nVidia Releases Financial Results for Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2009

nVidia corporation released financial results for the fourth quarter and Fiscal Year 2009, revealing a drop in revenue from 2008’s $1.2 billion fourth quarter to 2009’s $481.8 million fourth quarter, a 60 percent reduction. The results for the fiscal year saw a lesser decline, with a decrease of 16 percent from 2008’s $4.1 billion to 2009’s $3.4 billion.

Jen-Hsun Huang

“The environment is clearly difficult and uncertain. Our first priority is to set an operating expense level that balances cash conservation while allowing us to continue to invest in initiatives that are of great importance to the market and in which we believe we have industry leadership,” nVidia President and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said.

In spite of the losses, Huang expressed optimism concerning innovations nVidia had made in the past year, including advances in graphics processing due to PhysX and 3DVision, GPU Computing with the Tesla Personal Supercomputer, and mobile computing with the ION and Tegra. The press release cited several highlights. These included Huang’s points and nVidia’s licensing of its PhysX Development platform to Electronic Arts, THQ, and 2k Games.

The recession is obviously to blame for the hemorrhaging across nVidia’s board, and ATI’s parent AMD is having its own economic struggles. Even so, could this also mean that the never-ending graphics war between nVidia and ATI may slow down in the remainder of 2009? Could it allow ATI, long said to be lagging behind nVidia in the GPU technological gap, to find a way to pull back to the forefront? Or does it simply mean that like everything else, fewer PCs and PC components are being bought and thus the GPU market is suffering? Either way, it should be interesting to see what the rest of 2009 brings for the graphics’ giant.