NVIDIA Q1 FY2015 Financial Results
by Brett Howse on May 8, 2014 10:00 PM EST
This afternoon NVIDIA announced their quarterly earnings for Q1 2015. Overall GAAP revenue came in at $1.1B, up 16% year over year and down 4% sequentially. Gross margin was up slightly to 54.8%, up from 54.3% from Q1 2014, and up 0.7% from the previous quarter.
Most impressive of the numbers was the rise in net income, up 75% from Q1 2014 and coming in at $137M. Operating expenses were relatively flat sequentially, but up 4% from a year ago. This lead to an Earnings Per Share (EPS) of $0.24, an 85% increase from Q1 2014, although down $0.01 from last quarter. Non-GAAP EPS came in at $0.29, handily beating the analysts’ estimates of $0.17.
| NVIDIA Q1 2015 Financial Results (GAAP) | |||||
| In millions except EPS | Q1'2015 | Q4'2014 | Q1'2014 | Q/Q | Y/Y |
| Revenue | $1103 | $1144 | $955 | -4% | +16% |
| Gross Margin | 54.8% | 54.1% | 54.3% | +0.7% | +0.5% |
| Operating Expenses | $453 | $452 | $436 | flat | +4% |
| Net Income | $137 | $147 | $78 | -7% | +75% |
| EPS | $0.24 | $0.25 | $0.13 | -4% | +85% |
| NVIDIA Q1 2015 Financial Results (Non-GAAP) | |||||
| In millions except EPS | Q1'2015 | Q4'2014 | Q1'2014 | Q/Q | Y/Y |
| Revenue | $1103 | $1144 | $955 | -4% | +16% |
| Gross Margin | 55.1% | 53.8% | 54.6% | +1.3% | +0.5% |
| Operating Expenses | $411 | $408 | $396 | +1% | +4% |
| Net Income | $166 | $187 | $114 | -11% | +46% |
| EPS | $0.29 | $0.32 | $0.18 | -9% | +61% |
The GPU business is still the dominant division of NVIDIA, coming in at over 81% of the company’s entire revenue with $898M. GPU sales were strong for Q1, with revenue up 14% year over year, but down from Q4 2014. Most impressively, GeForce GTX GPUs for both desktops and notebooks grew 57% with strong demand for the newly released GTX 750 which is the first GPU based on Maxwell. NVIDIA stated that demand was strong in all markets for Desktop GPUs, and high-end notebook GPU volume also grew, but overall notebook GPU revenue was down. NVIDIA stated the seasonal decline in the desktop market more than offset the GTX GPU sales, contributing to the quarter over quarter decline.
Also on the GPU side, Quadro revenue increased with demand from all major OEM desktop and mobile workstation vendors. GRID sales were strong, and Tesla was also up. Tesla and GRID revenue increases was attributed to GPU acceleration opportunities, VDI deployments supporting Citrix, and streaming gaming providers.
Tegra Processor sales, which account for 12.6% of revenue, were up 35% year over year, and unlike GPU sales they were also up quarter over quarter 6%. The strong quarter for Tegra was attributed to a volume increase for smartphone and auto infotainment systems, but Android tablet SoCs were down partially offsetting the revenue gains. Automotive systems was up a healthy 60% year over year. Game consoles and embedded devices were down from Q1 2014, but the sequential growth of the Tegra division was attributed to the strong auto infotainment and embedded devices, so while embedded is down year over year, it’s recovered somewhat from the previous quarter.
NVIDIA has one other source of revenue which it reports on, which is $66M from patent license agreements with Intel.
| NVIDIA Quarterly Revenue Comparison (GAAP) | |||||
| In millions | Q1'2015 | Q4'2014 | Q1'2014 | Q/Q | Y/Y |
| GPU | $898 | $947 | $786 | -5% | +14% |
| Tegra Processor | $139 | $131 | $103 | +6% | +35% |
| Other | $66 | $66 | $66 | flat | flat |
NVIDIA is projecting their Q2 revenue will be flat at $1.1B plus or minus 2%.
Overall it was a good quarter for NVIDIA. The strong demand for their new Maxwell GPUs. NVIDIA’s share of notebook computers is the highest since 2010. Although uptake of the Tegra 4 has been slow in tablets, NVIDIA has seen growth in Smartphone adoption as well as a strong automotive presence which is becoming more important with the growth in automotive infotainment systems in every single automotive brand. I’m sure they are hoping for some design wins with the Tegra K1, which looks like a nice upgrade over the Tegra 4, however there was no mention of it in the earnings release. We still have a few months for them to hit their target for the first half of 2014.
