Earnings Labs

NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA)

Q2 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, Aug 7, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Colin and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the NVIDIA Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period. (Operator Instructions) I would now turn the call over to Mr. Chris Evenden, Senior Director for Investor Relations with NVIDIA. Sir, you may begin your conference.

Chris Evenden

Management

Thanks, Colin. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to NVIDIA's conference call for the second quarter of fiscal 2015. With me on the call today from NVIDIA are Jen-Hsun Huang, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Colette Kress, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After our prepared remarks, we’ll open up the call to a question-and-answer session. Please limit yourself to one initial question with one follow-up. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today’s call is being webcast live on NVIDIA’s Investor Relations Web-site and is also being recorded. A replay of the conference call will be available via telephone until August 14, 2014, and the webcast will be available for replay until our conference call to discuss our financial results for our third quarter of fiscal 2015. The content of today’s conference call is NVIDIA’s property and cannot be reproduced or transcribed without our prior written consent. Beginning in September, we will start to use our Company blog and Twitter to inform investors about our participation in upcoming investor and industry conferences. The next conference for NVIDIA will be the Oppenheimer Conference next week on August 12. During the course of this call, 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-Q for the fiscal period ended April 27, 2014, 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, August 7, 2014 based on information available to us as of…

Colette Kress

Management

Thanks, Chris. Hello everyone. Let me provide some details on the second quarter of fiscal 2015. Revenue of $1.10 billion grew 13% year-over-year. Growth was driven by Tegra Processor sales, GeForce GPUs for gaming, Tesla and GRID for datacenter and cloud workloads. Revenue from GeForce GPUs for gaming desktops and notebooks grew 10%, fueled by continued strength in the gaming market, including the recently released GeForce GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti, Maxwell-based GPUs. Tesla and GRID for datacenter and high performance computing increased significantly from VDI deployments and large project wins with cloud service providers, as well as high-end education and government customers. Quadro revenue increased, with particularly strong growth in mobile workstations. Tegra processor sales grew 200% from a year ago led by mobile devices and automobile infotainment systems. Revenue from Tegra processors for automobiles grew 74% year-over-year. All key platforms for growth, gaming, datacenter and cloud, and mobile showed strong growth this quarter. Our transformation into visual computing systems and solutions allows us to realize the continued success in consumer PC and mobile gaming, as well as realize the growth in cloud datacenters, supercomputers, professional design and automobiles. The GPU business declined 2% sequentially as we executed well during the seasonal decline of consumer desktop GPUs. We believe we outperformed the market for consumer PCs led by our overall performance and ecosystem supporting PC gaming. Quadro, Tesla and GRID, all grew sequentially as well. Moving to gross margins, GAAP gross margin was 56.1%, up 130 basis points sequentially. Non-GAAP gross margin was 56.4%, up 130 basis points sequentially. These margins were both a record and better than our outlook. The increases reflected continued strength in our GPU margins for PC platforms, datacenter and cloud, and partially offset by the increased volume in Tegra processors. Compared to our…

Chris Evenden

Management

Thanks. That concludes our prepared remarks and we'll take questions. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Colin, over to you please.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of James Covello with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Gabriela Borges - Goldman Sachs

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Congrats on the strong results. This is Gabriela Borges on behalf of Jim. I was hoping you could talk about relative to guidance, you mentioned a number of business lines that are doing well right now, maybe you could talk about which ones of those you would highlight just in terms of magnitude driving the strength in the quarter?

Colette Kress

Management

In terms of how we did versus the quarter in Q2 versus our guidance, is that the statement?

Gabriela Borges - Goldman Sachs

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Sorry, within the guidance for third quarter.

Colette Kress

Management

Correct. In terms of where we think the growth will stem from, from a revenue perspective, again it is usually a seasonally uptick in terms of our overall consumer GPUs that are there for gaming as we get ready for the second half of the year on the high gaming season. So, that we do expect to be a significant contributor to our overall revenue growth sequentially of 9%. Additionally, we also expect our overall Tegra business to also grow sequentially associated with both our SoCs particularly for auto will increase and also what we expect for our devices as well.

Gabriela Borges - Goldman Sachs

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead

That's helpful, thank you. And then just as a follow-up if I may on the gross margin guidance, maybe if you could just give us a sense of the longer-term as to what level is sustainable just with some of the tailwinds that you have from richer mix shift over the next few quarters or so?

