Visual computing giant NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) late Thursday posted blowout Q3 earnings, lifted its outlook, and boosted its dividend and buyback.
The Santa Clara-based company reported Q3 EPS of $0.94, a full 26 cents better than Wall Street’s $0.68 estimate. Revenue surged 53.6% from last year to $2 billion, also easily topping analysts’ view of just $1.69 billion.
NVIDIA said its gross margin in Q3 was 59.2%, which was well above its own 57.5-58.5% guidance.
Looking ahead, the company forecast Q4 revenues of $2.1 billion, which would shatter analyst expectations of $1.69 billion. Gross margin is expected to range from 58.5% to 59.5%.
NVIDIA’s board of directors also approved an additional $2 billion share buyback, which brings its total expected repurchases to $2.96 billion through the end of 2020. It also boosted its dividend payout 22% to $0.14 per share, up from $0.115 per share previously.
The company commented via press release:
We had a breakout quarter – record revenue, record margins and record earnings were driven by strength across all product lines,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and chief executive officer, NVIDIA. “Our new Pascal GPUs are fully ramped and enjoying great success in gaming, VR, self-driving cars and datacenter AI computing. “We have invested years of work and billions of dollars to advance deep learning. Our GPU deep learning platform runs every AI framework, and is available in cloud services from Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Alibaba (NYSE:BABA), and in servers from every OEM. GPU deep learning has sparked a wave of innovations that will usher in the next era of computing.
NVIDIA shares rose $8.16 (+12.04%) to $75.93 in after-hours trading Thursday. Prior to today’s report, NVDA had gained 105% year-to-date.