Cryptocurrency mining company and chipmaker NVIDIA has announced its first quarter revenue for 2019, and the results are better than expected.
Is NVIDIA Back on Track?
Recently, the company had been suffering thanks to what executives felt was a lack of enthusiasm for crypto due to its lagging prices as of late. The company had not been selling as much crypto-mining equipment, and there were fears that that division would ultimately shut down. However, the company appears to have made a serious comeback in divisions like gaming.
Sales of its crypto-mining tools have also improved now that bitcoin and other major forms of crypto have been experiencing price swells. Co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang commented:
NVIDIA is back on an upward trajectory. We’ve returned to growth in gaming, with nearly 100 new GeForce Max-Q laptops shipping, and NVIDIA RTX has gained broad industry support, making ray tracing the standard for next-generation gaming.
NVIDIA now says it projects sales of approximately $2.55 billion for its second quarter. This is better than its original trajectory of $2.53 billion.
Wall Street analyst Harlan Sur did a study of NVIDIA and published his findings:
Although GPU channel inventories have largely normalized in the April quarter, gaming growth also appears to be held back somewhat by the well-known notebook CPU shortages, impacting the initial ramp of its notebook business. However, we expect seasonal growth in gaming (augmented by ramp of second-generation Nintendo Switch) for the remainder of the year. In datacenters, the team noted that the July quarter guidance was softer than what they had originally anticipated due to large CSPs going through a period of digestion. However, we believe this view was largely expected as other large compute semiconductor companies such as Intel have guided towards a later recovery during their recent earnings call, which points to more of a 3Q and onwards type of recovery with stronger growth in 2020.
NVIDIA Just Keeps Growing
Other analysts also weighed in on NVIDIA’s success. Christopher Rolland, for example, echoed some of Sur’s sentiment by stating:
Somewhat surprising, implied gaming guidance beat our expectations, helped in part by a strong return of Nintendo Switch sales as the Japanese company is expected to launch a cost-reduced version of the device. While CPU shortages weighed a bit, management announced 100 notebook wins as their new laptop parts gain further traction (up from 40 announced at CES). While we previewed the many issues with GPU in the data center in C1H19 (primarily hyperscale digestion), we were positively surprised by the strong narrative around a ramp in their T4 inferencing product… Overall, it has been a harrowing few quarters, but we remain long-term bulls on NVIDIA as we believe in the AI inference opportunity, the proviz upgrade cycle, and 7nm refresh coming this fall.