Nvidia revenue and profit fall due to disappointing GPU sales g

Nvidia sold much fewer GPUs in the last quarter of 2018 than in the same quarter a year earlier. Turnover fell by 24 percent. That’s because people are buying fewer GPUs for cryptocurrency mining and because the RTX video cards aren’t working.

Nvidia confirms with the announcement of its quarterly figures that the sale of high-end RTX video cards is not what the company had expected. This is apparent from a transcript of the conversation with investors after the presentation. Nvidia does not provide concrete figures on numbers of video cards, but the company says that the RTX 2080 and 2070, among others, have not done as well as hoped.

The Gaming division had revenues of $954 million, down 45 percent from a year earlier and down 46 percent from the previous quarter. Sales also fell in the OEM & IP division, which includes sales of socs for consoles. The Datacenter, Automotive and Professional Visualization divisions did well, all of which achieved more turnover than a year ago. However, the Gaming division is by far the largest and the sharp drop there has a lot of influence on the numbers.

At the end of January, Nvidia already lowered its expectations. As an explanation, Nvidia already gave then, among other things, the disappointing sales of video cards with the new Turing architecture. CEO Jensen Huang said at the time that consumers may be waiting for RTX cards to be cheaper, or waiting for more support for ray tracing in games.

Revenue in the last three months of 2018 was $2.21 billion, 24 percent less than in the same quarter a year earlier. Net profit was $567 million, a 49 percent decline. The figures for the whole of 2018 were higher than those of a year earlier. Annual revenue was $11.72 billion, an increase of 21 percent. That is because many video cards were still being sold at the beginning of the year, partly due to the hype surrounding cryptocurrency.