Colette Kress

Management

So, we talked quite a bit about what will contribute to our gross margins going forward and we do expect in any one quarter to see seasonal increases or potentially large projects completed in some of our enterprise businesses. So it's really a nature of the overall mix over a longer-term period of time which will influence our gross margins long-term. When you think about our overall enterprise businesses from Tesla, GRID and overall Quadro, which carry slightly higher gross margins than overall Company average, and depending on the seasonality of some of those businesses as well as large projects that we may complete, you will see our gross margins be very strong. Our overall consumer GPUs, we've done a very solid job in keeping our overall gross margins with solid ASPs and that should contribute as well in the quarters which we have strong growth. Then thirdly, when you think about our overall Tegra business, it is a case in terms of volumes and we do know that these are lower overall gross margins than our Company average. So depending on when those volumes hit, it can also affect the overall Company's gross margin. But at this time, it is hard to say in precise every single quarter in terms of what that guidance will be but those are generally the factors that will influence our gross margin ranges going forward.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Vivek Arya - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Vivek Arya with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open. Please go ahead

I think you had mentioned about 10% growth in gaming revenues. I'm curious, how much of that growth is coming from unit growth versus just stronger ASPs or share gains from AMD?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Vivek Arya with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Vivek, this is Jen-Hsun. If you take a look at the overall gaming market, it is surely growing. Depending on which one of the analysts you follow, the vast majority of them see that global gaming market is growing about 10%, a little bit over 10%. If you take a look at the largest gaming franchise today, they are mostly associated with massively online battle arena games called MOBA games. Whether it's League of Legends or DOTA 2, the two combined has nearly 100 million gamers and each day there are some 10 million gamers playing these two games. The size of the eSports, competitive sports associated with these two games, is becoming quite a large industry in itself. China is still growing, Southeast Asia is extremely underexposed and those markets are growing. And so, I think that it's fair to say that the gaming market overall is still growing. ASP is increasing and the reason why ASP is increasing is because the production value of games are increasing. The latest generation game consoles are now out. The entry-level GTX, GeForce GTX, with a street price of about $100 is comparable in performance to a next generation game console. And so, if the market shifts to even that level, our ASP has quite a lot of room to still grow. And so as the production value of games continue to grow, I think we're going to see our ASPs grow. And so I would say that the dynamics of the gaming industry, PC gaming industry is really quite healthy, both in more and more players playing and ASPs increasing because of production value. Now when you think about it in terms of our own platform, there's almost I would say there's about 100 million GeForce gamers around the world, they are active gamers around the world. And yet we know there are several hundred million gamers altogether and PC gaming is becoming more and more popular for the reasons that I've mentioned already and others. My sense is that we still have quite a bit of penetration to go. And so these are the dynamics that are helping us.

Vivek Arya - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Vivek Arya with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Got it. Thanks Jen-Hsun, very helpful. And then as my follow-up, there has been a lot of discussion or concern about the royalty payments from Intel since they are a very important part of your EPS and domestic cash, and I do realize the agreement runs for a few years, but when do you need to start to renegotiate and do you think the new agreement would be flat, up or down from what you have right now?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Vivek Arya with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open. Please go ahead

It's hard to predict the future but there are some things that we know. NVIDIA invents more in modern computer graphics than just about all of the world's companies combined. We invented the GPU, we invented GPGPU, we invented the ability for GPUs to be virtualized so that you can put it in the cloud and that's one of the reasons why our cloud computing business has grown so fast now. We're continuing to focus on this one specialized field of computing that's becoming more and more important. I don't know of too many technology companies in the world today who doesn't rely on technologies that we've invented. Technology licensing is an important part of our business. Long before there was Intel licensing our technology, there were other companies licensing our technology. We have licensing revenues as a component of our business now for 15 plus years. And so my expectation is that licensing revenues will continue to be an important part of our income for quite some time to come. Now there's a second component that's really important which is, whereas we historically were able to license to mostly PC companies, we can now license to mobile and cloud companies. And so those are new opportunities for us. And then lastly, we no longer just license IP as in patents, we've productised our design into a core and that core could be licensed, so that makes it easier for companies who would like to innovate and build their own products to be able to license our technology. We have now more ways to engage customers in IP licensing. We're serious about this business, we're actively working on these matters, they take time, but I'm very confident that licensing will continue to be an important part of our business going forward.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Harlan Sur with J. P. Morgan Chase. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Harlan Sur - J. P. Morgan

