At the latest Goldman Sachs technology conference, Nvidia’s new CFO Colette Kress delivered a forty-minute speech, almost half of which focused on “solving the overproduction crisis in the gaming graphics card space”.
She said that graphics card prices have reached almost normal levels and that the company will be able to resume growth in product deliveries by next spring. She also confirmed that Nvidia will soon launch a new graphics architecture.
According to the report, in the past five years, Nvidia’s gaming division revenue has grown by an average of 20% per year, with about half of that coming from an increase in the average price of graphics cards and half from an increase in the number of graphics cards sold. Since the epidemic, NVIDIA’s gaming division revenue has increased by 70%, with the main reason being the increase in average price and, of course, the increase in shipments.
In the long run, NVIDIA management sees an opportunity for further growth in the average selling price of gaming graphics cards, but conditions are not conducive to that right now.
First of all, they have already accumulated many current generation graphics cards in their warehouse. Secondly, when the epidemic was severe, and the mining boom period, they had already formed such a high base that it would be difficult to surpass what was achieved at that time in the current economic conditions.
Regarding the consequences of the mining boom, Colette Kress does not dare to quantify the impact of this factor on the company’s sales in 2021, although she did her analysis after the last “cryptocurrency boom”.
The newly promoted Nvidia CFO believes the impact of aftermarket graphics cards on current sales is limited. But this is different from the used car market, where it is very difficult to assess the condition of used graphics cards, which is why gamers prefer to buy new ones.
Ms. Kress mentioned that (gamers) demand for GPUs has been very high, but many finished products are still backlogged in the warehouse, which is the reason why the company side is forced to reduce the delivery volume.
"Our ultimate goal is to meet that demand and to make those people understand that GPU prices are now close to normal, which is what we expect."
NVIDIA’s chief financial officer said the company worked hard to get rid of excess inventory through pricing methods to stimulate demand and expects normalization to resume after a few quarters.
By the end of the fourth business quarter, which is January, it will be possible to talk about normalizing the inventory of graphics cards in the warehouse, Kress said. During the period from February to April, shipments of gaming graphics chips from NVIDIA are expected to grow again.
NVIDIA will be making a big showing at GTC 2022 this month, where you will see the next generation of Ada Lovelace series GPU products. According to the previous revelations, the odds are that the RTX 4090 will go first, then the RTX 4080 will be launched next month, and optimistically, the RTX 4070 will also be seen.
