Nvidia published its Q1 financial results yesterday evening. The results come a little earlier than planned as Nvidia "inadvertently emailed" about 100 people with a draft containing these same figures on the 6th May. That preliminary draft somehow leaked out beyond the internal employee distribution.
The report spans the quarter ending 27th April 2014 – Nvidia's first 2015 financial quarter, apparently. The revenue generated of $1.103 billion was up 16 per cent year on year but slipped a little, down 4 per cent, from the previous quarter. Net income from this revenue was $136.5 million and earnings per share 24 cents.
PC gaming and cloud gains
Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of NVIDIA told us the story behind the figures; "First quarter results benefited from gains in PC gaming and our continued progress in the data centre and cloud," he explained. "Nearly 600 enterprises worldwide are now evaluating GRID, our virtual GPU server platform. VMware announced support for GRID to enable GPU-accelerated enterprise virtualization. And with IBM, Dell and HP now selling our GPUs in their high-volume servers, we expect large-scale data centres to be a significant source of growth."
Nvidia reiterated the business highlights of the preceding quarter which included; disclosing the first details of the Pascal GPU architecture, a notebook graphics refresh with GeForce GTX800M series products, the first Maxwell product releases and the launch of the Jetson TK1 development platform. It also said that it expects revenue to be similar in Q2 plus or minus two per cent.
GPU specific trends
Nvidia's Chief Financial Officer gave us some more in-depth info about the GPU business in a commentary (PDF) on the Q1 results. The GPU business has grown an impressive $112 million or 14 per cent, year on year. Gaming proved a big asset to the green team's bottom line, "High‐end GeForce GTX GPUs for desktops and notebooks grew 57 percent, fueled by continued demand for gaming GPUs and the newly released GeForce GTX 750 series, our first Maxwell‐based GPUs. Desktop GPU demand was strong in all key markets, including China, the U.S., and Europe."
We also learned that the Tegra mobile processor line is on the up, growing 35 per cent year on year. Automotive infotainment sales were behind this good result, increasing in sales by 60 per cent. Meanwhile Tegra sales associated with game consoles and embedded devices decreased.