Analyst · Harlan Sur with J. P. Morgan Chase. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Congrats on the solid quarterly execution. The Q3 guidance signifies revenue growth of 14% on a year-over-year basis. Your GPU business in particular, that grew double-digits year-over-year in Q1 and took a bit of a pause in Q2, I'm assuming just weaker consumer PCs. The question is, are you looking forward to GPU business to return to double-digits year-over-year growth in Q3, and if you are, if you could just highlight some of the drivers?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Harlan Sur with J. P. Morgan Chase. Your line is open. Please go ahead

First of all, Q2 is seasonally slower than all of the other quarters, and considering the performance that we had, it was actually quite extraordinary. And our expectation is that Q3 will return to its traditional seasonal growth era. There's a couple of other dynamics that's going on now. There are some really big titles coming this fall. I don't remember a time when PC gaming is going to benefit from the huge titles that are coming out this fall at the pace that it is. And partly the reason for that is because this is the first year, the first major year, first full year of next generation game consoles, and so these new large franchise titles like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed are going to hit the market. And ultimately what drives our business, some seasonality, of course Christmas matters, of course back-to-school matters, of course Chinese New Year matters, but ultimately what really drives our business are huge games, and this fall we're going to see some really, really huge titles. Our position in the marketplace is fantastic. GeForce is really the best gaming platform for PCs today, it's not even close anymore. I think that because of the technology, we know that Kepler has been a fantastic platform for us, Maxwell is even better than that, but all of the software and all the application technology that we put around GeForce has really changed its profile for gamers. Not only can you play great games now, you could use our GeForce Experience, which has been installed some 40 million times, there are 40 million PCs around the world that now has GeForce Experience inside so that you could record completely in the background without affecting your gameplay and stream it to Twitch, which as you probably know very well at this point is the largest real-time video platform in the world, and a lot of those gamers are streaming using GeForce and the number of concurrent viewers is really quite amazing. And so, GeForce as a gaming platform has really reached a level that is pretty substantial and my expectation is that this holiday season, this fall is going to be pretty big.

Harlan Sur - J. P. Morgan

Analyst · Harlan Sur with J. P. Morgan Chase. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Okay, thanks for that Jen-Hsun. And then, Colette, on the OpEx front, I mean obviously the team is certainly delivering to its target of $1.65 billion in OpEx this year and it seems clear that the team is going to continue to drive an OpEx profile that is below your revenue run rate. Any way to just help us quantify OpEx growth versus revenue growth from a longer-term perspective?

Colette Kress

Management

I think we're looking quite nicely at how we've executed over the last three quarters. It's definitely been through a lot of work thinking about how much better we can execute as a company with our overall business groups and working on reallocating investments across. And to look farther, there's continued day to day conversations about where those growth opportunities are on the top line and are we the best positioned at this time with our investments for those. So right now, I'd like to get through the rest of the fiscal year and I think we'll reassess what does that look like going forward, but I don't have anything at this time to give on a longer-term perspective. But I thank you for recognizing the great work on growing the top line and maintaining a very consistent OpEx base to improve the profitability.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Ross Seymore with the Deutsche Bank Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Ross Seymore - Deutsche Bank Securities

Analyst · Ross Seymore with the Deutsche Bank Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Your primary competitor had some issues with channel inventory on their side. It doesn't appear to be impacting you guys at all. But Jen-Hsun, could you give us some color, a little commentary on what you see going on in the channel right now for the GPU business please?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Ross Seymore with the Deutsche Bank Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead

