Nvidia just reported fourth-quarter and full-year earnings, and no exact rosy – at least compared to the height of the pandemic. Last year, Nvidia had record quarterly revenue of $7.64 billion, including $3 billion in net income. For Q4 of its fiscal 2023, the company predicted it would only see $6 billion in quarterly revenue in today’s earnings results, and that’s just where it landed: $6.05 billion in revenue, down 21 percent, of which $1.4 billion the profit, down. 53 percent. For the full year, it totaled $26.92 billion, roughly the same as last year, although revenue was down 55 percent.
Remember: in 2021, $5 billion in revenue a quarter a new Nvidia record. Now this is the status quo: the company says it expects to see $6.5 billion in the next quarter, too.
Nvidia’s data center and automotive businesses were on a roll this quarter, with record revenue for automotive of $294 million; the sinking of most of Nvidia’s graphics business, especially gaming, which each fell by 46 percent. That game reduction includes “lower shipping SOCs for game consoles,” which is code for “Nintendo isn’t selling as many Switch anymore” — it’s the only game console that uses an Nvidia chip .
Like other chipmakers, Nvidia is shipping fewer GPUs to retailers and partners instead of slashing prices. The polite phrase is “down selling partners to help align channel inventory levels with current demand expectations.” Nvidia also blamed the unrest in China on covid and other issues.
We are waiting to see if Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is optimistic that Nvidia can see a similar recovery – so far, he has only stated that gaming is improving. He is also bullish about data center growth due to the rise of large-scale language models (LLM) used to train AI systems such as ChatGPT and Bing, which often run on GPU hardware from Nvidia.
Moving forward … we will add more to this story if there are interesting responses to the call.