Nvidia Revenue Drops 60 Percent in Q4

Nvidia late yesterday reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 and the fiscal year ended January 25, 2009.

As with the rest of the computer chip industry, Nvidia saw a significant decrease in business in the fourth quarter. It reported revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 was $481.1 million, which represents a decrease of 60 percent from the $1.2 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008. Nvidia saw a net loss of $147.7 million, or $0.27 per share.

Without a doubt the dismal fourth quarter put a big dent in the overall results for the year. For the twelve months ended January 25, 2009, revenue was $3.4 billion compared to $4.1 billion for the twelve months ended January 27, 2008, resulting in a decrease of 16 percent. Net loss for the fiscal year was $30.0 million, or $0.05 per share, a disappointing follow up to the net income of $797.6 million, or $1.31 per diluted share, from the year before.

Like every other company out there in Silicon Valley, Nvidia is also looking at ways to reduce costs. Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, confirms the action, saying, “The environment is clearly difficult and uncertain. Our first priority is to set an operating expense level that balances cash conservation while allowing us to continue to invest in initiatives that are of great importance to the market and in which we believe we have industry leadership. We have initiatives in all areas to reduce operating expenses.”

Huang did try to highlight the positive, however, and added, "Although fiscal 2009 was extremely difficult, it was one of our best years of innovation. We made many important advances in graphics processing with PhysX and 3D Vision, GPU computing with CUDA and Tesla, and mobile computing with ION and Tegra. I am pleased with the excellent achievements we made in each of these important areas.”

Nvidia’s fourth quarter dip falls exactly in line with the overall industry trend. Late last month, Jon Peddie Research found that GPU shipments were way down regardless of which vendor. The trend carried over the CPUs as well, which also saw a similar drop.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
  • bf2gameplaya
    I'm glad nVidia is still around as who else is in the position to give us ray tracing as the next big thing - Intel? AMD? Not a chance.
    Reply
  • Dmerc
    Intel will give us ray tracing very easily. Do a search for Quake 3 raytraced and you will be surprised on which machine it is running. An Intel.
    Reply
  • A Stoner
    Duh, Henry Paulson and George Bush both stood up in the middle of the theater and screamed fire. Told the world that calamity was upon us. Told every worker that they could expect to be unemployed soon. Told every manufacturer and sales business that they would not be able to get loans. Told the world to basically hunker down and not spend their money, because next week they may not make any new money, a crisis is upon us. So businesses stopped buying computers, consumers stopped upgrading graphics cards and other things. Instead of going further into debt buying American's actually paid off large portions of their credit card debts. I for one know a joke of a scare when i see one. I do not believe in man made global warming, and I do not believe there is a financial crisis that is other than the one made up by Paulson and friends to force feed us pathetic citizens the idea that we have to give more to the government than we already do. I bought a new card, GTX 285 the week it launched $349.99 I think it was. I also got myself 8GB of ram, I think $125 for (2) 2GBx2 DDR2 1066. Later on I will be buying a new CPU cooler. Later this year I will build an HTPC after I get more educated on what I need to make it work. In all likelyhood that will mean either a discrete GPU from nVidia, or a motherboard from nVidia. I hope more Americans start to see through the haze created by Paulson and freinds soon, so that the USA economy can recover very quickly. Noting that in every other recession the world has known productivity has always fallen before unemployment and large layoff began. This recession saw unemployment rise shortly after Paulson's scream in the theater and large layoffs in anticipation of falling productivity. I have every confidence that nVidia will weather the storm and once the fog clears will be in a strong position in the future.
    Reply
  • falchard
    AMD GPU is already possible to Raytrace and Global Illumination. Its been able to since the HD3800 cards. There is even a game developed in OGRE that has real-time raytracing in it.
    Reply
  • Dmerc
    I think when Intel's GPU comes out it will be much easier to program ray tracing games.I am just wondering if it will be able to beat Nvidia and ATI cards.
    Reply
  • roofus
    60% down from the same Q year before but their marketshare increased. i guess people don't buy graphics cards with their unemployment checks.
    Reply
  • bf2gameplaya
    DmercIntel will give us ray tracing very easily. Do a search for Quake 3 raytraced and you will be surprised on which machine it is running. An Intel.
    I'm sorry, over 1 FPS ray-tracing performance was assumed. I can ray-trace a scene by hand in the same amount of time.