You're going to have to ask them for commentary about their channel inventory. In our case, we've seen spot shortages around the world. We're really super-focused on making sure that GeForce is the world's best gaming platform for PCs. It doesn't mean that, it doesn't mean alone that it has to be – just being the world's best GPU is not enough. We're surely the best GPU but being the GPU is just the first bar, if you will, for being a great gaming platform. And for us today, GeForce, all of the technology that we put into game-works, all the work that we do with game developers around the world, GeForce Experience which as I mentioned earlier has been installed some 40 million times, has really turned GeForce into one of the largest gaming platforms in the world. And if you're a gamer and you have GeForce in your system, you can be assured you're going to have a great experience. We're incredibly dedicated to the user experience, we're incredibly dedicated to making sure that every single game works perfectly and works marvellously as it can be in your PC. The amount of dedication that we put into this platform, this living breathing platform that's evolving and changing literally every day, is something that we've really mastered and it's something that has taken us well over a decade to do, and I think people are starting to recognize that. And as the PC market continues to become the most important gaming platform because of its open nature, you don't pay royalties to proprietary platforms, the installed base is really quite large now as you could imagine, and for most people outside of United States where disposable income is still rather challenging, a PC is necessary for most of them, everything else is a luxury, and so the fact that GeForce is extended inside a PC, on a platform that you already know you need, makes it quite a unique gaming platform. And so I think the comments that we've made over the years and as you've followed us over the years, we've been consistently dedicated to this game platform and I think it's starting to pay off now.

Ross Seymore - Deutsche Bank Securities

Analyst · Ross Seymore with the Deutsche Bank Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Great, thanks for that. And one is my follow-up for Colette, on the cash return side, you guys are nicely ahead of the $1 billion run rate, so that's working out well. Just wondered, is the ASR now complete, and if so, in the back half of the year to get up to that $1 billion number, is the plan to be much more of an organic day-by-day buyback plan or is there something more that you have in plan for us?

Colette Kress

Management

In the end of Q2, yes, we had completed the outstanding ASR that we began shortly after our Q1 earnings release. In the second half of the year, we are committed to meeting the full-year plan for $1 billion. Breaking that down, the dividend payments are still in the second half of the year, a part of the remaining balance to go, and then the amount of repurchasing as well. We're still assessing what the best method is overall to do that and we'll have something for you at the next earnings call definitely on how we executed within that quarter.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Blayne Curtis with Barclays Capital. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Blayne Curtis - Barclays Capital

Analyst · Blayne Curtis with Barclays Capital. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Nice results. I was wondering a couple of questions. One, if you could quantify, you mentioned gaming up 10%, how much is that of the overall GPU business? And then if you could talk about if overall ASPs were up in the July quarter as well?

Colette Kress

Management

It's a very good percentage of our overall consumer GPU business and we've talked about that remember our professional workstation GPUs are also in the overall GPU business as well as what we have for the overall datacenter with Tesla and our overall cloud in terms of GRID, but as a percentage of our overall consumer, it is a significant proportion of our overall consumer GPU.

Blayne Curtis - Barclays Capital

Analyst · Blayne Curtis with Barclays Capital. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Okay. And then I guess if you could just, the ASP trends overall in July and then your expectations into October, you're looking for another step-up in ASPs?

Colette Kress

Management

The ASPs are definitely a lot of different factors in terms of how certain things fell into the channel with certain OEMs or in terms of any just overall add in market. So it's real hard for us to lay out that mix perfectly over that. We believe what we've seen right now is extremely stable, if not from year-over-year, overall increases in our overall average ASPs over that period of time. So we'll get to see what that looks like as we go into the gaming season in the second half of the year, but you are correct that our overall gaming portfolio GPUs do carry overall higher than the average across our overall consumer GPUs.

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Blayne Curtis with Barclays Capital. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Blayne, you know what, just to add to that, one of the things that surely everyone is noticing now is that our business is really moving away from being a components business to being much more of a platform business, that's obviously built on top of a processor. Our ASPs for datacenters and for the cloud computing platforms are much, much higher than our ASPs for PCs, not only because the processors themselves are much more complex, because it has to be shared by many people, it's virtualized. It's designed for datacenter and so the robustness for it, the reliability of it, the quality of it has to be at a level that is able to sustain 24x7 operations. But mostly the reason is because the software stacked on top of it is really complex. Most of our datacenter business, most of our cloud computing business isn't really a software business anymore, it's really about GPU virtualization, it's really about high-performance computing, it's really about the ability to serve accelerated cloud computing. And so, our ASP profile is going to have to start changing over time. Tracking PC sales and then multiplying that by some ASP is not a logical way to think about our business anymore, because of cloud computing platforms, because increasingly our business is really a platform business. I hope that's helpful.

