Nvidia generated record sales in the fourth quarter of 2020 and generated more than $5 billion for the first time.
Profits were significantly higher than in the previous year — sales rose from $3.105 to $5.003 billion and profits from $0.99 to $1.507 billion. Added to this is the still very high margin of 63 percent.
The new but also the old GeForce was the driving force in the last quarter. Almost exactly half of the sales are accounted for by the gaming department, which was able to record a jump of over a billion US dollars in sales compared to the previous year.
Since the launch of the Ampere generation, the Geforce RTX 3000 are hardly available and if so, then at excessive prices. According to CEO Jensen Huang, this will remain so in the next quarter, although more is to be produced.
An inconsiderable number of Geforce graphics cards are bought by people who run crypto mining farms. Nvidia puts the estimated sales at just $100 to $300 million, which seems far too low given the total volume of the Geforce division.
To keep crypto farms away from Geforce models, Nvidia recently introduced the CMP HX (Cryptocurrency Mining Processors), cards specially produced for mining. Nvidia is forecasting $ 15 million in revenue for the CMP HX in the first quarter of 2021, which seems low. The four models — 30HX, 40HX, 50HX and 90HX — are to be launched by authorized partners like Asus, Colorful, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit and PC Partner (Zotac).
In the data center segment, Nvidia is meanwhile benefiting from the A100 accelerator, as sales rose from $1.021 to $1.947 billion. It was only in November that Nvidia provided the A100 with twice as much video memory, i.e., 80 GB. The takeover of Mellanox is still barely noticeable. In the 2020 fiscal year, it should have been only around 10 percent or $500 million.
The professional business with GPUs, as well as the automotive sector, is still struggling with the consequences of the corona crisis. Small workstations with expensive Quadro cards are less in demand due to the home office, and the entire automotive industry is currently more or less in a hole from subdued demand and busy factories. Nvidia expects improvement here later in the year — as do many companies in the industry.