    I'm not interested in going back to the dark days of under-performance.
    Reply
  • Trialsking
    A StonerDuh, Henry Paulson and George Bush both stood up in the middle of the theater and screamed fire. Told the world that calamity was upon us. Told every worker that they could expect to be unemployed soon. Told every manufacturer and sales business that they would not be able to get loans. Told the world to basically hunker down and not spend their money, because next week they may not make any new money, a crisis is upon us. So businesses stopped buying computers, consumers stopped upgrading graphics cards and other things. Instead of going further into debt buying American's actually paid off large portions of their credit card debts. I for one know a joke of a scare when i see one. I do not believe in man made global warming, and I do not believe there is a financial crisis that is other than the one made up by Paulson and friends to force feed us pathetic citizens the idea that we have to give more to the government than we already do. I bought a new card, GTX 285 the week it launched $349.99 I think it was. I also got myself 8GB of ram, I think $125 for (2) 2GBx2 DDR2 1066. Later on I will be buying a new CPU cooler. Later this year I will build an HTPC after I get more educated on what I need to make it work. In all likelyhood that will mean either a discrete GPU from nVidia, or a motherboard from nVidia. I hope more Americans start to see through the haze created by Paulson and freinds soon, so that the USA economy can recover very quickly. Noting that in every other recession the world has known productivity has always fallen before unemployment and large layoff began. This recession saw unemployment rise shortly after Paulson's scream in the theater and large layoffs in anticipation of falling productivity. I have every confidence that nVidia will weather the storm and once the fog clears will be in a strong position in the future.
    Looking at your screen name, I assume you are not a home owner and know nothing about the collapse of the homing makert which caused everything else. So I guess the fact that homes here in So Cal have fallen 25% in last 2 years is just Bush and Paulson yelling fire. If only the 2 million people who lost their jobs in the last 3 months would just pay off their debt and buy nVidia, the US economy woyld recover. Time to grow up stoner and move out of your parent's house.
    Reply
  • tayb
    A StonerDuh, Henry Paulson and George Bush both stood up in the middle of the theater and screamed fire. Told the world that calamity was upon us. Told every worker that they could expect to be unemployed soon. Told every manufacturer and sales business that they would not be able to get loans. Told the world to basically hunker down and not spend their money, because next week they may not make any new money, a crisis is upon us. So businesses stopped buying computers, consumers stopped upgrading graphics cards and other things. Instead of going further into debt buying American's actually paid off large portions of their credit card debts. I for one know a joke of a scare when i see one. I do not believe in man made global warming, and I do not believe there is a financial crisis that is other than the one made up by Paulson and friends to force feed us pathetic citizens the idea that we have to give more to the government than we already do. I bought a new card, GTX 285 the week it launched $349.99 I think it was. I also got myself 8GB of ram, I think $125 for (2) 2GBx2 DDR2 1066. Later on I will be buying a new CPU cooler. Later this year I will build an HTPC after I get more educated on what I need to make it work. In all likelyhood that will mean either a discrete GPU from nVidia, or a motherboard from nVidia. I hope more Americans start to see through the haze created by Paulson and freinds soon, so that the USA economy can recover very quickly. Noting that in every other recession the world has known productivity has always fallen before unemployment and large layoff began. This recession saw unemployment rise shortly after Paulson's scream in the theater and large layoffs in anticipation of falling productivity. I have every confidence that nVidia will weather the storm and once the fog clears will be in a strong position in the future.
    You obviously have no idea about what is going on in the United States. There have been more job losses in the past 15 months than there has been since the great depression. If the pace keeps picking up like it has been we might see unemployment reach 15%. Let's see your conspiracy theory when 50,000,000 Americans no longer have a source of income, the government can't handle the unemployed checks any longer, and they lose their cars and their homes.

