Nvidia's Fourth Quarter Earnings Down 60%

Posted 02/11/2009 at 8:27am | by Paul Lilly

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What a difference a year makes. Nvidia yesterday reported a loss of nearly $148 million, or 27 cents per share, for the fiscal fourth quarter. A year prior Nvidia reported a profit of $257 million, or 42 cents per share.

Said Nvidia's ever-candid CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, "November fell off a cliff." Huang was referring to the dramatic drop in demand, which led the company to post revenue of $481.1 million, down 60 percent from the $1.2 billion it reported for the fourth quarter a year prior.

A rebound might not be on the immediate horizon for Nvidia, either. Market research firm iSuppli predicts that shipments of desktop PCs will continue to sag in 2009, with shipments expected to fall 5.5 percent to 146.2 million units. This is important because many high-end videocards end up in those PCs.

Despite the depressing sales numbers, we can't help but think it could have been worse for Nvidia. The graphics chip maker scored a major win by convincing Apple to use its GPUs in the recently refreshed MacBook line, and going forward, the company's newly released GTX 285 and 295 videocards have put the company on more even ground with ATI's 4870 and 4870 X2 parts.

Image Credit: Nvidia