NVIDIA Beats Street For Q4 Earnings, Issues Upside Q1 Guidance On Growth Across All Market Platforms

NVIDIA hit it out of the park with its fourth quarter earnings, that the company reported this afternoon. The silicon valley graphics and system-on-a-chip titan outpaced last year’s already strong performance with revenue of $1.4 billion (a 12 percent increase from the same quarter a year ago). Net income came in at $297 million, or 35 cents per share. NVDA's full fiscal year 2016 was reported at $5.01 billion, which was a 7 percent increase over fiscal 2015.

The company’s quarterly performance far outpaced analysts’ expectations and NVIDIA was rewarded with a 7 percent share boost in after hours trading. Looking ahead to fiscal Q1 2017, NVIDA is expecting revenue of $1.26 billion and capital expenditure ranging from $35 million to $45 million. NVIDIA will also return roughly $1 billion to its shareholders via cash dividends and share repurchases during fiscal 2017.

NVIDIA can chalk up its strong financial performance to balanced growth across all its major market platforms. However, the company saw an especially noteworthy uptick in interest for its deep learning products. "NVIDIA is at the center of four exciting growth opportunities -- PC gaming, VR, deep learning, and self-driving cars,” wrote NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. “We are especially excited about deep learning, a breakthrough in artificial intelligence algorithms that takes advantage of our GPU's ability to process data simultaneously...

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang

“We are working with thousands of companies that are applying the power of deep learning in fields ranging from life sciences and financial services to the Internet of Things.”

Over the past few months, NVIDIA has introduced a number of new products that highlight its interest in future growth markets. In November, it revealed its Jetson TX1, which brings “supercomputer” performance to the red hot aerial drone and automotive markets. And in early January at CES, Jen-Hsun pulled the wraps off the Drive PX 2 automotive platform which uses Tegra processors combined with next generation NVIDIA Pascal-based GPUs to serve as the nerve center for the next generation of autonomous vehicles. NVIDIA claims that the Drive PX 2 is the equivalent of having "150 MacBook Pros in the trunk of your car."

As for gaming enthusiasts, we’re all awaiting the arrival of NVIDIA’s desktop-class Pascal GPUs which will be built on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process and employ up to 16GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) that is likely to be sourced from Samsung. Professional-grade Pascal-based Quadro cards are expected to support up to 32GB of HBM2 goodness