Revenue surged by 41% to $3.11 billion, which is higher than the analysts’ forecast of $2.97 billion. The top line was driven by double-digit growth across all market platforms except automotive, which remained flat from last year.
Tegra Processor business revenue, which includes Automotive, SoCs for gaming platforms, and embedded edge AI platforms, soared by 47% from a year ago.
Looking ahead into the first quarter, the company expects revenue to be $3.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, while the consensus estimates $2.85 billion. The operating expenses are anticipated to be $1.05 billion and capital expenditures are predicted to be in the range of $150-170 million for the first quarter. The forecast does not include any contribution from the pending acquisition of Mellanox.
The pending acquisition of Mellanox has been progressing smoothly. The discussions with China’s regulatory agency, the State Administration for Market Regulations, are progressing and the company believes the acquisition will likely close in the early part of the calendar 2020.
While the ultimate effect of the coronavirus is difficult to estimate, Nvidia lowered its revenue outlook for the first quarter of fiscal 2021 by $100 million to account for the potential impact. Nvidia will pay its next quarterly cash dividend of $0.16 per share on March 20, 2020, to all shareholders of record on February 28, 2020.
For the fourth quarter, gaming revenue jumped by 56% backed by higher sales of GeForce GPUs and SoCs for gaming platforms. Professional Visualization revenue increased by 13% helped by the strength in desktop and notebook workstations. Data Center revenue climbed by 43% on hyper-scale and vertical industry end customers.
The company has been working in the Automotive sector as the segment achieved flat revenue for the fourth quarter. OEM and other revenue increased by 31% on growth in entry-level GPUs for PC OEMs.
The company is expected to be beneficial by the 5G, genomics, robotics, and autonomous vehicles as well as rendering and cloud gaming. This comes after the artificial intelligence breakthroughs in language understanding, conversational AI and recommendation engines.