NVIDIA Corporation F4Q10 (Qtr End 01/30/10) Earnings Call Transcript

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NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA)

F4Q10 (Qtr End 01/30/10) Earnings Call Transcript

February 17, 2010 5:00 pm ET

Executives

Michael Hara – SVP, IR and Communications

David White – EVP and CFO

Jen-Hsun Huang – Co-Founder, President and CEO

Analysts

Alex Gauna – JMP Securities

Suji DeSilva – Kaufman Brothers

Dan Morris – Oppenheimer & Co.

Craig Berger – FBR Capital

Daniel Berenbaum – Auriga USA

Glen Yeung – Citigroup

James Schneider – Goldman Sachs

Doug Freedman – Broadpoint AmTech

Nicholas Aberle – Caris & Company

Arnab Chanda – Roth Capital Partners

Presentation

Michael Hara

(Call Starts Abruptly) Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today’s call is being webcast live on NVIDIA's Investor Relations website and is also being recorded. A replay of the conference call will be available via telephone until February 24, 2010 and the webcast will be available for replay until our conference call to discuss our financial results for our fiscal quarter of fiscal 2011.

The content of today’s conference call is NVIDIA's property and cannot be reproduced or transcribed without our prior written consent.

During the course of this call, we may make forward-looking statements based on current expectations. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties and our actual results may differ materially. For a discussion of factors that could affect our future finance results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today’s earnings release, our Form 10-Q for the fiscal period ended October 25, 2009, and the reports on Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

All of our statements are made as of today, February 17, 2010, based on information available to us today and except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements. Unless otherwise noted, all references to research market and market share numbers throughout the call come from Mercury Research or John Petty Research.

During this call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in our financial release, which was posted on our website.

One final note; we have announced the date of our Financial Analyst Day, which is set for April 7.

With that, let us begin.

GPU demand increased throughout the quarter, with GeForce and Quadro revenues growing to combined 22% quarter on quarter, and 97% over the same quarter a year ago. There were supply constraints from the beginning to the end of the quarter, and I expect the condition to persist. We continue to invest to drive market growth and share gain. NVIDIA innovates around the basic PC platform to create differentiated solutions and experiences, and in GeForce, gives the PC great graphics for video games and multimedia; Quadro transforms the PC into a workstation for designers; adding Tesla turns a PC server into a supercomputer; ION brings snappy graphics and multimedia to netbooks; and Tegra is fuelling the mobile computing revolution.

Each of our product lines enable a rich experience through architecture and an ever-growing composition of software. Momentum for Tesla and CUDA continues at a strong pace ahead of the new Tesla 20. In November, CSIRO, Australia's premier supercomputer center officially opened the GPU supercomputing cluster. Researchers in Australia will use GPUs to address emerging scientific challenges in astronomy, medical imaging, and water resource management. The Tesla group also had its biggest show of the year this quarter at Supercomputing ’09. The most significant news of Supercomputing ’09 was the GPU cluster in Japan that won the prestigious Gordon Bell Award.

In the category of price performance, a team led by Tsuyoshi Hamada of Nagasaki University, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Bristol and Riken conducted simulations used to study the evolution of star clusters with unprecedented efficiency. Supercomputing ’09 was not a GPU conference, yet 12% of the papers presented and half of the posters used GPUs. 75 booths, which is one out of four, featured CUDA, compared to 33 booths and one booth at SC08 and SC07 respectively. HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice awards were presented at the conference, and NVIDIA received an unprecedented five awards.

There are now approximately 3500 CUDA citations on Google Scholar, nearly 1000 CUDA videos on YouTube, and 1000 applications featured on CUDA Zone. Over 300 universities now teach CUDA, up from 40 just 18 months ago. That is a new University teaching CUDA every other day.

For notebook PCs, users faced an impossible choice between performance and battery life. GPUs give the PC great graphics and snappiness, but consume more power. That is why we have invented Optimus, a powerful combination of software and hardware innovation that provides the performance of discrete graphics, while still delivering great battery life. Unlike earlier attempts at hybrid solutions, Optimus is seamless and transparent to the user. Notebook check reported “We are excited about Optimus, switchable graphics solutions will finally grow up, and offer to end users in all laptop classes distinct advantages”. Engadget stated “We have always thought switchable graphics made a lot of sense on laptops. NVIDIA’s new Optimus technology looks like it is going to bring it to the mainstream in a serious way”. Seven models are available now, and we expect more than 50 systems will be available by summer. Optimus is unprecedented and unique to NVIDIA. We believe Optimus has the potential to expand the overall footprint for discrete GPUs by increasing the GPU attach rate for the notebook segment.

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