Nvidia Falls Despite Record Holiday Quarter

Nvidia Corp. declined after detailing fourth-quarter results Thursday, despite record profit and revenue that exceeded expectations. The videogame-gear specialist, which has soared for more than a year on Wall Street thanks to a breakthrough in deep learning that has applications in self-driving cars and data centers, reported net income of $655 million, or 99 cents a share, on sales of $2.2 billion. Analysts on average expected Nvidia to report earnings of 83 cents a share on record quarterly revenue of $2.1 billion, according to FactSet. The company predicted first-quarter revenue of $1.9 billion, plus or minus 2 percentage points, while analysts on average expect sales of $1.88 billion, according to FactSet. The company said it returned $1 billion to shareholders in 2016 and expects to return $1.25 billion in 2017, including a 14-cent quarterly dividend that will be paid March 17 to shareholders of record as of Feb. 24. Nvidia shares, which experienced the largest gain in the S&P 500 for 2016 and have continued to gain this year, immediately fell 7% after the results were released, but then rebounded to a loss of about 2%.

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