NVIDIA Releases Q4 FY 2015 And Full Year Results: Record Revenue For Quarter And Full Year
by Brett Howse on February 11, 2015 5:35 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- NVIDIA
- Financial Results
NVIDIA released their earnings report for the fourth quarter of their fiscal year 2015, which ended January 25th, 2015. FY 2015 was a record for the company, with revenues coming in at $4.68 billion, up 13% from 2014. Q4 also had record revenue, following Q3 2014 which was also a record for NVIDIA. For the most recent quarter, NVIDIA had revenues of $1.25 billion, up 9% from 2014 and up 2% from Q3 2015. Gross margin for Q4 2015 was $699 million, or 55.9% which is up 1.8% over Q4 2014, and 0.7% over Q3 2015. Net income came in at $193 million, also up quarter-over-quarter 13%, and year-over-year 40%. Earnings per share were $0.35 (GAAP), up 13% over last quarter and 40% over last year, and beating analysts expectations.
NVIDIA paid back $46 million in cash dividends, and bought back 200,000 shares in Q4, bringing the 2015 fiscal year up to a total of $186 million in dividends and 44.4 million shares repurchased for $814 million, meaning NVIDIA was able to return $1.0 billion during the year. For FY 2016, NVIDIA intends to return an additional $600 million through these methods. The next dividend will be $0.085 per share, paid on March 19 to all shareholders on record as of February 16.
| NVIDIA Q4 2015 Financial Results (GAAP) | |||||
| Q4'2015 | Q3'2015 | Q4'2014 | Q/Q | Y/Y | |
| Revenue (in millions USD) | $1251 | $1225 | $1144 | +2% | +9% |
| Gross Margin | 55.9% | 55.2% | 54.1% | +0.7% | +1.8% |
| Operating Expenses (in millions USD) | $468 | $463 | $452 | +1% | +4% |
| Net Income | $193 | $173 | $147 | +12% | +31% |
| EPS | $0.35 | $0.31 | $0.25 | +13% | +40% |
NVIDIA has also released Non-GAAP figures which exclude the stock-based compensation, legal settlements, acquisition costs, investments, and a credit related to weak die/packaging material set.
| NVIDIA Q4 2015 Financial Results (Non-GAAP) | |||||
| Q4'2015 | Q3'2015 | Q4'2014 | Q/Q | Y/Y | |
| Revenue (in millions USD) | $1251 | $1225 | $1144 | +2% | +9% |
| Gross Margin | 56.2% | 55.5% | 53.8% | +0.7% | +2.4% |
| Operating Expenses (in millions USD) | $420 | $415 | $408 | +1% | +3% |
| Net Income | $241 | $220 | $187 | +10% | +34% |
| EPS | $0.43 | $0.39 | $0.32 | +10% | +34% |
The GPU business is still the main part of NVIDIA, and they had a nice boost. During Q4, NVIDIA launched the GTX 960 GPU, as well as the GTX 965M. This, combined with the GTX 980 , 970, 980M, and 970M launches recently have propelled the GPU revenue up to $1.073 billion for the quarter. This is an 8% increase over Q3 2015, and a year-over-year gain of 13%. Maxwell based cards have been very popular, and NVIDIA has seen strength in the PC gaming market for their high-end offerings. Notebooks with discrete GPUs have also been selling well, showing sales well above year-ago levels.
Tegra sales fell quite substantially this quarter, after several quarters of strong growth. For Q4 2015, Tegra revenue was $112 million, down from $168 million in Q3, and $131 million a year ago. This represents a decrease in revenue of 33% quarter-over-quarter, and 15% year-over-year. Smartphone and tablet design wins featuring NVIDIA Tegra drove the decline, however automotive Infotainment sales more than doubled. This helps explain why NVIDIA focused solely on the Tegra X1 at CES this year, as it has been a very strong market for their processors.
The remaining revenue is $66 million, which is a licensing fee paid by Intel to NVIDIA every quarter.
| NVIDIA Quarterly Revenue Comparison (GAAP) | |||||
| In millions | Q4'2015 | Q3'2015 | Q4'2014 | Q/Q | Y/Y |
| GPU | $1073 | $991 | $947 | +8% | +13% |
| Tegra Processor | $112 | $168 | $131 | -33% | -15% |
| Other | $66 | $66 | $66 | flat | flat |
It was a great FY 2015 for NVIDIA. Strong GPU sales offset the weaker smartphone and tablet SoC sales, but Tegra in the automotive space continues to perform very well.
For Q1 FY 2016 (yes, NVIDIA’s fiscal year is almost an entire year ahead of calendar year) the company is expecting revenues of $1.16 billion, plus or minus 2%, and GAAP margins of 56.2%, with Non-GAAP margins of 56.5%.
Source: NVIDIA
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dragonsqrrl - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
The return rates for the 970 following the memory allocation incident have been around 4%. Significant, but far from the embarrassing disaster some people were predicting, most of whom don't even own 970's. Honestly if I owned a 970 I would probably be pretty pissed too, but it wouldn't be enough to make me return the card (it's still a great card), much less consider legal action.r3loaded - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Seriously? People actually returned their cards because of a minor architectural quirk that resulted in a segmented memory address space? There's nothing wrong with the 970, people were sold on it based on real-world performance, thermals and power consumption benchmarks and the retail units that made it into consumers' hands lived up to those benchmarks. The price too was amazing, especially compared to the 980.Or do people seriously base their hardware buying decisions on esoteric technical specifications like the number of cores, ROPs, theoretical memory bandwidth and the cache hierarchy? Because that's a terrible way to make decisions on performance - one should always benchmark and profile their software to see what makes a difference and what doesn't.
Murloc - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
in addition to very few people with legitimate reasons, many people who returned them probably did it to upgrade after trying it out for a month. And others were maybe just scaremonged into it and don't know anything about performance.FlushedBubblyJock - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link
Their epeen deflated and dejected and no longer confident they trode the dark path and turned it inMikemk - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
They weren't lied to, NVIDIA's left hand (marketing, website, ...) just didn't know what the right hand (Engineering) was doingMikemk - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
And also, the 970 technically *does* have 4GB RAMPneumothorax - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Sorry but that excuse doesn't fly with me. There's just a little too much denial in that.Klimax - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
I guess you never had to deal with two separate divisions or groups... (And still no evidence contrary which would prove anything worse then mistake)Pneumothorax - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
So you don't think A SINGLE Nvidia engineer bothered to read any of the reviews? Do you not think a single BMW engineer that has worked on designing a BMW ever reads a car mag?Wouldn't you after spending countless hours on a project would even be a little bit interested in how others are reviewing it?!
And after reading it and notice the error, don't bother to contact the press and get them to correct their "mistake?"
The fix is in folks...
Yojimbo - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
It would take a sort of fetish interest to be reading the for-the-public technical specifications of a card which you helped design. It's sorta like a professional athlete reading his stats in a video game, only without the ego involved that might make some of them actually care. One can look at how people are reacting to the product without reading the boring parts. Just skip to the benchmarks and conclusions. Of course we don't know if it was done on purpose or not, but things do get missed. The biggest reason in my mind to doubt that it was done on purpose is that it seems pretty stupid to do. How many extra 970 sales at the expense of AMD cards do you think there actually were because people didn't know that half an ROP unit was disabled? The benchmarks are the real selling point.