's the meaning of "NVIDIA could certainly design a new, genuine gaming GPU if they wanted to, but I don't think they care"?
This is not limited to nvidia, of course.
What do you have not understood that modern gaming base most of their work on exploiting the calculation capacities of the modern GPU? What do you think Vulkan and DX12 have been thought for? To use the same pre-made driver executed DX11 algorithms (which however use as much calculation capabilities as possible nonetheless)?
Why do you thing that modern games run faster on a 10TFLOPS GPU rather than a 5TFLOPS one? Because they have equal number of ROPs? Because the new GPU are not "genuine gaming GPUs" like the old ones?
What's the meaning of posting so many lines of craps when you do not know even what you are talking about?
Fact is a simple one: modern games have been constantly requiring more and more computational capabilities to the GPUs to run at decent frame rates. GPU have fattened for satisfy those requirements. The great work put in this has transformed the GPUs from a mere gaming focused product into a more general (and powerful) computational product useable also outside the gaming market.
However today has not understood why gaming and mining are the same market is the same one that thought that GPGPU was only executin FP64 calculations and believed that only AMD HW had such features, while all those GPU doing only FP32 calculations were toys.
They are also the same people that now can't understand why nvidia is making almost $3B with a $1B of net revenue while the other company playing in the same market is struggling reaching the break even point, all while the GPU market is booming.
CiccioB - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
"However today" was meant to be "Whoever today".What about the edit feature?