Nvidia boasts of record revenue, data centre growth

Nvidia has announced record revenue for its latest financial year, pointing to the cryptocurrency boom as a reason for its record returns while issuing a sly dig at rival AMD by claiming to have grown to ten times its size.

In its latest financial report, Nvidia showed growth which has its investors extremely pleased. The company's fourth-quarter revenue was up 10 percent quarter-on-quarter and a massive 34 percent year-on-year at $2.911 billion and a healthy profit margin of 61.9 percent, while its full-year revenue stands at a 41 percent increase over the previous year at $9.714 billion with a 59.9 percent profit margin. All told, the company's net income is up 71 percent for the quarter and 83 percent for the year - figures which have seen Nvidia's share price pop 10.22 percent in after-hours trading.

Nvidia's Colette Kress pointed to growth throughout the company's business sectors, with its data centre business more than doubling its revenue and its Tegra system-on-chip (SoC) revenue growing 75 percent - the latter thanks in no small part to the success of Nintendo's Switch console. Kress also confirmed, if confirmation were needed, that the cryptocurrency boom which has seen the average selling price of high-performance graphics processors skyrocket in recent months has been a major help but one on which Nvidia will not be relying: 'Strong demand in the cryptocurrency market exceeded our expectations. We met some of this demand with a dedicated board in our OEM business and some was met with our gaming GPUs,' Kress explained during the earnings call. 'This contributed to lower than historical channel inventory levels of our gaming GPUs throughout the quarter. While the overall contribution of cryptocurrency to our business remains difficult to quantify, we believe it was a higher percentage of revenue than the prior quarter. That said, our main focus remains on our core gaming market, as cryptocurrency trends will likely remain volatile.'

Nvidia president and chief executive Jensen Huang also had a word to say about his company's rival in the graphics market, AMD. 'Obviously, we're ten times larger of a GPU supplier than the competition,' he told attendees at the earnings call when discussing constraints on memory supply that rival AMD had blamed for a lack of graphics card inventory in the market, 'and so we have a lot more suppliers supporting us and a lot more distributors taking approach to market and lot more partners distributing our products all over the world.'

Heading into the first quarter of its 2019 financial year - which takes place in calendar year 2018, confusingly enough - Nvidia projected $2.9 billion in revenue on a healthy 62.7 percent profit margin - suggesting it has no intentions of reducing the retail price of its products any time soon.