Nvidia has published its latest quarterly results for the period ending 26th July 2015. It refers to this period as Q2 FY16 (FY = financial year), as you will notice in the tables below. Revenue is steady and trending in the right direction – up both sequentially and year-on-year. The firm's income and earnings per share look to be down significantly in the GAAP comparison charts but Nvidia notes that the GAAP financials include some hefty restructuring charges.
"Our strong performance in a challenging environment reflects Nvidia's success in creating specialized visual computing platforms targeted at important growth markets," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at Nvidia. Gaming platforms had benefitted from a growth in interest from "multiple vectors," according to Huang who listed new technologies like 4K and VR, the growth of eSports and blockbuster AAA games as driving forces behind new graphics hardware purchases. GeForce GPU demand was said to be strong and the GeForce GTX 980 Ti was launched to cement the green team's leadership. Nvidia's GeForce Experience PC gaming platform grew to 65 million users, from 38 million a year earlier.
Nvidia's automotive business looks like it has great potential, as it was announced to investors that "more than 50 companies that are exploring Nvidia DRIVE PX to enable self-driving cars". This platform is powered by a Tegra X1, plus 10GB of RAM to provide sophisticated advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Such systems can handle 12x two-Megapixel cameras at frame rates up to 60 fps for surround computer vision.
Another sector that Nvidia was upbeat about was visual computing, which the CEO expects to grow in importance. Nvidia GRID, for example, has more than tripled its user base over the last year.
Turning to the less successful aspects of the business, and negative impacts on the company in the most recent quarter, Nvidia said that its decision to wind down its Icera modem operations had a negative impact of $0.19 per diluted share. The recent Nvidia SHIELD tablet recall – due to the fire-hazard battery component – has had a negative impact of $0.02 per share. Other key points to note were that Tegra revenue dropped by 19 per cent from a year ago and shipments of Quadro GPUs for PCs declined.
