Earnings Call: Q4 2015

Feb 11, 2015

Good afternoon. My name is George, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the NVIDIA Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer period. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, Wednesday, February 11, 2015. I will now turn the call over to Ms. Colette Kress, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer with NVIDIA. Ms. Kress, you may begin your conference. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to NVIDIA's conference call for the 4th quarter of fiscal 2015. With us on the call today from NVIDIA is Jensen Wong, President and Chief Executive Officer. I'd also like to introduce Arnab Chanda, who joined us last week as the Head of Investor Relations. Arnab and Raj will closely work to support the investment community. I'd like to remind you today's call is being webcast live on NVIDIA's Investor Relations website. It is also being recorded. You can hear a replay by telephone until February 18, 2015. The webcast will be available for replay up until the next quarter's conference call to discuss Q1 results. The content of today's call is NVIDIA's property. It cannot be reproduced or transcribed without our written prior consent. During the course of this call, we may make forward looking statements based on our current expectations. These forward looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties and our actual results may differ materially. For a discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release, our most recent Form 10 Q and the reports that we may file on Form 8 ks with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All of our statements are based as of today, February 11, 2015, based on information currently available to us. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements. During this call, we will discuss non GAAP financial measures. You may find a reconciliation of these non GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in our CFO commentary, which is posted on our website. With that, let's start. We achieved record revenue for the Q4 and the full year with impressive growth in each of our market specialized platforms. NVIDIA's strategy of creating an ecosystem in gaming, enterprise graphics, accelerate computing and automotive continues to make excellent headway. Our gaming platforms grew more than 30% year on year and accelerated in the 4th quarter driven by our 10th generation Maxwell Processors and the vibrant gaming market. Launched in September, our GeForce GTX 980 and 970 GPUs continue to be enthusiastically received. The Maxwell architecture provides new capabilities such as real time dynamic global illumination, which simulates the true interaction of light with the environment and is the most energy efficient GPU architecture ever created. We added to our lineup the GTX 960, which brings Maxwell to $199 what we see as the gaming market sweet spot. Powered by 10 24 CUDA cores, it plays even some of the most demanding titles on 60 frames per second on full HD displays and it leaves plenty of headroom for overclockers. The GTX 960 will let gamers enjoy the latest games at quality and performance greater than even the best gaming consoles at half the price. There are now more than 50,000,000 PCs with GeForce Experience. Our application for the gaming ecosystem that optimizes the user settings for each title and enables players to record and share their victories. In the month of November alone, GeForce Experience users downloaded our drivers over 30,000,000 times. GeForce Experience brings the simplicity and the community benefits of a console to the PC. NVIDIA powered the holiday season's 2 best reviewed Android tablets, the Google Nexus 9 and our own Shield tablet, which are based on our Tegra K1 Processor. More than a dozen media outlets recommended Shield in their holiday gift giving guides. Over the course of the quarter, Shield, which has pioneered a premium gaming experience for tablets, became one of the very first devices to be upgraded to the Google's latest OS Android 5.0 Lollipop. The NVIDIA the product in recent months and experienced the benefits of GPU accelerated virtualization. They range from large institutions such as the University of Southern California, leading manufacturers such as Airbus and Lockheed Martin and defense providers like Raytheon. Enterprise virtualization leaders continue to deploy Grid. Just last week, VMware rolled out the latest version of its v Sphere virtualization software, including full support for our Grid vGPU graphics virtualization technology. Quadro professional graphics continued to maintain market leadership. Refreshed in Q3, the lineup is now being shipped in all major OEMs. For the 6th year in a row, every film nominated for an Academy Award for special effects was made using Quadro. Our accelerated computing platform performed very strongly. Tesla's revenue growth from a year ago exceeded 50% as HPC customers and cloud service providers continue to deploy large GPU powered systems. These provide deep learning capabilities that help enable our amazing capabilities like voice recognition and natural language processing. Using Tesla, our customers have seen dramatic benefits in application performance, radically reducing run times. During quarter, we introduced the Tesla K80 Dual GPU, our new flagship Tesla offering. It provides nearly twice the performance and double the memory bandwidth of its predecessor, the Tesla K40. A single server with Tesla K80 delivers the same performance as 8 servers with our old Fermi generation GPU accelerators for a range of applications. A powerful endorsement of Tesla came just ahead of the recent Supercomputing 2014 show. The U. S. Department of Energy announced that its next generation of supercomputers will utilize Tesla GPU accelerators in conjunction with our powerful new NVIDIA NVLink high speed interconnect technology. These systems will be deployed at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Will be at least 3x faster than today's most powerful systems. These supercomputers will serve scientists across our nation and every field of science to accelerate their research for the next 20 years. Finally, NVIDIA's automotive platforms remain on a sharp upward trajectory, registering better than 80% growth on the year. More than 7,500,000 cars with our technology are now on the road, up from 4,700,000 a year ago. At CES, we announced NVIDIA DRIVE, a computing platform for next generation advanced driver assistance and digital cockpits. NVIDIA