Nvidia releases financial results for Q4 and 2019

Nvidia has announced its financial results for Q4 and the past fiscal year, demonstrating a strong final quarter after a not so strong year. 

It's a trend that's been seen with other hardware firms with the final quarter making a massive difference to many companies' achievements. In the case of Nvidia, it announced revenue for the fourth quarter of $3.11 billion, up 3 percent from the $3.01 billion of the previous quarter. More remarkably, that's a 41 percent improvement over the same quarter a year earlier. It also meant a profit of $950 million. 

In comparison, the full fiscal year came in at a revenue of $10.92 billion which was down 7 percent from a year earlier's total of $11.72 billion. 

Despite that, it's Q4 that Nvidia has reason to be proud of. Besides that substantial revenue boost, it also saw net income improvements of 68 percent compared to the same quarter a year earlier. It's a promising end to a year that Nvidia will still have wished went slightly better. 

To break it down, gaming accounted for $1.49 billion in revenue in Q4 which is a 56 percent year on year improvement. There's been strong growth too for the datacenter segment with $968 million of revenue in Q4 being a 43 percent improvement on a year earlier. Nvidia has suggested that's down to a surge in demand for AI hardware as well as the fact that such spending had plateaued for a time last year. 

It's worth noting though that the past fiscal year wasn't as strong as the previous year. Nvidia's revenue was down 7 percent from the previous year with net income falling by 32 percent. 

Despite that, Nvidia is cautiously optimistic about the coming financial year. Pointing out that it's difficult to estimate the effect of the coronavirus, Nvidia has reduced its revenue outlook for the first quarter by $100 million to account for it, which could be quite conservative considering China accounts for about 30 percent of its gaming sales. Despite that, Nvidia expects revenue to be around $3 billion with a gross margin of 65 percent. 

Nvidia also used the time to remind us all of what it's achieved in the past year, including more coverage for ray tracing, GeForce Now, more gaming laptops, and advancements within data centres and supercomputers. It may not have been the brightest of years ultimately for Nvidia, but it's safe to say it's doing just fine.