SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Nvidia Corp. shares jumped nearly 12 percent in extended trading Thursday after the computer chip maker offered a revenue forecast that topped Wall Street’s forecasts.
Jen-Hsun Huang, an Nvidia co-founder who has served as its CEO since 1993, credited strong consumer demand for laptops with its GeForce graphics chip. The outlook provided some relief for investors who have seen the Santa Clara-based company’s shares fall about 50 percent over the past six months on worries about its competitiveness, particularly with rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
The latest numbers show that Nvidia’s efforts against AMD may be paying off, and that it is benefiting from its push into smartphones and tablets with a chip called Tegra.
“The future of computing is mobile and visual. With Tegra’s momentum and our growing GPU businesses, we are ideally positioned to lead the industry forward,” Huang said in a statement.
Net income was $151.6 million, or 25 cents per share, second fiscal quarter, which ended July 31. Excluding items, the company earned 32 cents per share, ahead of the 25 cents per share analysts had predicted on that basis, according to a poll by FactSet.
A year ago, the company posted a loss of $141.0 million, or 25 cents per share.
Revenue rose 25 percent to $1 billion, in line with analysts’ predictions.
For the fiscal third quarter, the company expects that revenue will rise 4 percent to 6 percent sequentially, which translates to a range of $1.06 billion to $1.08 billion, ahead of analysts’ expectation of $1.05 billion.
The numbers come at a tough time for the PC industry. The U.S. and European PC markets are contracting amid economic worries. Sales are growing internationally, but the real stars are tablets and smartphones, whose growth is supercharged. The emergence of companies such as Nvidia in those markets has posed a problem for other chip industry heavyweights, especially Intel Corp., whose presence in the new mobile devices is more limited.
Nvidia’s shares rose $1.59, or 11.9 percent, to $15 in extended trading, after the results were reported. They had finished the regular trading session up $1.07, or 8.7 percent, at $13.41.
