Posted on Monday, January 28 2019 @ 17:51 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
NVIDIA share are down 14.48 percent at press time due to a Q4 earnings guidance cut. The graphics chip designer expects fourth quarter revenue to come in at just $2.2 billion, a steep decline versus the previous guidance of $2.70 billion. NVIDIA blames lackluster gaming and datacenter sales for its worse-than-expected sales. Additonally, NVIDIA also expects non-GAAP gross margin will be just 56.0 percent, plus or minus 100bps, down from previous guidance of 62.5 percent, plus or minus 50bps.
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today updated its financial guidance for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2019, reflecting weaker than forecasted sales of its Gaming and Datacenter platforms.
In Gaming, NVIDIA’s previous fourth-quarter guidance had embedded a sequential decline due to excess mid-range channel inventory following the crypto-currency boom. The reduction in that inventory and its impact on the business have proceeded largely inline with management’s expectations. However, deteriorating macroeconomic conditions, particularly in China, impacted consumer demand for NVIDIA gaming GPUs. In addition, sales of certain high-end GPUs using NVIDIA’s new Turing™ architecture were lower than expected. These products deliver a revolutionary leap in performance and innovation with real-time ray tracing and AI, but some customers may have delayed their purchase while waiting for lower price points and further demonstrations of RTX technology in actual games.
In Datacenter, revenue also came in short of expectations. A number of deals in the company’s forecast did not close in the last month of the quarter as customers shifted to a more cautious approach. Despite these near-term headwinds, NVIDIA has a large and expanding addressable market opportunity in AI and high performance computing, and the company believes its competitive position is intact.
“Q4 was an extraordinary, unusually turbulent, and disappointing quarter,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Looking forward, we are confident in our strategies and growth drivers.
“The foundation of our business is strong and more evident than ever – the accelerated computing model NVIDIA pioneered is the best path forward to serve the world’s insatiable computing needs. The markets we are creating – gaming, design, HPC, AI and autonomous vehicles – are important, growing and will be very large. We have excellent strategic positions in all of them,” he said.
NVIDIA expects its GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin to be impacted by approximately $120 million in charges for excess DRAM and other components associated with the updated revenue guidance and current market conditions.
The company will provide Q4 fiscal 2019 financial results and Q1 fiscal 2020 guidance on its earnings call scheduled for Feb. 14.
