Nvidia revenue plunges 60% in fourth quarter

Written by Tim Smalley

February 11, 2009 | 11:38

Tags: #card #crisis #earnings #economic #financials #gpus #recession #revenue

Companies: #nvidia

Demand for Nvidia's graphics cards dried up in the fourth quarter of its 2009 fiscal year, which ended on 25th January 2009, as the company's revenue dropped by a staggering 60 percent year-on-year.

Last night, the company reported that it had racked up a $147.7 million loss, compared to the $257 million profit it posted a year earlier.

Revenues were just $481.1 million, down massively from the $1.2 billion revenue reported by the company during the same quarter in its 2008 fiscal year.

"November fell off a cliff," said Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during last night's earnings call, while CFO Marvin Burkett said that December was even worse.

This isn't good news for the company, because in a time of recession, it's clear that consumers aren't rushing out to buy new graphics cards - they're content with what they've already got and will make do until the storm has passed.

Nvidia is working to address this with innovations like the GeForce 9400M GPU, which is used in its Atom-based Ion platform, and continuing its CUDA push towards ubiquitous GPU Computing.

Sadly, neither of these have well and truly taken off yet - there's still a cloud of uncertainty over the brilliant Ion platform as OEMs and ODMs remain quiet on adoption. Meanwhile, CUDA-accelerated apps are only available to those running Nvidia GPUs, which means widespread adoption is a way off yet. We're waiting for OpenCL and DirectX Compute to come along before we can actually reach the holy grail of widespread, massively parallel computing for all - that should happen some time this year, though and Nvidia is right at the forefront.

Did you purchase a new graphics card over the festive period? Tell us in the forums.
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