2006: a very good year for NVIDIA

Nvidia has reported great financial results for fourth quarter ended January 28 and Fiscal Year 2007.

The last three months were really good with sales of $878.9 million almost up 39% compared to the same quarter last year. Even better, profits for the same period increased from $97.4 million to $163.5 million (+68%).
For the fiscal year, sales jumped 29% to $3.07 billion from $2.38 billion last year. Net profits reached $448.8 and increased 49% Year-Over-Year.

Nvidia explains these good performances by the improvement of gross margins but also and mostly by conjoint sales of laptop computers (+120% over a year!) and the leadership for this market (58% shares). Two other product lines have also contributed to this success, the nForce chipsets with 89% revenue improvement year-over-year and the Quadro (high profit professional graphic cards) with 24% sales improvements for the same period.

These figures confirm published by Jon Peddie Research regarding market shares in terms of units sold. With such results and the technological advances in DirectX 10 GPUs, Nvidia’s current position is very comfortable. On the longer term, however, the company will have to face the considerable economies of scale that ATI could beneficiate if the acquisition by AMD creates substantial R&D synergies.