Nvidia has published a barnstorming set of quarterly and final year results. In its Financial Results for the Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2016 the graphics chip specialist reported better than expected revenue, with growth across all its markets and especially strong demand in sales of GeForce GPUs. Needless to say stock market investors are impressed and Nvidia's share price has soared as high as 8 per cent in afterhours trading - following up on a good pre-results day when its shares rose 2.5 per cent.
Highlights of Nvidia's financials are as follows:
- Record quarterly revenue of $1.40 billion, up 12 percent from a year earlier
- Record full-year revenue of $5.01 billion, up 7 percent from fiscal 2015
- Growth across all market platforms - Gaming, Professional Visualization, Datacenter, Automotive
- Sharply growing customer engagements in deep learning
Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia welcomed the record quarter, topping a record year. Huang won't be taking his foot off the accelerator and gave indications of Nvidia's market tactics going forward, "Our strategy is to create specialized accelerated computing platforms for large growth markets that demand the 10x boost in performance we offer. Each platform leverages our focused investment in building the world's most advanced GPU technology". The Nvidia CEO went on to add "Nvidia is at the centre of four exciting growth opportunities -- PC gaming, VR, deep learning, and self-driving cars. We are especially excited about deep learning, a breakthrough in artificial intelligence algorithms that takes advantage of our GPU's ability to process data simultaneously".
Looking back at specific highlights of the past year, Nvidia points to its GeForce GTX VR Ready program and release of the GameWorks VR SDK. In a conference call Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said that "GeForce sales are driven by the launch of great gaming titles and that again proved true this past holiday season". Meanwhile Needham & Co analyst, Rajvindra Gill, provided the insight that Nvidia "clearly are benefiting not only from new game titles but also market share gains from AMD". GPU revenue for the fourth quarter was $1.18 billion, up 6 per cent sequentially and up 10 per cent from a year earlier. GeForce Gaming GPU revenue grew 21 percent from a year ago, as sales from all regions continue to provide solid growth.
In professional graphics Nvidia rolled out accelerator plugins for Autodesk Maya and 3DS Max plus released DesignWorks VR. In Automobiles, Nvidia launched the DRIVE PX2 and announced its adoption by Volvo. Finally, in the Data centre, Nvidia enjoyed a number of breakthroughs including Facebook's adoption of Tesla accelerated computing systems and other tech giants such as Alibaba, IBM, Google and Microsoft using Nvidia GPUs for computation and deep learning.