DRIVE makes driving safer and more enjoyable by introducing surround vision and auto ballet capabilities. Its cockpit computing platform includes 3 d navigation systems, natural speech and image processing capabilities, dramatically transforming the automotive user interface. NVIDIA DRIVE is the 1st car computing platform, utilizing advances in deep learning. DRIVE will leverage our dramatic advances in deep learning for voice, language and image recognition to enable surrounding and situational awareness in cars. We believe deep learning is the key enabling technology to continue advancements and autonomous driving capabilities. At the heart of NVIDIA DRIVE is the recent announcement of Tegra X1, a 256 core superchip with over 1 teraflops of floating point processing power built on the same Maxwell architecture rolled out only months earlier for high level gaming, TEGRA X1 provides the computational horsepower, computer vision and graphic capabilities for cars that can see and learn. Now let's take a more detailed look at the financials. 4th quarter revenue increased 9% year over year to a record 1 $250,000,000 Growth was driven by strength in gaming, data center, cloud and auto. 4th quarter revenue was up 2% sequentially. The GPU business grew 8% helped by Maxwell GPUs and the seasonal increase in consumer PCs. Overall, Tegra processor sales decreased 33% as growth in our automotive and shield devices was more than offset by lower revenue from smartphone and tablets. Fiscal 20 15 revenue grew 13% to a record $4,680,000,000 In our GPU business, revenue grew 13% in Q4 from a year earlier. Revenue from our PC gaming platforms rose 38% due to the popularity of our high end Maxwell based GTX GPUs. Tesla GPUs for accelerated computing increased strongly driven by large project wins with cloud service providers. Tegra Processors declined 15% from in Q4 from a year ago as smartphone and tablet designs reached the end of their product lifecycle. This was partially offset by the increased revenue from auto infotainment systems, which more than doubled and from Shield Devices. Moving to gross margins. GAAP gross margin was 55.9%, above our outlook for the quarter and up 70 basis points from last quarter. Non GAAP gross margin was 56 0.2%, also above our outlook and was up 70 basis points sequentially. Strength in margins from gaming and accelerating computing was partially offset by those from TEGRA Processors and certain inventory provisions for prior TEGRA architectures. For fiscal 2015, GAAP gross margin was 55.5% and non GAAP gross margin was 55.8%. These full year record levels were led by the strength of our high end GPUs for gaming and accelerated computing. GAAP operating expenses for the Q4 were $468,000,000 Non GAAP operating expenses were 420,000,000 dollars in line with our outlook and inclusive of legal fees associated with our litigation against Samsung and Qualcomm. For fiscal 2015, GAAP operating expenses were $1,840,000,000 and non GAAP operating expenses were 1,660,000,000 dollars The low single digit growth from the previous year represents discipline from our continued management of our investments in both R and D and capital expenditures to enhance return on invested capital. The U. S. Federal R and D tax credit was reinstated for calendar 2014. For the full year, the GAAP effective tax rate was 16.5%, non GAAP was 16.9%, incorporating the U. S. Federal R and D tax credit. For the Q4, GAAP net income was $193,000,000 up 31%, driven by increased operating profit from strong revenue and margins. GAAP earnings per diluted share of $0.35 increased 40% from a year ago quarter reflecting net income growth and share repurchases. For the full year, GAAP net income was $631,000,000 up 43% and GAAP earnings year of 2015, we paid $186,000,000 in cash dividends and repurchased 44,400,000 shares for $814,000,000 As a result, we returned to shareholders $1,000,000,000 during fiscal 2015. Since restarting our capital return program in the Q4 of fiscal 2013, we have returned approximately $2,220,000,000 to shareholders. This represents 111 percent of our cumulative free cash flow for fiscal year 2013 through 2015, reflecting the acceleration of our capital return program from cash generated in prior years. In November of 2014, we announced our ongoing commitment to deliver shareholder value through capital return with the intention to return approximately 600,000,000 dollars in the prior quarter. Inventory at the end of the quarter was $483,000,000 up from $408,000,000 in the prior quarter. The sequential increase included the ramping of our new Maxwell based GPUs and TEGRA based SoCs and Shield devices. Cash flow from operating activities was $443,000,000 up from the $216,000,000 in the prior quarter reflecting higher net income and the annual payment from Intel. Free cash flow was $412,000,000 in the 4th quarter. Depreciation and amortization expense amounted to $54,000,000 capital expenditures were $31,000,000 Now turning to the outlook for the Q1 of fiscal 2016. We expect revenue for the Q1 of 2016 to be $1,160,000,000 plus or minus 2%. Growth year over year is expected from our key platforms, gaming, data center and cloud and automotive. Our GAAP and non GAAP gross margins are expected to be 56.2% and 56.5%, respectively, plus or minus 50 basis points. The gross margin outlook is slightly higher than our Q4 performance, driven by our gaming and accelerated computing platforms. GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $478,000,000 with non GAAP operating expenses of approximately $425,000,000 inclusive of legal fees associated with our litigation against Samsung and Qualcomm. Excluding these legal fees, we expect to maintain our operating expense levels near Q4 levels. GAAP and non GAAP tax rates for the Q1 of fiscal 2016 are expected to be 20%, plus or minus 1%, excluding the benefit of the U. S. Federal R and D tax credit, which expired December of 2014. In summary, we are pleased with our record revenue for the quarter and the full year, which reflects strength across our platforms and businesses. Profitability as measured by earnings per diluted share increased 51% in fiscal 20 15 as our revenue and gross margin growth continue to outpace our investment. This concludes our remarks and Our first question comes from the line of Ross Seymore. He's with Deutsche Bank. And the strong results and guidance. I guess the first question, Jensen, one for you on the TEGRA side of the business. I know that can be inherently lumpy in how it operates, but can you talk about what