Nvidia Could Shine Again When It Reports On Wednesday

Nvidia NVDA will report quarterly results next week, and the year-over-year comparisons will once again be stunning as the company continues to dominate the graphics processing unit (GPU) market. Last year, it was a fairly new market as data centers sought to deploy GPUs and related hardware to support the expansion of artificial intelligence technology to their enterprise customers.

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Nvidia is having a strange fiscal year – Wednesday's report covers the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024, which ended on January 29th. Since the year-over-year comparison of quarterly results will be so extreme, here is a look at the last four fiscal years of quarterly results as well as consensus estimates from analysts surveyed by FactSet for the quarter published on Wednesday. Sales figures are in the millions.

	Estimate for the quarter ending January 29, 2024	The quarter ended on October 29, 2023	The quarter ended on July 30, 2023	The quarter ended on April 30, 2023	The quarter ended on January 29, 2023
Sales	$20,374	$18,120	$13,507	$7,192	$6,051
Change compared to the same quarter of the previous year	237%	206%	101%	-13%	-21%
Change from previous quarter	12%	34%	88%	19%	2%
Earnings per share	$4.59	$3.71	$2.48	$0.82	$0.57
Change compared to the same quarter of the previous year	704%	1262%	850%	29%	-52%
Change from previous quarter	24%	50%	202%	44%	110%
Source: FactSet

Nvidia's quarterly revenue increased in the quarter that ended April 30 and accelerated from there. For the quarter reported next week, year-over-year sales growth is expected to be incredibly high again. However, analysts expect sequential quarterly revenue growth to slow to 12% from 34% in the previous quarter.

Read: Nvidia is expected to be the best performer in the S&P 500 by 2025

Ken Laudan, portfolio manager of the Buffalo Large Cap Fund BUFEX BUIEX, said in an interview with MarketWatch on Thursday that analysts' estimates are conservative because even “hyperscalers” among data center operators have “bought all the GPUs they can get.”

He expects 2024 to be another year in which the “AI enablers,” or companies that make GPUs and related devices, such as Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSM, as well as cloud service providers (Microsoft Corp. MSFT , Amazon.com Inc. AMZN and Alphabet GOOGL

) will continue to dominate AI-related investments.

Laudan expects the focus of AI expansion to shift to “AI adapters” in 2025 or later. He described this group as “software-centric companies that sell their customers a large-language AI model on top of their enterprise or vertical software stack.” This could include companies like Adobe Inc. ADBE, ServiceNow Inc. NOW, Salesforce.com Inc. CRM , MongoDB Inc. MDB and Snowflake Inc. SNOW, he said.

More coverage of Nvidia:

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