Nvidia held their Q1 earnings call last night, boasting bumper revenue, but also announcing an expected 67% drop in cryptocurrency revenue for the next financial quarter because of the recent dip in mining GPU demand.
It’s already been a massive year for Nvidia, especially compared to this time last year. Thanks to having the best graphics cards around, in terms of overall revenue the green team have seen it jump from just under $2 billion in Q1 2017 (none too shabby) to $3.2 billion in twelve months (holy **** that’s a lot of money).
But all those big mining companies holding off on new graphics card purchases will soon start to impact Nvidia’s bottom line. They’re shifting it over onto the OEM portion of their business, so the drops in crypto revenue aren’t going to show up in their overall GPU sales, ensuring investors won’t get too panicked by the time the next results appear. Investors are like nervous horses, extremely skittish around financial results time.
Nvidia have claimed that shifting the crypto sales into their OEM business has meant they could protect the ‘limited gaming GPU supply’ for gamers.
They’ve been selling crypto-specific SKUs of 10-series cards direct to the big mining corporations to ensure the GeForce stock isn’t compromised. I mean, it didn’t really work until the miners stopped actually ordering GPUs, but that’s not going to stop them calling it a win.
“We try the best we can to go directly to the major miners, and they represent the vast majority of the demand,” explained CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang. “We can serve those miners directly, hopefully to take some of the demand pressure off of the GeForce market.”
In terms of what that’s meant for Nvidia in the first financial quarter of this year it’s almost $290 million.
“Cryptocurrency demand was again stronger than expected,” says CFO, Collette Kress, “but we were able to fulfill most of it with crypto-specific GPUs, which are included in our OEM business at $289 million. As a result, we could protect the vast majority of our limited gaming GPU supply for use by gamers.”
But that number is going to look significantly different at the next quarterly earnings call, with Nvidia anticipating a revenue drop of two-thirds. “Looking into Q2,” Kress continues, “we expect crypto-specific revenue to be about one-third of its Q1 level.”
That will wipe approximately $190 million off the revenue of the OEM division in Q2. But, considering the gaming revenue of Nvidia in Q1 this year was some $1.7 billion, that’s barely going to be noticed by Jen-Hsun and co…