you envision the biggest drivers in fiscal 2016 will be to get that business on a growth trajectory versus the year over year drop that it's currently running at? Yes, Ross, first of all, thanks. Our strategy for TEGRA is to focus on automotive, gaming and wherever opportunities arise in OEMs, we surely will entertain it. But our fundamental focus is automotive and gaming. And you already heard Colette say that our automotive business nearly doubled year over year. Our gaming business is really strong and we have some exciting things that we love to share with you in the near future. But that's those are our two focuses for TEGRA. And if you look at the opportunities that we're pursuing in the area of automotive, obviously, in the area of automotive. Obviously, more and more cars are becoming computerized cars. And at CES, we announced a brand new platform called DRiV. And Drive is basically a mobile superchip, a mobile supercomputer with a ton of software on top and it provides for 3 basic functionalities. The first is a very advanced digital cockpit. You know that we're incredibly good at computer graphics and the things that we can do in a car with more and more displays showing up in the car is pretty wonderful. The second is a technology called surround vision. Beyond surround view, which is basically cameras connected around the car, surround vision not only allows you to see the images from the videos around the car, but also create a virtual environment around it and using computer vision technology, keep your car alert of the surroundings. And the third is using a technology called deep learning that has been revolutionized recently and it's something that we're very much at the center of. Using deep learning, we can do voice processing, natural language processing and understanding of imagery, so that the car can be more situational and environmentally aware. All of those technologies I just described, we believe will help pave the path to the self driving car. Car. In the area of mobile gaming, the gaming market as you know is huge and it's growing quite rapidly internationally. It's about a $70,000,000,000 business now. We know that mobile cloud is probably one of the most important disruptions in the history of computing. And yet there's really no computer gaming architecture that serves mobile cloud very well. And that's what Shield is all about to create the platform that allows mobile cloud to bring gaming to a lot more people. And we think that by doing so, we'll be able to So, So our Tegra business model is about focusing on automotive and gaming. Great. Thank you. I guess as my follow-up, a bigger picture question for the GPU side of the equation. You talked about the GeForce business being up 38% year over year and GPUs as an entirety were up 13%. Is there any color you can provide just into the size of the buckets within your GPU segment, so we can get a little more granular on how we model those very disparate growth rates, whether it's the 4 segments you break out in your segment definition and the CFO commentary or any other color you give that would be helpful? Thank you. We serve 4 markets: gaming, automotive, enterprise graphics and high performance computing and cloud computing. Those are the 4 major segments that we 4 major markets that we serve. GPUs serve gaming, enterprise graphics and cloud. Gaming as we said earlier has grown as you mentioned 38% year over year. Our Enterprise Graphics business, the workstation business is relatively flattish. However, our enterprise virtualization virtualized graphics platform called Grid about doubled year over year. And our Tesla business, which is our accelerated computing business about doubled year over year. The PC OEM business declined. The PC OEM business represents, I would say, low teens maybe approximately part of our overall business. We've been talking about this decline for some time now. And this year, again, it declined. Obviously, the PC OEM business representing umpteenth percent of our overall GPU business represents a substantially lower part of its profits, because the gross margins at OEMs tends to be much lower. But nonetheless, it declined year over year. Okay. So looking at those segments then, gaming grew, enterprise grew, cloud computing and high performance computing grew, OEM business, PC OEM business declined from a low umteen percent level. Okay? Great. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Our next question comes from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead. Hi. This is Shankar on behalf of Vivek. Just a follow-up on that GPU breakdown. Could you give a color on what's the based on the guidance you're giving for Q1, how do those individual segments kind of play out? Sure. We guided seasonally down. And of course, as usual, we'll see how it turns out. But if you look at the position of each one of our platforms, our position in gaming is very strong. The gaming market globally is quite robust. We're still seeing gaming growth all around the world and the production value of games is increasing all the time. And whenever the production value of a game increases, it requires more GPU performance. For the very first time in history, a game console has come out that uses essentially a PC architecture and its performance is substantially higher than the average PC performance. And so as a result, we see a lot of adoption to our higher end GPUs and that's good. We also expect that the Tesla platform continues to be quite robust. We know now that GPUs are wonderful processors for massively parallel applications like Deep learning could be used for voice recognition, natural language processing, image recognition, video tagging, all kinds of interesting applications that are made possible because of cloud computing and because there are so many sensors and images and voice being uploaded into the cloud. That's one of the drivers for Tesla and Tesla business has doubled year over year from a fairly large base now. My expectation is that this coming year Tesla will remain on that trajectory. And I hope that Tesla will grow very nicely this coming year. Grid, another part of our GPU business is all about enterprise virtualization. Because of Grid, we're now able to companies are able to now virtualize beyond the data center all the way to the end user computing device. For the very first time, it is now possible to virtualize graphics intensive applications and make it possible for people to enjoy their applications wherever they are. So now you could be virtualized, it