Nvidia is experiencing the same problems in the graphics card market as everybody else — improved demand pushed by cryptocurrency miners — and the provider is carrying a two-pronged method of tackling the matter, Nvidia executives said today during a sales call with shareholders.
For the period ending Jan. 28, 2018, the fourth quarter of Nvidia’s 2018 financial year, the company reported record revenue of $2.91 billion. That included $2.46 billion from Nvidia’s GPU business, a massive increase of 33 percentage which was led by increase in the gaming and data center markets. Nvidia cited “solid growth” because of its Pascal-based GeForce gaming GPUs that was driven by “new matches, holiday-season need, iCafe updates, esports and cryptocurrency mining”
“Strong demand in the cryptocurrency market exceeded our expectations,” said Colette Kress, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Nvidia, during the earnings call. Kress added that “cryptocurrency accounted for a higher percentage of revenue than the previous quarter,” although she said the increase is “difficult to quantify.”
Nvidia is not counting on this company, however. “Our main focus remains on our core market, as cryptocurrency will likely remain volatile,” said Kress, including Nvidia expects earnings in the cryptocurrency section to be level for the first quarter of its own 2019 year. And since miners are still grabbing up GPUs, players continue being frustrated in their inability to locate fairly priced graphics cards.
“There’s a fairly sizable pent-up demand going into this quarter,” said Nvidia CEO and president Jensen Huang, referring to the market for gaming graphics cards. “The demand is great, and it’s very likely the demand will remain great as we look through this quarter.”
Huang noted that merchants would be those setting costs for GPUs amid the continuing shortage, also affirmed that the business is asking retailers to concentrate on players rather than miners.
“We’re working really hard to get GPUs out into the marketplace for the gamers,” said Huang. “And we’re doing everything we can to advise e-tailers and system builders to serve the gamers.” Retailers like Micro Center are already taking odd measures, such as offering package pricing for clients purchasing parts for a complete PC construct.
For its own part, Nvidia — for example its main competition, AMD — will be making an attempt to improve supply and fulfill the requirement. Huang commended the organization’s providers, however, sidestepped a question inquiring whether Nvidia’s generation procedure was hamstrung with shortages of specific elements. (AMD is competing with shortages at both GDDR5 along with HBM2 memory, business CEO and president Dr. Lisa Su stated a week.)
“We’re doing everything we can, but I think the most important thing is, we just got to catch up with supply,” said Huang. “We’re just constrained.”
