Slight expectations
NVIDIA warned its Q4 revenues would be significantly lower than previously indicated last month. It unveiled those revenues late yesterday and at $481.1 million compared to $1.2 billion for the same quarter a year ago, the 60 percent drop was greater than expected.
The GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) bet loss for the quarter was $147.7 million, which contributed to a GAAP net loss of the full year to 25th January of $30 million, compared to a net profit of $797.6 million for the previous full financial year. Full year revenues were down 16 percent.
"The environment is clearly difficult and uncertain," said NVIDIA boss Jen-Hsun Huang. "Our first priority is to set an operating expense level that balances cash conservation while allowing us to continue to invest in initiatives that are of great importance to the market and in which we believe we have industry leadership."
"We have initiatives in all areas to reduce operating expenses. Although fiscal 2009 was extremely difficult, it was one of our best years of innovation. We made many important advances in graphics processing with PhysX and 3D Vision, GPU computing with CUDA and Tesla, and mobile computing with ION and Tegra. I am pleased with the excellent achievements we made in each of these important areas," he concluded.
NVIDIA's shares were down 4.3 percent in regular trading and a further 3.4 percent in after hours trading as it forecast revenues for the next quarter would be around the same level.
However, the Dow and NASDAQ were both down over four percent following apparent disappointment in the level of detail revealed in the US Treasury's latest bailout/stimulus plan. So in that context the falls in NVIDIA's share price don't seem exceptional.