could be more secure, you can be more mobile, enjoy graphics on any device. That platform is growing nicely. A year ago, we had about 400 trials. Today, we have well over 1,000. And recently, the most the largest enterprise virtualization company in the world VMware has integrated Grid into vSphere and it has been it has gone to production. And so we're seeing quite a bit of momentum from that production release. So these platforms are all growing nicely and I expect that this year to help drive our growth. Great. So I just have a follow-up on the autos business. I know you have you talked about the different products and features that you have been working on and those seem to be the maybe a high end side of auto. But can you talk about the products that you have for the mid and low end? Because looks like that might be the area where the scale is. And also talk about how you are you plan to increase the gross margin for Hot Wheels business, because it looks like it's in the low 30s, if I just back out all the numbers based on your reported numbers. Well, the answer to the second question, I know better than the answer to the first, so I'll just answer that one first. The way to add the way to increase our gross margins is to continue to innovate and increase the amount of value added that we bring. And if you recall a long time ago, meaning about 10 years ago, NVIDIA's gross margins was about 30 some rich. Today, our gross margins are surely much, much higher than 35%. And so my expectation is to do the same on the NVIDIA DRIVE platform. It's intensely software rich. I think somebody said that today a car is about 10% software, but soon the car will be about 80% software and I think that's right. I think that's right. I mean in the future with electric cars, you have obviously still very sophisticated drivetrain and such, but the car is going to be largely a computer with software. And that's where we can add an enormous amount of value. And that's what drive is all about, adding value through a very powerful processor of course, but most of the capabilities I described from the digital cockpit to surround vision to deep learning is all about software. It's all the software that runs on top of TX-one. So that's number 1. Your question about high end versus midrange, I believe that more and more of the car's value will be delivered through software. And if you have to deliver it through software then the processor underneath it is obviously more and more important. And my expectation is that great computing platforms will extend well into mid range and into the low end part of the marketplace. And that's just that's a belief. And just as I believe a long time ago that the car is going to be one of our most sophisticated computers, which has obviously at this point coming true. My sense is that it's going to continue to go down that path and we're going to see a lot more computation capability inside the car. To the point where I actually believe that every car will have a good processor, the high end cars will have many good processors. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Ramsay. He's with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead. Yes. Thank you for taking my question. I think the first one, Jensen, you made some interesting comments earlier about the need for a, I guess, a fully virtualized mobile gaming experience. I assume you're meeting across desktop, tablet, smartphone, cloud, etcetera. It one of the things that strikes me is obviously there's the suit going on between yourselves and Qualcomm, Samsung, etcetera. And your market share within the mobile graphics business, when you think about smartphones, is fairly small from a hardware perspective. So do you see that changing dramatically going forward? And if not, do you see the gaming mobile device market bifurcating from like the traditional smartphone market going forward? Yes, Matt, thanks a lot for that question. First of all, mobile is much more than phones. Mobile is a fundamentally new way of designing computers. And I believe that mobile will impact almost every segment of computing as we know it. It will impact refrigerators. That's not a phone. It will impact drones. That's not a phone. It will impact earrings. That's not a phone. It will impact watches. That's not a phone. It will impact game consoles. That is not a phone. It will impact cars and that's not a phone. I think mobile is going to be important in all kinds of computing devices. When I say mobile, that's what I mean. I don't mean mobile as in the mobile phone. Mobile technology is real important. I also believe that mobile cloud in combination is one of the most powerful computing forces that the computer industry has ever known. Because of mobile cloud, we've been able to extend the capabilities and the benefits of computing to billions of people, whereas in the PC era, we were able to benefit 100 of millions of people. And yet no one has yet created a game platform around mobile cloud. The technology of mobile cloud, the power of mobile cloud, the architecture of mobile cloud, so that we can extend gaming not to tens of millions of game console users, but billions of users. I think that that's the great opportunity. And I don't have anything to announce today, but that's what we're trying to endeavor. So I appreciate you asking that question. I think it's going to be a really big opportunity for us. Thank you for that perspective. As a follow-up, this one for Colette. Obviously, you guys have done a great job in returning cash to shareholders and announced a new plan for the next fiscal year. Maybe as the last fiscal year ends, maybe you could update us on your onshore and offshore cash balances, if you could, and any perspectives on the difference in cash flow onshore and offshore? Thanks. Thanks, Matt, for the question. Again, we are looking at a cash balance lower than where we ended at fiscal year 2014 due to our $1,000,000,000 return through shareholders, but also the increase in cash flow. Nothing has materially changed in terms of our cash flow from international and our cash flow in the U. S. So again, the majority of our cash flow tends to arrive from international overall operations. We have about the same mix of overall U. S. Cash versus international cash, a little lower than where we ended at the end of fiscal year 2014. But we feel very confident with our overall capital return program for fiscal year 2016 and the overall cash flow prospects. So I think we're well aligned there. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of David Wong. He's with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead. Thanks very much. Can you give us some idea what percentage of TEGRA is now automotive? And just a clarification, when you say that automotive infotainment more than doubled year over year, do you mean all automotive? Is there some other segment than infotainment or yes? Most of our automotive today is infotainment. Some of more and more people are starting to do what Audi has done with their really amazing virtual cockpit, where infotainment and digital clusters merged into 1. And digital clusters is much harder than infotainment. And so with Tegra, with our automotive platform, we're able to easily merge the 2. And so you'll see some more examples of that in the future. But initially, it's largely infotainment, some amount of digital clusters, if that's your question. And between automotive Shield, our gaming platform that represents the vast majority of tech right now. Okay, great. And you also mentioned Tesla more than doubled from an already substantial base. Can you give us some idea of the size of Tesla today? I'm sorry? Tesla? Tesla. Tesla, yes. Tesla is several $100,000,000 multiple $100,000,000 now. On a quarterly basis? On an annual basis. Right. Okay, great. Thank you. And it grew nearly doubled year over year. Great. Our next question comes from the line of Christopher Rolland. He's with FBR Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thanks for the question. Can you guys talk a little bit about your eventual move to 20 nanometers? And it seems like you guys are staying on 28 for perhaps a bit longer than you have prior nodes. And if you are staying here for longer, is it safe to assume that you can get some gross margin uplift year over year? Well, let's see. We're always moving to the next node. And Tegra X1, the mobile superchip that we announced at CES is 20 nanometer. And so we're always moving forward. But the equation is much more complicated than that. And the reason for that is because we have the ability because of the fact that we architect and innovate from architecture all the way to software. We have the ability to improve our performance and efficiency and features on all of those dimensions. We can improve at the at the architectural level using the same process. We can innovate at the design level using the same process and same architecture. We can innovate at the process level. We can innovate at the software level. We can innovate at the algorithm level. And because we control all of that, we have the ability to move the needle forward in multiple dimensions. And so if you look at Maxwell, Maxwell is an unbelievable energy efficient processor. And because of the because of the energy efficiency of Maxwell, not only did we make all of GeForce higher performance, lower power, quieter, We were also able to take that GPU just a few months later and put it into a Tegra X1 and performance is really quite shocking. And so we could innovate on multiple levels as a company. That's one of the benefits. But overall, we're moving forward all the time in process technology. Okay, great. And then also at CES, love the automated driving stuff, but I was a little confused on the way that you're positioning yourself in that market, particularly sort of you against or either talked to another person, they say you're partnering. And I talked to another person, they say you're going head to head. I talked to another person, they say you're partnering. And I talked to another person at the booth who said that you guys are really enabling third parties to go after Mobileye. So how do we think about yourself positioning yourself in that market? Are you really going after them there? Oh, wow. I appreciate that question. I think it's a great question. And the answer is actually really simple. I mean, we're in 2 different things. We make 2 different things. And so we're very complementary. Mobile Eye, think of it as a computer vision signal processor ISP, if you will. It's connected to the camera. And they do wonderful work in computer vision in that area. The DRIVE platform is a computing platform. Just as a phone has ISP as well as the application processor, in this case, we're the application processor, if you will. This application processor has been designed to be incredible in the three areas that I talked about digital cockpit, surround vision and deep learning based computer vision. And so many of the customers, in fact most of the customers that I know where there's ADAS work being done, we're both involved. And so we're connected to many mobile devices and we're delighted by that. But even if you're able to detect images and objects, you still need to do something to process that information. And we could do it we could reconstruct the surround environment. We still have to drive the infotainment the infotainment in the digital cluster. And of course, we could apply higher level deep learning algorithms to figure out what to do with the objects that you detect. And so I see ourselves very, very complementary. And of course, because we're a general purpose processor and it's 1 teraflops of computing, we can do a lot of things for computer vision. And that's probably where people are questioning the overlap. But from where I see it, we're very complementary. Great. Thanks, guys. Our next question comes from the line of Blayne Curtis. He's with Barclays. Please go ahead. Thanks for taking my question. Jensen, I just want to follow-up on in terms of the auto opportunity, just your dollar how you see your dollar content progressing? You're talking about selling modules, multiple processors and then more importantly monetizing the software. And then if you could talk about some of the timing here, I think the auto OEMs have become a little quicker. Where are you today in terms of the generation of products you're selling, TEGR3 or K1? And when could you see some of these more advanced systems actually hitting revenue? Yes, I really appreciate the question. And you're exactly right. The dynamics are that more and more of the value of a car is going to have to go into its computing, the hearts and soul of its computing platform. And our expectations about a computer car and the software capabilities we can bring to bear over mechanical, electronic type of widgety y things is going to grow substantially. 