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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iamlilysdad - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
Curious about the source of your information.grahaman27 - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
Testbug00,They have sold zero, mostly because they are not seeking yet. The k1 is at least a year ahead of the competition in GPU performancs and performance per watt. They will start licensing with next years maxwell architecture, which will only have better performance and crazy good perf per watt. Its the only mobile GPU that supports full opengl 4.4 and all other nvidia gaming optimizations.
Why would anyone not want that?
testbug00 - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
Because:1. You have to give Nvidia your roadmaps and a look into your tech
2. Apple clearly wants to make a fully custom chip, Nvidia likely does not want to allow licenses to change how the architecture works. This is based off of how NVidia's management acts. __THIS COULD BE WRONG__
3. No proof that Nvidia's GPU is best in perf/watt (Except what Nvidia says...) and, while it might have beaten everything when it was announced, so did Tegra 2 (which ended up not being the fastest or best perf/watt) as did Tegra 3 (See tegra 2) and also Tegra 4 did ( see tegra 2/3). Nvidia has a history of hyping its products in mobile space only for them to be average at best (Although, the K1 should be above average)
4. Kepler would only work on 28nm node. Why licenses a 28nm tech when you are working on 20nm? Gains from shrinking it could easily be obtained by licensing a PowerVR design much like they did with ARM... AKA, licensing the architecture, and designing a fully custom GPU.
grahaman27 - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
A)OK, if youre not going to listen, then please don't reply. Kepler is the most efficient architecture in mobile, but nvidia WILL NOT BE LICENSING until they unvail their maxwell mobile architecture next year.B)Apple uses powervr by imagination right now, and they have no plans of changing that, thats not custom.
C) Kepler is not based on one lithography. There are two versions of the tegra k1, one which is 28nm, the other(Denver) has not yet been determined. But it doesn't matter, the maxwell architecture will be independent from the process used, it would work on 3nm chips if a third party company wanted to.
4) go home you're drunk.
testbug00 - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
A. You have proof? NVidia has not managed to make a system that wins in perf/watt in mobile in REAL DEVICES compared to Qualcomm, Apple, and a few others. When NVidia's K1 gets into a phone, and we can test the power/pref talk to me. Until than, I must go by the fact that Tegra, Tegra 2, Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 were all uncompetitive on perf/watt and say that K1 is not competitive either.2. They can do custom PowerVR the same way they do Custom ARM... It is not that complicated.
3. Oh? Those me any roadmap suggesting a 20nm Kepler is coming? Don't you think JHH would have mentioned "Nvidia has the first 20nm SoC taped out for mobile chips" when he presented Tegra K1 if he could have? JHH is GREAT at seizing PR moments (And always wants to have the FASTEST chip)
ams23 - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
If Apple wants to create their own fully custom GPU's that reach beyond simply phones and small tablets, they will likely need to turn to NVIDIA in order to license NVIDIA's world-leading GPU patent and IP portfolio.Kepler and Maxwell GPU power efficiency has been proven time and time again. The top 10 most green supercomputers in the world are powered by Kepler GPU's. The most power efficient high end gaming computers in the world are powered by Kepler GPU's. The most power efficient gaming laptops in the world are powered by Kepler (and now Maxwell) GPU's. And Tegra K1's GPU on 28nm HPM is ~ 1.5x more power efficient than the very best ultra mobile GPU's available today. Previously generation Tegra GPU's are so much different in architecture and design that there is really no comparison.
testbug00 - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
No, not really. Most of Nvidia's patents don't have anything to do with mobile GPUs.End of story. Besides, until we can see an independent review test K1, we cannot say it is better.
Tegra 1, 2, 3 and 4 all lost in perf/watt. Nvidia all said they were amazing, the best chips, they beat all the competitors as date they were announced. Come launch, they did not beat competing chips. I hope Tegra K1 is different, but, putting hope in Nvidia's Tegra division is like Hoping VIA becomes the worlds largest x86 manufacturer.
Ghost0420 - Wednesday, May 28, 2014 - link
28nm and 20nm TSMC are pretty much same node, except shrunk down...so any issues seen in 28nm will be worse on 20nm...so shrinking Kepler to 20nm, is not a huge issue since it's mostly a shrink in node...same materials used. Why would Kepler NOT work with 20nm? Maxwell is on 28nm, but i'm sure it'll go 20nm by sometime next year...Morawka - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
Tegra K1 is <5W, Its even in Anand's own articles. He explains exactly how they got there. Your speculation about license stipulation is pure guess work, you shouldn't have even used that in your argument.They dont have to share their roadmap or chip plans. The only time a company would want to do that, is if they wanted guidance on how to make their SoC. This is the same thing ARM does. You can license the IP, and make a chip yourself, or you can license and work with our engineers to optimize your SoC
Morawka - Friday, May 9, 2014 - link
Brian Klug Talking Tegra K1 Power: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7622/nvidia-tegra-k1...