Success is a double-edged sword if you really think about it. Let’s assume, for sake of example, you start a tech company that manufactures custom keyboards for laptops and desktops. You convince a small VC firm to throw you some seed money and, after months of R&D, product design meetings, and countless visits to Office Depot, you’re exhausted and the company is headed down the tube. No one cares about you or your company, your girlfriend leaves you, it’s all bad news bears. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, everything changes. A major manufacturer of PCs in China wants to collaborate with your startup. You’ve hit the big time! TechCrunch raves about you, Elon Musk tweets that he’d love to grab lunch with you when you get the chance. Everything is perfect until Apple (AAPL) announces that they plan on releasing custom keyboards for their products, and Google (GOOGL) hires several street artists from South Korea to take a stab at the previously niche market that your company was responsible for creating. And in no time, there you are, right back in the tubes.
Over the past several months, Nvidia (NVDA), known for manufacturing top-of-market graphical processing units (GPUs) for gaming and other applications such as computer-assisted design (CAD), has returned to the tubes after a significant period of sustained success. Back in August, U.S. News reported that 76.4% of PC gamers, at the time, used Nvidia (NVDA) graphics cards, elevating the company to benedictine status in the gaming industry. As we have seen with companies like Epic Games, the creators of “Fortnite,” there is serious lucrative potential in video games. However, most gamers prefer to play on consoles like Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox One or Sony’s (SNE) Playstation 4, rather than on a personal computer. Due to this notion, over the years, Nvidia (NVDA) looked elsewhere to e expand its product offering and, until very recently, found its niche in cryptocurrencies.
About nine months ago, TechCrunch reported on a major inventory shortage of Nvidia’s (NVDA) GPUs due to the increased preference of these chips for mining for cryptocurrencies, specifically Ethereum (ETH). When news broke about the shortage, Nvidia’s (NVDA) Chief Executive Jensen Huang told the press that he wishes consumers would stop using his company’s products for crypto mining.
“We’re sold out of many of our high-end SKUs, and so its a real challenge keeping [graphics cards’ in the marketplace for games. At the highest level the way to think about that is because of the philosophy of cryptocurrency — which is really about taking advantage of distributed high-performance computing — there are supercomputers in the hands of almost everybody in the world so that no singular force or entity that can control the currency.”
–Jensen Huang, Chief Executive Officer, Nvidia
While this was probably very exciting for Nvidia (NVDA), which saw impressive growth in their revenue stream from $1.05 billion in 2013 to $3.2 billion following the company’s foray into supplying crypto miners with processing equipment, anyone with a connection to the internet will know that cryptocurrencies haven’t felt too hot lately. The crypto industry has all but crashed, with Bitcoin down more than 80% from its all-time high set in December 2017. For one reason or another, crypto investors are selling off and bailing on the once-lucrative market.
In addition to Nvidia’s (NVDA) financial troubles in connection with crypto losing its luster, it can’t help that companies across Silicon Valley are feeling anxious due to President Trump’s trade war with China.
“Nvidia executives are watching the trade fight with growing unease over whether it will curb its access to Chinese customers. Almost 20% of Nvidia’s $9.7 billion in revenue last year came from China. Many of its chips are used there for assembly into other products, and it has heavily invested to tap China’s burgeoning AI industries.”
–Dan Strumpf and Wenxin Fan, The Wall Street Journal
Nvidia’s (NVDA) increasing irrelevance is not only due to the eventual death of cryptocurrency, but rather other companies in the space, namely tech giants like Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOGL), and Amazon (AMZN) are stepping up their game in the GPU manufacturing business. Though none of these companies have broken into manufacturing chips for the gaming industry, it may only be a matter of time before Nvidia (NVDA) loses its preeminence. In anticipation of the company’s decline, Nvidia (NVDA) stock has dropped from a closing price of $289.36 on Oct. 1 to Wednesday’s open of $148.42, a near 50% drop, according to TechCrunch.
Only time will tell as to how Nvidia (NVDA) will fare in the coming months.