Source: NVIDIA
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testbug00 - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
NVidia probably selling loads of Tegra chips due to a deal with a Chinese manufacturer + the MS/HP deals.Tegra SOLD a lot, but, they don't talk about how much money it made... for good reasons. 139 million in sales does not mean anything if you spent 150-200 million+ on the division. Nvidia would never be willing to release profits of its Tegra division... Mostly because it has none. Tegra has always been a par chip that Nvidia overinflated to OEMs/consumers. Doing it to OEMs cost them every large mobile OEM (except that chinese one, but, those chips were probably sold with very low margins. And, that OEM had not used Tegra before).
Now that Tegra K1 has a nice GPU, they have a part they really can sell as beating the competition, but, sadly, they have driven away most of their customers... I hope they make a SHIELD 2 (with K1) I would love to pick up one of those. The SHIELD screen rez is to low for me to justify (I pick out pixels really easily) but, the device is really cool.
ams23 - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
It is not just the GPU that is impressive in Tegra K1. The CPU is also impressive, with reportedly superior performance and superior per watt compared to Tegra 4 and Snapdragon 800.FYI, NVIDIA does release data on Tegra profitability on an annual basis. NVIDIA does not release data on profitability by line of business on a quarterly basis. Anyway, that is now largely a moot point because R&D costs will be shared and leveraged between Tegra and other lines of business moving forward.
testbug00 - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
no, Tegra 4 was aweful in perf/watt compared to SD 800.... this part is no different.According to Nvidia themselves, it draws over 10W (well, they say <11) "working hard"
it is probably 20% faster (CPU at that speed) and uses WAY more power (not sure how much is GPU, which is certainly faster than the 800)
ams23 - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
LOL, you have no idea what you are talking about. See measured application processor + DRAM perf. per watt of Tegra K1 vs. Snapdragon 800: http://cdn.pcper.com/files/imagecache/article_max_... . Tegra K1's CPU is > 1.3x more power efficient in this task!Your <11w number is very misleading too. That is CPU+GPU+mem+I/O for a dev platform that is not mobile optimized. With very compute heavy tasks, the Jetson TK1 dev kit consumes slightly north of 6w for application processor + mem. For a mobile optimized TK1 variant, this would be closer to ~ 5w. Remember that this is > 300 GFLOPS GPU throughput!!!
At the end of the day, based on what we have seen so far, it is pretty clear that TK1 has superior CPU and GPU perf. per watt compared to S800, on the same fab. process node to boot.
tuxRoller - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
Well, if Nvidia's slides tell us that...testbug00 - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
how many phones is Nvidia in with Tegra 4? How many is Qualcomm on with SD800?NVidia has proven itself inept at making a low power chip... Note, that 11W is not the max power draw, that is "working hard" the max power draw for the whole thing is probably closer to 15W... with at least 10W going to the SoC.
Why you seem to think Nvidia managed to magically change from losing perf/watt with Tegra, Tegra 2, Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 into slaughtering competition with Tegra K1 (when compared to products that have been out and IN PRODUCTS for over a year, mind you).
Remember, Tegra 4 was faster than Apple's iPad 8 month old iPad chip... Than Apple released a new chip... Tegra 4 was slower. It is not enough to beat competitors chips.
Also, you do realize Tegra K1 will be competing with 20nm chips... right?
melgross - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
Don't believe anything Nvidia says, or their controlled laboratory testing. None of their stuff ever meets their inflated numbers.tuxRoller - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
http://semiaccurate.com/2014/03/05/nvidias-tegra-k...Also, the dev board has a frickin fan attached.
For comparison, the dragonboards (the dev boards for snapdragon, don't seem to have fans attached---http://mydragonboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/0...
So, yeah, it's easy to have great performance if you don't mind blowing your power budget.
melgross - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
The problem with the Tegra's, and Nvidia in general, is that their chips never meet the overinflated specs Nvidia releases for them before they hit the market. By the time they arrive, they are no longer what Nvidia has gotten people to expect for them, and other manufacturers, such as Apple and Qualcomm, have passed them by, except for a few specs.That's why they aren't in a lot of devices, the OEM's are very well aware of all this.
phoenix_rizzen - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
According to the article, the Tegra sales are up due to use in car infotainment packages, not phones/tablets.