2nd, the fact of the matter is you can't spend 5 years designing your car anymore. Consumer electronics moves way too fast. People's expectations are set by what they have in their phones. And so you've got to move faster. And the most progressive car companies are moving at the speed of light now. They've taken their design cycle from 5 to 3 and I think I'm seeing them moving down to 2 potentially 1. And so this is going to be a brand new automotive industry. And the third thing that you mentioned is the content. Well, if you think about cars as a chip opportunity and it's an application processor opportunity like an infotainment like a smartphone, then of course it's in tens of dollars. But I actually see the car as a multi $1,000 computer opportunity. Some are one computer, some are many Some are one computer, some are many computers. And we're a computer company. We're a visual computing company. We are software rich. All of the applications that I mentioned, the capabilities I mentioned are all software. We provide the entire BSP. We're one of the few companies in the automotive industry that can provide literally end to end solutions. And that's what DRiV is about. DRiV is a computer platform, software and all. And we provide capabilities across the board, okay? So I see the card long term as quite a large opportunity for us, not a chip opportunity, because we're not chip companies anymore. Thanks. And just to recollect quickly on gross margin, I think you mentioned gaming as the tailwind for gross margin. Is that more a function of just Maxwell and pricing? Or you're actually seeing gaming not down as much seasonally? And then as you look out the rest of the year, how should we think of that tailwind? Yes. Thanks for the question. So our gross margin guidance is just for Q1. We do see seasonal effects as we usually go from Q4 to Q1. We believe gaming is still a driver, just due to the mix of the type that we're selling into the market. And we've also talked about accelerated computing and cloud also as a driver of our guidance in Q1. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Harlan Sur with JPMorgan. Please go ahead. Hi. Good afternoon and great job on the quarterly execution. MaxSold is driving a solid SAM expansion into the notebook market. I think you guys started to see that in Q3 with that segment up 2x year over year. Customer gaming notebook platforms were pretty visible during the holiday season. So I apologize if I missed this, but how much did the notebook gaming business grow for you guys in Q4? And maybe Jensen, if you can just help us quantify where the attach rates could go? And how much this expands your GPU gaming opportunity? Yes. I really appreciate the question. Maxwell made it possible first of all the background. Maxwell made it possible for the very first time the ability to put a high end GPU in a laptop and deliver a desktop quality experience. So you can now get a laptop with a GeForce in it and have and run AAA titles at 1080p and at quality levels and frame rates higher than the state of the art game consoles. That's pretty amazing. You can now just have a nice and thin laptop and it's better than a game console. It's better than a game console. And so people are quite excited about that. Maxwell made that possible. We see this business growing well over 100% per year at the moment simply because it's off of a small base. This has been an underserved part of the market for some time. We really welcome just about every company in the world, laptop company in the world into this opportunity from Asus, the MSI, the Gigabyte, recently even HP came into this. And I say even because, of course, HP is largely focused on enterprises and yet this opportunity so significant that their notebook business decided to jump into the GeForce platform. Of course, Dell, of course, Alienware, of course, Fraser. We're just seeing a lot of support from every notebook maker in the world, because this is an underserved market, if you will. And with the Maxwell Energy Efficiency, for the first time, we're able to deliver an experience that quite frankly is pretty amazing. And so where do I see the attach? I guess I don't think about attach anymore. And the reason for that is because PC OEM business is not really our focus in the sense that it's already umpteen a low umpteen part of our business. The way we think about that business is that's really a gaming business. And how big can it be really is a function of how many gamers are there in the world. And I think the numbers are actually quite substantial are really quite substantial. So I see this as a growth opportunity for some time. Thanks for that, Jensen. And then Colette, nice job on your part and on the team's part on the OpEx discipline in Q4 and here in Q1. How should we think about the OpEx trajectory for the remainder of the year? Yes. We really just are here to focus on our Q1 guidance and what we can see at this time. When we get further into the year, we'll talk about the full year. But again, we do just want to balance our Q1 with the investments that we need to make with again looking at the efficiencies across the arc and what we can do. So I think that's a consistent theme and you've seen us play that out in fiscal year 2015 and our guidance for Q1 is about that same. Great. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Sanjay Chaurasia with Nomura. Please go ahead. Hey, gentlemen. One question on your grid GPUs. My impression was that you were very excited about the upcoming VMware release and it has G8 obviously. I was just wondering if you does it give you better visibility in terms of upcoming deployments? And do you see that all the challenges that remain for the customers that were trialing Grid, they're ready to deploy that or you see there are some missing pieces. So I just wanted to get some color on that. Thanks. Well, with VMware's integration, we're now able to engage probably some 80% of the world's enterprises. Just about anybody who has virtualized their enterprise has done so with VMware's technology. And so I think that is a really big deal. And if you look at our trials, we went from about 400 last year at this time to well over 1,000 this year at this time. Our revenues doubled. My sense is that there's no reason for that pace to slow. And we'll see how it turns out. But I would think that my intuition would be kind of like yours that if anything it ought to accelerate. But there's really the most important thing about enterprise virtualization all the way to the client is to have deep integration with VMware and we've done that and they've done a great job. They've been a great partner. And as a follow-up, Jensen, you guys indicated some large