Could’ve been worse
Graphics giant NVIDIA announced its earnings for the quarter ending 26th October 2008 and they revealed a year-on-year revenue decline of 20 percent to $897.7 million and a 73 percent drop in profits to $61.7 million.
Investors were apparently expecting worse because, although NVIDIA shares dropped by over ten percent during normal trading yesterday, they recovered pretty much all of that in after hours trading and should open at around $8.40.
"We made good progress on multiple fronts during the quarter," said NVIDIA head honcho Jen-Hsun Huang. "Improving gross margin while managing operating expenses enabled us to significantly improve our operating fundamentals. We transitioned our performance segment GPUs to 55 nanometers and are now poised to recapture lost share.
"We entered the fastest growing segment of the PC market with our first notebook chipset for Intel processors, and delivered on several exciting new growth initiatives -- 3-way SLI for the Intel Core i7 processor platform, Quadro CX for Adobe CS4 creative professionals and the Tesla supercomputing processor."
Huang's got a point about the GeForce 9400M chipset, especially since Apple decided to put it in its new MacBooks and the early signals are that Core i7 does improve the scaling in 3-way SLI (three graphics cards in one system), but NVIDIA's not out of the woods yet.
As reported previously, a 3-way set of challenges remain for NVIDIA: the economy, AMD's graphics resurgence and Connectorgate. In a conference call Huang said Q4 was difficult to call because of the macroeconomic chaos, but forecast a sales decline of around five percent.
