Nvidia Q4 profits jump 68%

Santa Clara (CA) - Nvidia reported solid financial results for the fiscal fourth quarter 2007 ended on January 28. Fueled by strong sales in the desktop and notebook segment, revenues surged 39%, profits climbed by 68%.

Q4 sales came in at $878.9 million, compared to $633.6 million in the year-ago period. Net earnings were up from $97.4 million to $163.5 million in the same time frame. For the year, the company reported revenues of $3.07 billion, up 29% from $2.38 billion the prior year. Profits for the year increased by 49% from $301.2 million to $448.8 million.

Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, described the firm’s fiscal 2007 as "an outstanding" year. "We established the number one position in multiple categories - desktop GPUs, notebook GPUs, workstation GPUs, and AMD chipsets. Most importantly, we significantly enhanced our strategic position in the markets we serve," he was quoted in a press release.

For the current fiscal year, Nvidia expects to grow by moving deeper into the Intel market, and by releasing its first applications processor for the handheld market. The company also plans to soon release the first public beta version of its CUDA platform, which will allow the use of graphics cards as floating point accelerators in high-performance computing applications.

However, the company expects first quarter revenues to decline about 5% from Q4 due to seasonal patterns. Nvidia’s stock was down about $0.10 or 0.25% in after hour trading on Tuesday.