51 percent increase in Tegra SoC sales boost NVIDIA Q3 profits

Nvidia has handily surpassed its third quarter revenue targets for the year and has seen strong sales growth over the past 12 months.

The computer graphics giant collected $1.23 billion in the third quarter, up 16 percent from a year earlier and up 11 percent from the second quarter. NVIDIA has generated $3.43 billion in total revenue from the first three quarters of the year, up 15 percent from a year earlier. Although the bulk of NVIDIA’s revenues still come from its GeForce GPU division, income from its mobile Tegra processor line-up is becoming an increasingly important earner for the company.

In the third quarter, Tegra processor revenue totalled $168 million, compared with $111 million during the same period last year. Year over year this marks a 51 percent increase in sales revenue and a 6 percent increase compared to the previous quarter. For a sense of scale, GPUs accounted for 81 percent of all income in Q3 while the Tegra line-up makes up 14 percent of NVIDIA’s income. However, mobile processor sales are growing at a faster rate.

Nvidia’s existing range of Tegra powered mobile devices, its own SHIELD tablet and the new Nexus 9 are driving NVIDIA into direct competition with the big mobile SoC designers, but there’s another more surprising area of growth for the Tegra range. Revenues from Tegra powered automotive entertainment systems have almost doubled over the past year, with total installations surpassing the 6 million mark. The majority of growth in NVIDIA’s Tegra platform seems to be coming from this market rather than mobile products.

NVIDIA also generated $66 million from an existing patent licensing agreement with Intel.

In summary, NVIDIA’s Tegra business is still a small but growing part of the company’s portfolio. Mobile revenues aren’t quite as large as the Tegra figures suggests due to strong growth in automotive sales. NVIDIA’s mobile success looks to hinge on its latest Denver CPU variant of the Tegra K1.