NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) stock delivered a solid FY18 performance, leading to the stock rise of over 7.5% in the after-hours session on Feb 8th, 2018.
For Fiscal 2018, the revenue surged 41% yoy to $9.71 billion, driven by the solid data center segment growing triple digit. For the fourth quarter of 2018, the GPU revenue surged 33% yoy to 2.46 billion while Tegra Processor revenue enhanced 75% yoy to $450 million.
The Gaming business fourth-quarter revenue surged 29% yoy to $1.74 billion, while rose 11% sequentially with growth across all regions, enabling a GPU demand for a number of great titles during the holiday season, including Players Battleground, PUBG, Destiny 2, Call of Duty, World War II, Star Wars: Battlefront 2. Moreover, the Nintendo Switch gaming console became the fastest selling console of all time in the U.S leading to the segment growth.
Data center segment revenue surged 105% yoy to $606 million while rose 20% sequentially. Rapid adoption of Tesla V100 GPUs based on their Volta architecture ramped up in Q3 and Q4. V100 is being chosen by every major cloud provider to deliver AI and high-performance computing while started shipping in the second quarter.
Professional visualization segment revenue surged 13% yoy to 254 million, given the demand for real-time rendering as well as emerging applications like AI and VR. These emerging applications currently account over 30% of pro visualization sales.
Meanwhile, major firms like ZF and Baidu are using NVIDIA Drive self-driving technology to create a production-ready AI autonomous vehicle platform for China. Production vehicles leveraging this technology are forecasted to be on the road by 2020. The group also made a partnership with Aurora which is working to create a modular scalable Level 4 and Level 5 self-driving hardware platform incorporating the NVIDIA Drive Xavier processor.
GAAP gross margins reached 61.9% during the quarter while non-GAAP was 62.1%, driven by growth in their value-added platforms. The group continued to invest in major platforms to deliver long-term growth including Gaming, AI and automotive. GAAP EPS surged 80% on a yoy basis to $1.78, due to U.S. tax reform and excess tax benefits related to stock based compensation. For the fourth quarter GAAP effective tax rate was a benefit of 3.7% against the group’s forecasted tax rate of 17.5%. The group returned $1.25 billion to shareholders in the fiscal year.