Nvidia reports record revenues

Components vendor Nvidia has announced record revenues for both the fourth quarter and the full year of 2017. 

For the fourth quarter, Nvidia is reporting revenue of $2.173 billion, up 55 per cent from a year ago. Gross margin came in at 60 per cent, which is up 3.5 per cent year-on-year. Operating income for the quarter was $733 million, up a huge 191 per cent, and net income was up an even bigger 216 per cent to $655 million. All of this is even more impressive when you consider that quarter four 2016 was also a record for the firm at the time. Nvidia reported $0.99 per share earnings for this quarter, up 183 per cent. The firm also reported record revenue of $6.91 billion for the full 2017 fiscal year – up 38 per cent year-on-year – and had a net income of $1.666 billion. 

Breaking down the source of the revenue, the majority of it came – unsurprisingly – from Nvidia’s Gaming segment. This segment includes the GeForce GPUs, and had revenues of $1.348 billion, up from $810 million a year ago. The company reinforced its position at the top of the market, gaining 66.4 per cent year-on-year. 

Elsewhere, Proffesional Visualisation had a more modest growth of 10.8 per cent (revenues of $225 million for the quarter), and Datacentre increased 205.1 per cent from $97 million to $296 million for the quarter year-on-year. Another area of growth for the company is its Automotive segment thanks to the Tegra processor. While Tegra was initally launched as a mobile SoC, it has now found itself in self-driving cars and in infotainment systems for car manufactureres like Audi and Mercedes-Benz. This segment saw revenues of $128 million for the quarter, up from $93 million a year ago, or 37.6 per cent.

The last segment was the only one which saw a drop in revenue. The OEM and IP segment had revenues of $176 million, down from $198 million the previous year. The company hasn’t gone into much detail about why this is dropping, but it could be an indication that less people are interested in purchasing ready-built gaming PCs, and that more are leaning towards going to system builders or building their own rig.

Nvidia has said that it is expecting revenues of $1.9 billion, plus or minus 2 per cent, for the next quarter, and gross margins between 59.5 per cent and 59.7 per cent.

All of this is a reflection that the company’s diversification from purely building GPUs is working – particularly in the Datacentre segment. With this being the case, expect to see much more out of Nvidia in the next 18 months outside of graphics cards.