Nvidia posted higher second-quarter earnings and gave a forecast for current-quarter revenues that exceeded what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street predicted.
This was surprising given that some analysts were worried that PC shipments were flat in the June quarter.
Nvidia’s graphics chips for PCs make up most of its business but what appears to have saved the company’s bottom line was that it has been selling to car makers and data centres.
In the second quarter, revenue from Tegra chips for automobiles and mobile devices jumped 200 percent to $159 million.
After struggling to compete against larger chipmakers like Qualcomm in smartphones and tablets, Nvidia has increased its focus on using its Tegra chips to power entertainment and navigation systems in cars made by companies including Volkswagen’s Audi, BMW and Tesla.
Nvidia in July launched its own tablet aimed at game enthusiasts, called Shield, with Tegra chips and other high-end components. This went against the industry trend toward commoditized, inexpensive devices.
Nvidia has been doing well in the cloud by flogging its chips to IBM, Dell and HP as part of their datacentre product range.
Predictions are that Nvidia’s GRID graphics technology for data centres will also do well after it has been tested by other potential enterprise customers.
Nvidia reported second-quarter revenue of $1.1 billion, up 13 percent from the year-ago quarter as it expanded its focus on cars and cloud-computing.
For the current quarter, Nvidia said it expects revenue of $1.2 billion, plus or minus 2 percent. Analysts on average expected second-quarter revenue of $1.1 billion and third-quarter revenue of $1.16 billion.
Nvidia’s net income in the second quarter, which ended on July 27, added up to $128 million or compared with $96 million in the year-ago quarter.
