Nvidia (NVDA 4.35%) stock has slipped 48% in 2022, and things may be about to get worse for the graphics card specialist amid a multitude of headwinds, ranging from its rich valuation to weakness in consumer spending due to surging inflation.
A further drop in Nvidia's shares cannot be ruled out in the current scenario, especially considering that weak graphics card prices have the potential to wreck its gaming business. After all, gaming was Nvidia's second-largest business in the first quarter of fiscal 2023 (for the three months ended May 1), generating $3.6 billion in revenue and accounting for 43% of its top line.
The segment's revenue shot up 31% year-over-year as consumers continued to upgrade to Nvidia's RTX series cards. However, near-term weakness in demand on account of the Russia-Ukraine war and COVID-related lockdowns in China will hit Nvidia's gaming business to the tune of $400 million in the current quarter. While this is a big red flag for the chipmaker, savvy investors may want to take advantage of the potential dips in Nvidia stock to buy more shares, as the gaming business could supercharge its long-term growth. Here's why.
The video gaming market could boom big-time in the long run
Nvidia's rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 1.36%) held its financial analyst day on June 9, revealing some interesting statistics about the video game industry. According to AMD and other third-party estimates, gamers spent $176 billion on games last year. Of that, 57% was spent on personal computers (PC) and consoles.
This spending is set to head higher -- the number of gamers is expected to hit four billion by the end of the decade, compared to around three billion last year. The addition of new gamers means that the likes of Nvidia and AMD will have the opportunity to sell more of the graphics cards and chips that power gaming hardware, including consoles, PCs, and handheld devices.
Not surprisingly, AMD sees a $37 billion revenue opportunity in the form of semiconductor sales within the video gaming market. Nvidia's video gaming business pulled in $12.4 billion in revenue last fiscal year, which means that the chipmaker has a lot of room for growth in this space. Third-party estimates from Mordor Intelligence also point toward 14% annual growth in sales of gaming GPUs (graphics processing units) for the next five years.
Nvidia is in a terrific position to capitalize on this massive revenue opportunity thanks to its impressive market share in gaming graphics cards. According to Jon Peddie Research, Nvidia controlled 78% of the discrete GPU market in the first quarter of 2022. AMD ranked second with a 17% market share. Nvidia seems on track to maintain its dominance of this market with a new generation of GPUs that are set to be launched later this year. More importantly, the company has reportedly pulled the strings to ensure that it has enough chips to make its next-generation cards and grab a significant chunk of sales.
All this indicates that Nvidia's gaming business should be able to recover from the near-term headwinds that it is facing and help the company clock healthy long-term growth. However, there is another emerging catalyst that could give Nvidia's gaming business a solid boost.
Cloud gaming could accelerate Nvidia's gaming growth
Nvidia is focusing big-time on its cloud gaming service GeForce Now. On its May earnings conference call, CFO Colette Kress said that the company added more than 100 games to its GeForce Now gaming library last quarter. Nvidia now has 1,300 games on offer on GeForce Now, and the service had 15 million users, as the company pointed out in its March investor day presentation.
The cloud gaming market is expected to generate nearly $41 billion in revenue by 2029, compared to $1.7 billion in 2021, according to a third-party estimate. That's not surprising, as cloud gaming allows gamers to stream resource-hungry games to their devices.
The games are run in remote data centers and delivered to users via the internet. The reason why cloud gaming is becoming popular is that it allows gamers to play popular games without having to invest in expensive hardware -- they only have to purchase monthly subscriptions. Nvidia has already cornered a nice chunk of this emerging opportunity. The cloud gaming business generated $1 billion in revenue for the company last fiscal year, while graphics card sales produced $11.4 billion in revenue.
So Nvidia already has more than half of the revenue share of the cloud gaming market, which places the company in a solid position to capitalize on this emerging opportunity.
There are robust reasons why Nvidia's gaming business could accelerate impressively in the long run. That's why savvy investors should consider taking advantage of any further weaknesses in Nvidia stock in the near term to buy its shares. The stock is trading at 40 times earnings, which makes it expensive compared to the Nasdaq-100's multiple of 25. But any dip in Nvidia stock would open a nice opportunity for investors to add this solid video gaming play to their portfolios at more attractive levels.