Blayne Curtis - Barclays Capital

Analyst · Blayne Curtis with Barclays Capital. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Thanks for that.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Ramsay with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. Please proceed with your question.

Matt Ramsay - Canaccord Genuity

Analyst · Matt Ramsay with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. Please proceed with your question

In your prepared remarks, there was some mention, and Jen-Hsun, you just mentioned it as well, sort of a longer-term growth in the datacenter for cloud computing and HPC around your GPU and the platform. I'd be interested, it seems like there were some developments relatively recently around your partnerships with other ARM 64-bit vendors maybe versus your own internally developed solutions. Maybe you could give us an update about what the strategy is going forward for attack in that market and is I guess the general purpose compute engine that sits next to your GPU in those applications of paramount importance to you or does your GPU really drives the value?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Matt Ramsay with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. Please proceed with your question

First of all, I think I've said this before and I continue to believe it and more so every day, that the datacenter and accelerated cloud computing will likely be the largest opportunity that the Company is following today. Our ASPs there are many, many, many times higher than our ASPs in average. The gross margins are obviously a lot higher, primarily because it's a software business. Now, at the center of that platform strategy is recognizing that datacenters, Internet service providers, cloud service providers, even countries who have their own supercomputing interests, have rather different opinions about what kind of CPUs they use. They don't all want exactly the same instruction set architecture. What we've done with Tesla is, and what we've done with our GPUs, GRID and Tesla, is established a bit of an ISA-neutral attitude about what datacenters can and cannot use, and we believe that people want to use whatever instruction set architecture they would like to use and we've created the ability to support x86, we support Power with our announcements with IBM, a very deep and quite a broad strategic alliance to bring accelerated computing to the Power platform, and also ARM. Of course we care about ARM. ARM is one of the most pervasive CPU ISAs in the world, it is very accessible, it's available to anybody who would like to build CPUs around them. And so, our first philosophy is focus on building a platform for accelerated cloud computing, accelerated computing. Our second is to be ISA-neutral, so that Tesla could be a platform that any service provider or any datacenter can build around. And then third, if it makes sense for us to build CPUs for those platforms ourselves, we'll consider doing so, but it kind of goes in that particular order. Is that helpful?

Matt Ramsay - Canaccord Genuity

Analyst · Matt Ramsay with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. Please proceed with your question

That's really helpful perspective, thank you. And then as my follow-up for Colette, there's been a lot of conversation on the call here about the progress on capital returns. If you could give us, one question is, an update on the domestic cash balance, and then just going forward after the $1 billion is completed through the year, maybe you could give an update on your longer-term philosophy about capital returns relative to that domestic cash position?

Colette Kress

Management

So we've been pretty clear that when you look at our overall cash balance and our overall cash flow, a good percentage of our cash flow extends from our international operations and the overall revenue that we receive from a good percentage of our business. From time to time, we'll have a little bit of peak in the U.S. in terms of some of the providers that we do business with in the U.S., but I'd say more than the majority, our significant amount of the earnings are earned overseas. So overall, cash balance about a November year ago, we infused with the overall convertible debt which added $1.5 billion. So right now, outside of the Intel payments as well that come once a year, it's pretty steady and it may grow a little bit from time to time, but I'd say it's just right now at about a steady level. Secondly, when talking about our overall capital return from a long-term perspective, we are really trying to look at our overall growth this year. We've executed strongly to the $1 billion that we put out for the fiscal year and we're just about half way through that right now, and so we'll continue to look what is the appropriate level for long-term. As you know, we're executing to return more than 100% of our free cash flow, that you've seen in this quarter and the last quarter. But over the last three years, we've probably been executing on average anywhere from about 70% to 80% of our free cash flow. So, stay tuned, let us get through this year in terms of the $1 billion and we'll look in terms of what the future will lie after we look at that overall cash balance and the options that we can do.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Moore with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Once again, Mr. Moore, your line is live, please proceed with your question. Alright, moving along, our next question comes from the line of David Wong with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

David Wong Wells Fargo

Analyst · Joseph Moore with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Once again, Mr. Moore, your line is live, please proceed with your question. Alright, moving along, our next question comes from the line of David Wong with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead

