NVIDIA (NVDA 1.84%) reported strong results following market close on Wednesday. The company turned in $1.25 billion in sales, reportedly beating estimates by $50 million, and generated GAAP earnings per share of $0.35, ahead of consensus of $0.29 (according to Yahoo! Finance data). The company also guided to $1.16 billion in sales (give or take 2%), which edged slightly past analyst consensus of $1.15 billion. On a GAAP basis, NVIDIA's gross profit margins came in at 55.9% in the most recent quarter, and the company guided to 56.2% gross profit margins for the coming quarter.
Let's take a closer look at what look like solid business results.
GPU sales continue to be robust
The company's major profit driver, its stand-alone graphics processing unit or GPU business, saw revenues grow 13% year over year. According to the CFO commentary, revenue from gaming-focused graphics chips grew 38% year over year, with the company citing "continued strength in PC gaming." The company also highlighted that sales of graphics chips into gaming notebooks "continued to perform well above year-ago levels."
The company also claims that sales of its Tesla GPUs for GPU-accelerated workloads "increased strongly" as a result of "large project wins with cloud service providers." The company also states in the CFO commentary that its workstation-oriented Quadro GPU revenue "remained healthy," although CEO Jen-Hsun Huang clarified on the earnings call that this business was "relatively flattish."
For the full year, NVIDIA saw its total GPU revenue increase 11%.
Tegra processor up for the year, but down for the quarter
After a nice rebound year over year in the company's Tegra processor business over the last several quarters, revenue from this segment this quarter was down 15% year over year. This, according to CFO Collette Kress on the earnings call, was because "smartphone and tablet designs [powered by Tegra] reached the end of their product life cycle."
On a full year-basis, NVIDIA saw Tegra processor revenue up 45% from $398 million to $579 million.
As far as what the next year holds for Tegra, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang claimed that the company's strategy for Tegra "is the focus on automotive [and] gaming." Interestingly, he also said that, "wherever opportunities arise in OEMs, we surely will entertain it, but our fundamental focus is automotive and gaming."
Additionally, Huang stated on the call that "between automotive and SHIELD, our gaming platform, that represents the vast majority of Tegra now."
Capital returns
NVIDIA reported that it repurchased 0.2 million shares during the fourth quarter. According to the CFO commentary that accompanied the earnings release, NVIDIA bought back 44.4 million shares for $814 million (implying an average price of $18.33) during the fiscal year. The company also reported paying out $186 million in cash dividends. All told, this works out to $1 billion returned to stockholders for fiscal 2015.
For fiscal 2016, NVIDIA expects to return $600 million to shareholders via buybacks and dividends. This implies a cutback in the share repurchase activity from fiscal 2015. What's interesting, though, is that while NVIDIA raised its dividend from $0.075 to $0.085 after four quarters, the company just announced its sixth quarter at $0.085.
