CNBC’s Jim Cramer didn’t rename his dog Everest to Nvidia for nothing — he did it because the company is a “remarkable” leader in the world of computing chips, he said on Friday.
“Nvidia’s a rescue dog, and I feel compelled today to rescue Nvidia, the company, from the narrative that I most feared: the one that says its stock is falling … because of a decline in cryptocurrency mining,” the “Mad Money” host said one day after Nvidia’s earnings report.
Beating analysts’ expectations on the top and bottom lines, Nvidia’s first-quarter report showed a slowdown in its cryptocurrency-mining segment.
When the price of bitcoin neared $20,000, crypto-fanatics bought Nvidia’s powerful, costly gaming chips to mine the cryptocurrency, “inflating the company’s bottom line in an unsustainable way,” Cramer said.
In its previous quarter, Nvidia’s management warned investors of the unexpected boost and forecast an eventual slowdown. This quarter, they doubled down on that message: while the mining results were still strong, next quarter would show a steeper drop, they said.
“That … non-news dominated the headlines and caused investors to panic, just as I feared, even as every other line of business was downright fabulous: gaming, data center, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, you name it,” Cramer said.
“Look, I warned you this would happen,” he added. “But apparently that wasn’t enough to prevent the stock from selling off on something that should’ve been expected by everybody. Why? In part because Nvidia’s stock had run so much that a lot of people felt it was way too expensive.”
But what mattered more than the stock’s near-term costs was its long-term outlook, the “Mad Money” host argued. He noted that in 2016, shares of Nvidia looked like they were trading at 40 times earnings, but by the end of 2017 — the year of the crypto craze — it was only trading at 12 times earnings.
“That’s what happens when you keep blowing away the estimates,” Cramer said, pointing to Nvidia’s other wildly strong lines of business making chips for top cloud companies like Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud and for voice-enabled devices like Amazon’s Alexa.
“I think that if you totally strip out the cryptocurrency-mining business, which is basically what will happen next quarter, Nvidia’s stock will still turn out to be incredibly cheap based on, say, its 2019 or 2020 earnings,” Cramer said. “[That] is why I say that Nvidia’s no dog in real life, just in my household, and it should be bought, not sold. This is not a cryptocurrency story and the rest of the business, the actual core business? It’s booming.”
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