Chris Evenden
Analyst · Wells Fargo
Thanks, Ashley. Good morning, and welcome to NVIDIA's conference call on the first quarter of fiscal 2013 results. With me on the call today from NVIDIA are Jen-Hsun Huang, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Karen Burns, Interim Chief Financial Officer. After our prepared remarks, we will open up the call to a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's call is being webcast live on NVIDIA's Investor Relations website and is also being recorded. A replay of the conference call will be available via telephone until May 15, 2012, and the webcast will be available for replay until our conference call to discuss our financial results for our second quarter of fiscal 2013. The content of today's conference call is NVIDIA's property and cannot be reproduced or transcribed without our prior written consent. During the course of this call, we will make -- we may make forward-looking statements based on current expectations. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. For a discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release, our Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 29, 2012 and the reports we may file from time to time on Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All our statements are made as of today, May 11, 2012, based on information available to us as of today. And except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements. Unless otherwise noted, all references to market research and market share numbers throughout the call come from Mercury Research or Jon Peddie Research. During this call, we may discuss non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in our financial release, which is posted on our website or in the case of our fiscal year 2013 outlook, the reconciliation is posted on our Investor Relations website. With that, let me begin. Each of NVIDIA's businesses performed at least in line with expectations for the quarter with notebook graphics and Tegra coming in slightly higher than we had anticipated. As expected, we faced headwinds from the soft economy and hard, hard drive prices -- high hard drive prices, which passed the PC mix away from the channel in favor of OEMs. However, our competitive position was enhanced in mid-March with the launch of our new Kepler GPU architecture. Kepler is more powerful, more compact and more efficient than anything before it. Kepler is also our first architecture to include virtualization technology built right into the GPU. And we'll talk more about what that means at our GPU Technology Conference next week and at our upcoming Analyst Day on May 24. Our first Kepler product was the GeForce GTX 680, which is 10% faster, 20% smaller and 22% more power efficient than its direct competitor. Of more than 130 media reviews published so far, each and every one of the recommended our GeForce GTX 680 over the competition. Kepler is the most efficient GPU architecture we've ever created and we expect this to translate into more market share and higher margins. Less than 2 weeks ago, we launched our second GeForce Kepler product, the GeForce GTX 690, which uses 2 Kepler GPUs to set a new bar for performance. The 690 is a gorgeous piece of engineering and industrial design, and this is widely noted by the press. The public reaction speaks to its degree of craftmanship and pride our engineers and designers put into their product. PC Magazine, which is a mainstream technology publication, described it as the card to cherish. Enthusiast sites went even further with HardOCP calling it the most perfect card they've ever tested. Their review found it to be, and I quote, "the finest looking, best performing, most efficient jewel GPU card in the world with unsurpassed design and engineering." And yesterday, we launched the GTX 670 to even better reviews. These cards enter a healthy PC gaming market. We launched the 690 at our GeForce LAN/NVIDIA Gaming Festival in Shanghai. The event had 8,000 live attendees competing with a passion that has to be seen to be believed, and more than 1 million people viewed the 2-day contest online. Note that revenue hit a record in the first quarter as we refreshed our notebook GPUs top to bottom with the launch of the GeForce 600M series. The unprecedented power efficiency of GeForce 600M notebook GPUs has enabled new notebook form factors like that of the Acer Aspire Ultrabook M3. Putting a GeForce 600M GPU in an Ultrabook makes the Ultrabook truly worthy of the ultra tag. All indicators are that the strong growth will continue for our notebook business through 2Q -- Q2 and Q3 driven by Kepler design wins on the Ivy Bridge platform. Our visibility into OEM builds suggests that the attach rate, stable for the last 3 years, will remain strong. We'll be instituting more Kepler GPUs in the coming quarters. Demand is high for Kepler and although supply will continue to improve, we are not able to meet all our OEM and channel demand in Q2. We do not expect the 28-nanometer supply situation to resolve itself until later this year. This is factored into our current outlook. At this point, we can sell everything we can get. I'll now turn to our Tegra business. The world's first Tegra 3 phone was launched in February by HTC. The HTC One X is their new flagship product and has delighted reviewers worldwide. This is the first phone we've had that launched day one across multiple carriers. Tegra 3 gives it a long battery life, thanks to the 4-PLUS-1 quad-core architecture, console gaming -- console quality gaming and fast web browsing. And because Tegra 3 utilizes a specially enhanced 40-nanometer process, it's not affected by 28-nanometer supply constraints. Other phone wins around -- announced at Mobile World Congress includes ZTE with the first Tegra plus Icera phones, Fujitsu, LG and K-Touch. Tegra 3 phones are now shipping from 22 carriers in Europe and Asia and more will follow shortly. The launch this past quarter of the first 2 phones with Icera baseband processor signals a new opportunity for NVIDIA to penetrate the mainstream smartphone market and to capture a greater share of the silicon bond in each phone. Looking forward, you'll see Tegra 3 LTE phones with partners' baseband processors in the second half of this year and then next year with our own LTE baseband processors as well. Additionally, we remain very excited about Tegra's opportunity in Windows on ARM. Progress continued this quarter with Microsoft shipping development PCs powered by NVIDIA's Tegra 3 mobile processor to Windows 8 developers and to device makers. Microsoft, itself, has made some important recent announcements about Windows on ARM, particularly those referring to its ability for enterprise application. And related, Forrester has predicted that 375 million tablets will ship in 2016 and almost 1/3 of these will be bought directly by business. Even for the rest, Forrester believes that most consumers will use them for work as well as at home. Before handing things over to Karen, I'd like to remind everyone that our annual GPU Technology Conference takes place next week. We're bringing together several thousands of sciences, engineers and academics together to share, learn and network. Jen-Hsun will be presenting a major keynote at 10:30 a.m. on May 15, and it's well worth listening online if you can't be there in person. We'll also have keynotes from a Princeton researcher using GPUs to model collective behavior and the leader of a team competing for the Lunar X PRIZE. Many of the best minds in computing will be there. Finally, I want to highlight our Annual Investor Day on May 24. If you'd like to attend, please e-mail me or visit our website at nvidia.com/ir to register. Now, over to Karen.