    You'll see some real civil unrest of things don't turn around, and turn around quickly.
    Reply
  • A Stoner
    I know all about the home market problems, I have been watching from outside since 2001.
    Exactly TWO areas are HARD hit, California is one. The rest of the country is mildly impacted. Most banks are perfectly liquid and are lending money just fine. Only the large banks with huge capital investments in retardedly murky paper are in trouble. I am still getting credit card offers, 0% transfers. Does not seem to be a dry market for lending. I do not own a home, I have been looking to buy one since around 2001. In 2001 when I was in California prices had gone up in the neighborhood I was looking something like 22% the previous year, I though, bah, it is a fluke and prices will go down, by 2003 I was never going to be able to buy a house. The fact is that if you bought a house in 2003 through 2008 in the hot markets, you are a retard and your money would have ended up being wasted someplace else anyways. Now that prices have come back down to values that are somewhat related to the incomes of jobs available in the neighborhood it is a CRISIS? How much of our economy is based on housing anyways? 10%? How much of our housing actually has a mortgage on it? 10%? How many of those mortgages are in crisis? 10%? That makes up .1% of our economy. Quite the crisis we have there. Do I feel sorry for anyone losing their home that bought between 2003 and 2008? Hell no I do not, many of them thought they would flip that home in 6 months and make a hundred grand in the process. Others thought that house prices would keep going up and they would refinance next year and use the current time to refinance to buy a new SUV, family vacation or some other LUXURY they otherwise could not afford, what ever thier reasoning for buying a house in a hyperinflated market was the only thing it accomplished was making the problem far worse when the bubble did burst. They got their luxury, now they lost their home, I do not care. My personal bank went under, WAMU, it got taken up by another bank, want to know how it affected me? In two months I will have to change my login from one website to another website. Again, WHO CARES, I do not. The fact is that there is turmoil in the markets, but it is not a CRISIS unless you are the last retard holding onto property or the paper for property that was inflated 200% over its real market value, and in that case it is not MY crisis, it is YOURS. The internet bubble happened, 9/11 happened, Watergate, Oil Embargo, Cuban Missile, WWII and in every instance the American people weathered the storm, picked up where they left off and came back in a year or two better off than they were before. In almost all these instances the governments only role was to get out of the way, sometimes lowering taxes, which in my books is getting out of the way. The ONE time in which American's did not recover was when they allowed Washington to get between them and prosperity, it is called the Great Depression, which was Great because government meddled in every part of the economy. They thought a couple supposedly great minds could run an economy the Size of America better than 150,000,000 rubes out in the sticks could. They protected us from global trade, that did wonders for our exporting industries as well as any industry that needed imports from other countries which retaliated with protectionism back at us. They protected workers from losing jobs while at the same time forcing employers to overpay for work, that did wonders for employment, no wait, actually it made any prospective employer decide to forget about hiring someone, because they may never be able to get rid of them. While I am certain that what Obama and the rest of Congress is doing will only do HARM to our nation's economy, I beleive that Americans will pick up, move on and make the best of what is left and prosper in the future, just maybe not as much as we might have had government stood aside and allowed Americans to fix the mistakes the government forced upon them. As it stands, we will save a couple trillion dollars in lost revenues if the rescue plan works, and our children will be forced to pay interest over thier lifetimes that will amount to tens of trillions on that newly created debt, and that is if America is able to keep from defaulting on any loans and loses is AAA credit rating. If it loses it's AAA credit rating, make those tens of trillions and start adding 0's as interest rates go from mid single digits to low double digits. Another instance where that same problem may arise is if the government pumping money into the economy in such a huge fasion may cause inflation as more dollars chase fewer assets, then we have inflation and inflation means no one lends money cheap, so again interest rates jump. Just because my last name is Stoner, does not mean I am a drug using loser, you DOPE.
    Reply