What a strange stretch it’s been for the graphics card market, particularly for Nvidia. At the moment, multiple factors have led the company to drop…
What a strange stretch it’s been for the graphics card market, particularly for Nvidia. At the moment, multiple factors have led the company to drop its guidance for Q4 2019 by half a billion dollars. Revenue expectations for the quarter are now $2.2 billion, down from $2.7 billion. According to CNBC, Nvidia shares dropped 12% after the new figures were announced.
According to Nvidia, and also what we can see with our own eyes, timing played a role in the current situation. While riding high on its Pascal architecture wins, the cryptomining boom threw everything out of whack for Nvidia. Demand spiked, and for a while there, it was hard to find any graphics cards to buy, let alone for a reasonable price. In an investor letter (PDF), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the company adjusted production in response, but then demand dropped off.
That left Nvidia with lots of inventory, largely mid-range Pascal GPUs, at a bad time—right around a new architecture launch. “We delayed the planned production ramp of several new products to allow excess channel inventory to deplete,” wrote Huang.
