Nvidia revenue plunges 60% in fourth quarter
Demand for Nvidia's graphics cards dried up in the fourth quarter of its 2009 fiscal year, as the company's revenue dropped by a staggering 60 percent.
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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Because yet even MORE customer confusion is what we need.
Honestly, if I was going to buy one card for every market segment, the only segments where NVIDIA would even really be a consideration would be the high-end and ultra-high-end with the GTX260 and the GTX295, and even the GTX295 falls by the wayside when you consider its cost.
NVIDIA just guessed wrong for this generation and ATI guessed right. It's kind of like we're back in the Radeon 9x00/GeForceFX days.
+1 to that, my thoughts exactly!!!
until games push the boundaries of the GPU again i doubt revenue will incease
nVidia just says what investors expect to hear to maintain cash flow. Those are just poster words, last year we had "global warming" (so the revenue was smaller because of the need to upgrade manufacturing processes to more "green"), before that there were "infavourable economical conditions" due to the whole "war on terror" crap. As an investor in several companies I hear this crap all the time, month after month, on every summary meeting, in every summary letter.
There must be a ton of people with 8800 GTS models out there though that are itching to upgrade... if it wasnt for this darn recession taking all our pennies away for other such luxuries.. like food (hey.. the UK is almost third world nowadays!)
A lot of the games made by smaller teams are better than the games made by small armies, at least.
I keep expecting AMD or Nvidia to one up the other soon too.
All I really know is running a single 8800gt on a 30" monitor sucks because for most games I don't have enough umph to run at native anymore..
With the economy what it is, it's no wonder that people aren't buying graphics cards costing many hundreds of dollars.
Apart from those two cards that have gotten all the media attention, they released an excellent range of modern low-cost cards, scaling all the way down to cards that are just a little stronger then their integrated HD3300.
Sure, they recently launched new high end cards, but those don't generate much profit on their own, the market for them has always been small and as games run on "crappy" gpus as well due to being mostly console ports the highend market as a whole is shrinking.
What do they have in the midrange? renamed 8xxx cards... great, people who bought a mid - highend card in the last 1-2 years don't have a reason to buy those (especially if you factor in the very attractice prcing of ati's 4670 and 4830 cards) and looking at the low end market, the nvidia products are simply out dated (complete refresh of low end cards is due for first half of 2009 only).
MSI K9A2 Platinum V2 // Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H // Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe
AMD phenom2 720
Kingston value 4gb ddr2
Ati 4870 1gb,
1tb Samsungspinpoint HD.
This would set you back around: 580 euro +/-