NVIDIA’s chief financial officer, Colette Kress, attended the Raymond James Institutional Investors Broker conference call, which took place yesterday in a virtual capacity instead of the usual location in Orlando, Florida.
The company’s CFO made some interesting comments in the question and answer session, particularly regarding the highly successful launch of the Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3000 Series graphics cards.
We launched our Ampere-based 3000 series GPUs for games early last year and it has been a huge success, probably the most successful game launch we’ve ever had. With a second generation RTX, we now also have a list of more than three dozen games for general lightning tracking and just a sharp performance improvement with our 30 series, the demand has been incredible.
We started launching this product, starting on several of our high quality cards. Our 3070, 3080 and 3090 have been on the market for several months now. During this time, it is showing the capacity of the 3000 Amperes series not only to our real players, but also to support the creators and broadcasters who use it. So we hope to see the 30 series continue to launch new products as we go along.
Our last product we launched was the RTX 3060. The 60’s class is the sweet spot for gamers, great performance at a great price. Class 60 is essentially preferred by our iCafes that you will find in the Asia Pacific area, as well as by many of our system integrators who build custom general systems. The 3060 was launched last week. It ran out in hours. It was carefully designed for gamers and especially gamers, and they were excited about it.
Now we have the Ampere architecture starting at $ 329. So, we have a big price difference to support any type of player, depending on what they want to enter the market and pay for. All of this is well below the cost of a new console.
Later in the question and answer session, NVIDIA’s CFO went so far as to say that the recent cryptographic surge may not have influenced the company’s gaming quarter due to existing problems (and will likely continue, unfortunately) with Ampere. Overall, given the strong demand, NVIDIA estimates that growth will continue this year, following the promising previous quarter.
Our gaming quarter, for example, probably would have been the same with or without encryption, because we have supply restrictions. So, let’s continue to watch this. We believe that our CMP product will allow us better visibility to understand the size of cryptography in our quarter.
[…] This is, of course, a situation that we would love to have more optionality. We would love to have more general offer. But remember, our problem is that the demand is strong. Demand is strong and we believe that we will grow very well, as this demand will continue throughout this year ahead.