project wins with cloud service provider on Tesla side. Could you give us some color on what exactly is the use case? You did talk about deep learning and image processing. Just wanted to understand a little bit if you could give us more color. And where exactly are you on that ramp? Is that kind of a lumpy deployment that you saw? Or is that something very early in the ramp and we could continue to see that grow? Yes. A lot of these projects are quite confidential. But I'll highlight 2 that have been public. Baidu announced that they built a supercomputer based on Tesla for deep learning and it's used for natural language processing, Another one that was public, I just saw yesterday and this is actually quite a monumental event. The event is for the very first time in history, a computer is able to understand images better than humans. This is a milestone event in the development of neural nets, the development of computer vision and it was announced by Microsoft yesterday. A human has the best human has the ability to detect and make errors on about 5.1% of the time or recognize 95% of the images that they're presented. For the very first time in history, a computer is now able to recognize over 95% better than a human. Recognize over 95% better than a human. That I think is really quite a record. We will remember this day for a long time and look back on it. And they also said that their deep neural nets were trained using NVIDIA GPUs. And so you could see that these are couple of the examples and they were public about it. In the coming event, there's a GTC coming up. It's on March 15? 17. 17, I'm sorry. March 17, our annual GPU Technology Conference. This year, we're going to highlight deep learning and computer vision. I really, really encourage people who love computer technology to come and see some of the largest computer companies and most influential computer designers in the world talk about using GPUs in these areas. It's just a huge event. And this is going to be the largest GTC we've ever held. It's right here in San Jose. And this could be the mecca for deep learning. Our next question comes from Rajvindra Gill with Needham. Please go ahead. Yes. Thanks and congrats on great results as well. Could you just talk a little bit about your transition to a platform company? You definitely over the last few years have transformed from a component supplier to more of a platform based business where you're getting higher margins. I'm just wondering kind of where we are in that development cycle and how do you look at the overall business model over the next 3 to 5 years for the company? Yes. I really appreciate the question. First of all, if you look at our company 10 years ago, 10 years ago, we were 100% PC OEMs largely. Maybe it wasn't 100%, but it was close. And now we're less than we're only umpteen%, substantially less than 20%. And so the company has been transitioning to this new model with our own platforms, largely software and they serve 4 vertical markets. These 4 vertical markets have a characteristic that really, really benefits from great visual computing technology. And those 4 vertical markets as I've mentioned is gaming, it's automotive, it's enterprise graphics and it's high performance computing and cloud computing. And our PC OEM business is continuing to decline because PCs have largely become good enough and it's fragmented. Most people use their PCs for information access for working and some people use it for gaming. And so for those gaming markets, we serve those. But for most of the generic and mainstream PCs, we've largely been out of those for some time. And so if you look at our business, it's now really focused on serving these 4 markets with our market specialty platforms. And so I really appreciate that. The gross margins are obviously higher because it's very software rich. If you extracted out the PC OEM business and just looked at those four segments, our gaming business, I think somebody mentioned was growing at over 30%. Our automotive business has doubled. Our Tesla cloud computing business has doubled. And in enterprise computing, our grid business has doubled year over year. And so those value added highly differentiated platforms are really growing nicely. And it's more than making up for the decline of our PC OEM business, which as a result, our margins also increase. And so now you're starting to see the dynamics of the business and it basically works like that. So very good. And last question for me with respect to Grid. So I was wondering if you could maybe update us on the design engagements Grid in 2014 relative to say 2013. And as you continue on this trajectory, can you talk a little bit about how the enterprises are beginning to realize the leverage that a cloud based visual computing architecture enables? And when do you think because the installed base is very large as you mentioned. And do you think this year will be the inflection point? Or are we already past the inflection point and you think we're going to start to see more acceleration of this cloud based visual system? Yes. Well, there's let me break that question down into a couple of pieces. One, the number of OEM platforms that we were designed into was about 50 last year and it's almost 100 this year. About 50 this time last year about 100 this time at this time. The number of trials we have last year was about 400. The number of trials we have here is about 1,000 plus. And the difference and I think the difference going forward for this coming year when we stand here and look at this coming year backwards, I believe that what we're going to see is because of our now completed integration with both VMware and Citrix and the fact that every single enterprise OEM has now adopted Grid. And that Grid is making its way through just about every enterprise, every company in the world as they get to be familiarized with them. I believe that this year could be a very important year for Grid. Now the second question that you asked is, where are some of the things that people found are benefits of Grid? And I would say that there are several. The first one the very first one is, of course, mobility. Mobility as in the sense that you can now access your PC applications from anywhere you happen to be on any device you happen to be on. And so whatever device you have, all you have to do is have a browser and or an application, a receiver if you will, a receiver application from VMware or Citrix and you remote back into your PC and every graphics application is perfectly compatible. The performance is wonderful and it's where you left off. Okay. So one is mobility. 