Anticipating the best quarterly report from NVIDIA

Nvidia (NVDA) plans to report revenue and profit for the third quarter of fiscal 2021 (beginning on 27 July and ending on 25 October 2020) on Wednesday after market closure. In the previous quarter, Nvidia reported that sales of chips for data centres exceeded sales for gaming consoles for the first time in its history, but this trend may change with the introduction of new chips and the boom in games caused by the pandemic.

In August, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang said he believes this could be one of the best gaming seasons ever, citing big numbers from its consoles partner, Nintendo.

Average third quarter sales figures for the Games segment were a record $2.02 billion, compared to actual $1.65 billion in the previous second quarter and $1.66 billion in the third quarter of 2019. The average analytical forecast for the Datacenter segment is $1.83 billion, down from $1.75 billion in the second quarter, but three times the $726 million of last year.

One of the analysts at Wells Fargo said that the company expects Nvidia to justify its estimates for the data centre segment while potentially demonstrating strong growth potential for the gaming segment as the GeForce RTX 3000 Series comes out.

On September 1, Nvidia introduced its new GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs.

No less significant event of this quarter was Nvidia's deal with SoftBank to acquire British technology leader Arm Holdings for $40 billion.

The Estimize software platform, which uses crowdsourcing from hedge fund managers, brokerage firms, customer analysts and others, forecasts revenue of $4.45 billion. Nvidia's management stated in the last report that it expects revenue in the third quarter to be $4.40 billion, plus or minus 2% ($4.31 billion to $4.49 billion).

Nvidia shares, which have increased 126% since the beginning of the year, increased 33% over the third quarter (27 July to 25 October), outperforming the growth in technology indices over the same period: the PHLX Semiconductor Index added 16%, the S&P 500 SPX Index increased almost 8% and the Nasdaq Composite Index increased more than 11%.