To push a bit further on a couple of the earlier questions, your GPU segments that are growing are the higher ASP segments. So year-over-year GPU sales grew 2% but ASPs also rose a fair amount, didn't they? So did your unit shipments for GPUs overall actually declined on a year-over-year basis in June?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Joseph Moore with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Once again, Mr. Moore, your line is live, please proceed with your question. Alright, moving along, our next question comes from the line of David Wong with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead

I would think so. I would think that it declined a little, and the reason of course has to do with the fact that the consumer PC market overall declined. You know very well that our consumer PC business is a components business and those components' ASPs are rather low and the margins are lower. And although we care about that business very much, components business and volume business does provide scale and it leverages our R&D anyhow, and so we surely appreciate the business, but in the final analysis the consumer PC market was down and I think that the consumer PC market is expected to be more stable now and we'll see how it trends out.

David Wong Wells Fargo

Analyst · Joseph Moore with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Once again, Mr. Moore, your line is live, please proceed with your question. Alright, moving along, our next question comes from the line of David Wong with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Okay, great. And my other question, what portion of total Tegra sales is Tegra for automotive at the moment, and did your current level of R&D spending have meaningful spending on Tegra for smartphones and tablets or is it, is the Tegra R&D primarily on automotive products?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Joseph Moore with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Once again, Mr. Moore, your line is live, please proceed with your question. Alright, moving along, our next question comes from the line of David Wong with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Our Tegra strategy is really centered around several areas. One is automotive, as you've mentioned, a business that has grown to be quite sizable. I think Colette mentioned earlier that it grew 70% year-over-year. We're expecting the growth to continue for the next several years. The pipeline of projects that we know that we're already working on that will go into production is relatively well understood now. On the second is gaming. Android is the world's largest computing platform and gaming, we've shortened to computer gaming, and with a great computing platform like Windows, we were able to build a franchise called GeForce on top of it. Our strategy with SHIELD is exactly the same as that, to leverage the Android platform, which is now the world's largest computing platform, and build a gaming platform out of it and we call that SHIELD. The mobile platform is now extended beyond phones and has gone into tablets, as you know of course, but recently also into television. This fall I'm looking forward to seeing some exciting products for Android TVs and hopefully NVIDIA could be part of some of those. Our focus is primarily there, the vast majority of our focus, automotive, consoles, if you will, Android TV consoles, gaming, and wherever we can, wherever it makes sense for us, continue to engage with OEMs like Xiaomi and others who are building exciting devices where Tegra could be a differentiator for them, and that's basically our strategy and where we're focusing our R&D.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Rajvindra Gill with Needham & Company. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Rajvindra Gill - Needham & Company: Thank you and congrats on the good results. Just given the changing mix of your business, could you maybe talk a little bit about seasonality in the fourth quarter, fiscal fourth quarter and how do you see that relative to kind of historical patterns?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Rajvindra Gill with Needham & Company

We're talking about fiscal third quarter, but I appreciate it, Raj. Rajvindra Gill - Needham & Company: No, I mean in general now that the…

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Rajvindra Gill with Needham & Company

We'll talk about fiscal fourth quarter next quarter. Rajvindra Gill - Needham & Company: No, to just kind of get a sense of kind of how the patterns are changing given the mix of the business, the changing trends of the business.

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Rajvindra Gill with Needham & Company

I appreciate that, I was just kidding. Look, consumer business is still a large part of our business and GeForce for PC gaming is a large part of our business, and for the foreseeable future I expect it to be a large part of our business. Consumer business is important to us because consumers drive a lot of computing technology today and obviously the volumes are much, much higher and it's important to have high-volume business to drive the flywheel of R&D. And so I appreciate the seasonality, GeForce is going to benefit from that in the third and fourth quarter, but increasing over time – and one of the things you're highlighting here is that our datacenter business, our cloud computing business, our high-performance computing business are not affected by those kind of seasonality, people buy those platforms when they need those platforms, and the dynamic trends of those businesses are several. One, the more mobile devices in the world, the more pictures people take, the more videos they upload, the more they talk into their phones for search, more of those applications, those consumer applications are going to be accelerated by GPU in the cloud. And so those are great opportunities for us and I think it's pretty clear now the dynamic trends of consumer generated media, as it's censored to cloud, shared and processed and otherwise, is growing I guess at least exponentially and I think that that's one of the dynamics, major dynamics driving our GPU success in the cloud. And then the second has to do with the fact that more and more of companies are using high-performance computing to drive their business. Some companies call it big data analytics, some you then refer to machine learning to understand what is happening to the dynamics…