2nd, for the benefit of the IT department is security. No more digital downloads. The computer has now moved to the data center. The computer has moved to the data center where the data is, so that you don't have to move the data to the client. I think that that's going to be a utter transformational event for security. And then the third is collaboration. Because more and more of us are working on the same data set and the data has become quite large, the ability to move the computer, if you will, to the data prevents all of us from having to download large data to our own client and become out of sync. And so now we can collaborate on the same data set because our computers are all right there in the data center. There are many other benefits, but these are the 3. I mean, I've also heard great stories. In Japan, one particular car company wanted to move all the workstations into the data center, because it's dangerous to have so many heavy things in such tight environments. And during earthquakes, it's harder for them to manage all those different computers. And so they have a mandate push it all out into the data center. Another one because of flexible workforces, this is now in Europe, large car companies do a lot of outsourcing. And because they work with different Tier 1s from a lot of different industries, it's hard for them to collaborate with them by having without having all their engineers of the Tier 1s of the subcontractors move on site. And so now with Grid, they could actually have the computer be remotely accessed off-site in a secure way without digital download of the data. And the engineers, their subcontractors could literally be everywhere. There are all kinds of anecdotal stuff. At IT departments of colleges, college is a perfect example, another example. They have large number of computers, but the computer per square meter is very, very low because as you know that colleges are very large in campus. And then also the people come and go. They only stay for a couple of 2, 3 years by definition. And so in that particular case, putting all of the workstations in the data center has tremendous benefits to the IT department. So I hope that answers your question. No, it did. Thank you and exciting stuff. Thanks. Our next question comes from the line of Stephen Chen with UBS. Please go ahead. Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Jensen, if I could first ask about the gaming business in terms of PCs. In fiscal Q4, can you talk a little bit more about geographically how demand was across the developed markets as well as the emerging markets? Yes, Stephen. Our largest market is China. As you know well, as you probably are could guess, GeForce is the largest game platform in China. And the reason for that because it's a market that historically hasn't had access to game consoles. It's still extremely important even though extremely expensive consoles are. And of course, most of the titles are from the West. And most of the titles that people enjoy in China tends to be multiplayer. It tends to role playing games. It tends to be Internet based games. And so China still remains our largest market. The fastest growing market is probably Southeast Asia. These developing countries developing markets, excuse me, developing markets, when they get to a certain point in their computer history and Internet history, all of a sudden the gaming market booms. And in that area Southeast Asia, we know now the economies have become sufficiently vibrant because of the outpouring of opportunities from China. Those local regional economies have now become quite large and quite vibrant. And we're seeing the same thing now as we saw 5 years ago. In China, we're seeing the same developments in Southeast Asia. So I would say that Southeast Asia is still up. It's probably the 4th largest region, but it's the fastest growing region by far. And then, of course, the U. S. And Europe, both quite vibrant. Our next question comes from the line of Alex Gana with JMP Securities. Please go ahead. Hey, thanks very much. Congratulations on the great quarter year. I was wondering, Jensen, you could update us on what's going on, on the licensing front, perhaps comment on if it's getting to the point where it might provide a tailwind to gross margins this year or if not this year when? Thanks. Well, our licensing discussions are ongoing and quite rigorous. And the thing that is, of course, very important to know is that we are unquestionably the world leader in visual computing. And we have created so much of modern computer graphics, it's almost hard to even make a list of it anymore. Fundamentally, from the invention of the GPU to modern general purpose computing GPUs like CUDA and others, The type of work that we're doing is obviously pioneering and it's very important to many markets. We're open to licensing technology to companies who would like to exercise their own design and build their differentiated products. But protecting our IP is extremely important to our company. We're in discussions. Of course, the most public discussion is the one with Samsung and Qualcomm. And we're looking forward to some of the developments that will be happening in just a few more months. And so I look forward to reporting on the developments in that area in the Operator, we're going to take one more question. Okay. Our last question comes from the line of Ian Ng with MKM Partners. Please go ahead. Yes, thanks. Could you talk about your foundry strategy a little bit? I mean TSMC, good supplier, but not considered the best FinFET out there. Would you consider diversification being something you'd evaluate? Well, first of all, TSMC is a fabulous supplier. And number 2, their FinFET technology is excellent and we've been evaluating it. And we of course, we do test chips. And our test chip technology is incredibly rigorous and we take it very, very seriously. This comes from the years of learning that in working with advanced process nodes and fast process ramps, we take it incredibly seriously. So we've been working with TSMC on FinFET now a couple of years. And so we have quite a bit of confidence in their ability to deliver amazing FinFET transistors. I I guess with respect to that, we always look to look at all foundries and TSMC remains our most Okay. Operator, I think this is the end of our call. And to all that joined us, I thank you and we'll see you next quarter. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your line.