NVIDIA CEO expects growth in mobile chip business for Q3, sees strong fiscal 2013 overall

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was on hand at an investors conference this week and he said that revenue for the company for fiscal 2013 would beat Wall Street expectations. Analysts had predicted $4.45 billion for NVIDIA and the company is expected to post figures in the $4.7 billion to $5 billion range. Huang also expects the gross margin at NVIDIA to remain flat at 51% to 53% with growth across the entire range of NVIDIA graphics and mobile processor lines.

The news was good for investors and sent stock prices up 5.5% in after hours trading reports the WSJ. Huang had stated previously that mobile growth would be flat for Q3. The CEO also noted that NVIDIA is too new to the mobile market to be able to provide detailed forecasts for sales. Huang also noted that some of the conservative outlook was based on unknowns that are caused by the bevy of patent litigations between tablet makers.

Looking into the future Huang also noted that new devices running the quad-core NVIDIA chips should hit stores in Q3 or Q4 putting them in time for the holiday season, but slightly later than the original projections. Next year, Huang expects that NVIDIA's Arm-based chips will be inside Windows 8 tablets with the time frame predicted to be the end of 2012. NVIDIA will also be sampling new chips next year that integrate the Tegra mobile processor with wireless baseband tech thanks to its purchase of Icera. These chips are expected to be a hit in the mainstream market where cost is an important factor.

Some of the delay in getting products using the NVIDIA quad-core chips to market is to allow the industrial design to be "as wonderful as possible" according to Huang. He also added that some of the time is being spent to fine tune and improve performance as well.

[via WSJ]