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Rajvindra Gill with Needham & Company

Good question. The most important partners, number one, starts with the hypervisor companies, the companies that build the core of virtualization. Of course VMware is a very important part of that, Microsoft is, Citrix is. I think it was at GTC, I guess it's in May, VMware was on stage with me to announce that they were adopting GRID, integrating GRID into ESX, and enabling virtual GPUs for their hypervisor stack. I'm anxiously waiting for them to go to beta, and so let's watch this space. I think that that has probably the single greatest near-term turbocharger to the GRID business. Beyond that, the ecosystem partners that we will go to market with are all the OEMs. They have the largest sales forces in the world and they are engaging enterprises from financial services to government to education to industry, and those sales forces are being trained on a constant basis and enabling OEMs to be able to take GRID to market as a very big part of the overall strategy. We now have every single OEM in the world supporting us. There are some 70, 80 servers that have been certified and qualified for GRID. OEMs from HP and Dell and IBM and Cisco and Hitachi and Fujitsu and just every OEM in every corner of the world has been enthusiastic supporters of GRID, and partnering with VMware and partnering with Citrix and partnering with Microsoft over time, that's how we're going to convert and virtualize all of the enterprises around the world.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Doug Freedman with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Doug Freedman - RBC Capital Markets

Analyst · Doug Freedman with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Congratulations on the strong results. If I could, Jen-Hsun, dig into GRID just a little bit more, in the past you guys gave out a number for the number of engagements that you were tracking. I believe last quarter it was 600. Just to have a like-for-like, what is that number this quarter?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Doug Freedman with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead

We stopped mentioning it because the numbers were getting kind of large and maybe we just got kind of bored talking about it, but it's almost 1,000, Doug. I appreciate you asking.

Doug Freedman - RBC Capital Markets

Analyst · Doug Freedman with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Terrific, that's great to hear. If I could, one of the areas that I believe one of your competitors hit a speed bump on was the fact that GPUs were being used for cryptocurrency algorithms. Is this a market that you view as something that NVIDIA should be servicing, are you targeting your products at that and is it something that we should take into our thinking?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Doug Freedman with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead

There are several things about that event that's really interesting. First, the fact that you could run an arbitrary and newly developed cryptocurrency algorithm on a GPU says something about the programmability of a GPU now. That's one of the things that – of course cryptology, cryptography is very important, of course encryption and decryption for security long-term will be very important, and GPUs will increasingly become important in the development of those algorithms. However, we really didn't benefit very much from people who were doing I guess bitcoin mining, and the reason for that is because if it's just one application, if it's somebody who is using that one application, they don't really care about the gaming experience, they didn't buy the platform for gaming, they didn't buy the platform for workstations or design, I would say that NVIDIA GPUs are not the most performance per dollar efficient in the market. As a component, if you will, as a commodity component, we're not the most competitive in that they. And maybe that was a blessing, maybe it wasn't, but I think in the final analysis I don't think we were particularly the best choice for somebody who would like to bitcoin mine. When they were done, they resold the graphics cards in the marketplace, and I guess in a lot of ways I'm kind of happy that that didn't happen to us.

Doug Freedman - RBC Capital Markets

Analyst · Doug Freedman with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Okay, great, I appreciate the color there. My last one for you is really having to do with sort of the structure of the Company. You've been reliant on a single source for your foundry since inception. You're pretty much at a scale now that might make you say, we really should have a second source supplier here. Is there some sort of a catalyst that makes you or some level at which you feel you really do need to bring on a second supplier of wafers?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Doug Freedman with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead

We look at every foundry that's available in the world and there aren't that many that is competitive enough to be able to earn our business. So we competitively look at every single opportunity every single time. We've been fortunate to partner with GSMC for a very long time, they are a fantastic, fantastic partner, they continue to be, and quite frankly we've been well-served by that partnership. But we look at the competitive landscape on a node by node basis. And so, we have our eyes wide open and we keep all of our partners as competitive as they can be.

Chris Evenden

Management

Thanks, Doug. Thanks everyone. We look forward to talking to you next time on our Q3 earnings call. Thanks Colin.