Nvidia makes $1.066b for Q3 2011, impresses analysts

Graphics giant Nvidia revealed Thursday its Q3 2011 financial results and, in short, they have beaten analysts’ estimates.

Nvidia earned $1.066 billion for the quarter ending in October, up 26 percent from Q3 2010 and slightly above expert estimates of $1.062 billion. Perhaps unsurprising, its mobile market division saw the largest growth during the quarter at 14 percent compared to Q2 2011, likely due to the now ubiquitous Tegra 2 chipset present in numerous Android tablets and certain smartphones. The chipmaker’s second division, which includes workstation graphics cards (e.g., Quadro), also had a healthy growth of 9.5 percent. This contrasts with Nvidia’s desktop/PC GPU sector, which only saw a 1 percent growth compared to the same time period.

“We’re impressed with the growth in the work station business. That’s high margin. We think that’s why they beat on the bottom line,” said analyst Kevin Cassidy of Stifel Nicolaus to Reuters.

To top off the good news, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced even more Tegra-based phones and tablets to be released in the near future. A total of 23 devices with Tegra processors are scheduled to see release, 13 of which are tablets. The latest iteration of Tegra, the quad-core Tegra 3, will launch alongside the Asus Transformer Prime before the end of this year.

The final quarter of the year, however, is expected to see lower growth numbers. Huang predicts only a 2 percent change in revenue next quarter compared to Q3 2011. As for the reason why, Electronista believes slowing sales could be the explanation.

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