Monday, September 16th 2013
NVIDIA Appoints Colette Kress as Chief Financial Officer
NVIDIA today announced that it has named Colette Kress, a 24-year veteran of the tech industry, as executive vice president and chief financial officer. Kress, age 46, whose appointment takes effect later this month, reports to Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA's president and chief executive officer.
"We have searched extensively for the right candidate and are thrilled to have Colette join us," said Huang. "She brings fantastic experience, excellent financial management skills and deep industry knowledge to NVIDIA. Colette will be a great asset as we work to extend our global leadership in visual computing, mobile and the cloud. I want to thank Karen Burns for her truly outstanding work as interim CFO as we conducted our search."
Kress most recently served for three years as senior vice president and chief financial officer at Cisco's Business Technology and Operations Finance organization. She was responsible for financial strategy, planning, reporting and business development for all business segments, engineering and operations.
Previously, she spent 13 years at Microsoft, including four years as chief financial officer of the Server and Tools division, and held senior roles in corporate planning and finance. Prior to that, she served at Texas Instruments in a variety of finance positions.
Kress holds a B.Sc. degree in Finance from University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
"We have searched extensively for the right candidate and are thrilled to have Colette join us," said Huang. "She brings fantastic experience, excellent financial management skills and deep industry knowledge to NVIDIA. Colette will be a great asset as we work to extend our global leadership in visual computing, mobile and the cloud. I want to thank Karen Burns for her truly outstanding work as interim CFO as we conducted our search."
Previously, she spent 13 years at Microsoft, including four years as chief financial officer of the Server and Tools division, and held senior roles in corporate planning and finance. Prior to that, she served at Texas Instruments in a variety of finance positions.
Kress holds a B.Sc. degree in Finance from University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
9 Comments on NVIDIA Appoints Colette Kress as Chief Financial Officer
But, unlike you, I did not plan to play with words with you. I plan to prove that my statement is relevant. First at all, the news was about new financial headguy for nVidia. So it is about - money and management.
Therefore nVidia is seeking a way to improve their cashflow, otherwise why the change, right?
She did not affect the cashflow directly, but she can optimize and tweak it a bit.
But money come from sales of the chips. Sales depends on buyers buying the chip. And since there is preliminary tests of the new line of Radeons, then nVidia sales will be hurt. The mid to low segment is likely to be owned by AMD for now and that means what, Sherlock?
Sure thing - less money. Therefore she is in hard position. In current situation, the nVidia chips has to be sold for notably less, or lose the market completely. You just cannot sell a 20% slower chip with the same price - well, of course you are welcome to try, but we all know the result.
Therefore I was just pointing out, that right now she have a hell of the job, because the timing is bad for nVidia. While the top segment is owned by nVidia, the majority of sales (read - majority of money) are the mid to low segment, where is nVidia par-to-par with AMD offers and now there is "new AMD guy in town" and nVidia sales will be hurt by it.
Maybe it is even now, as the people are waiting for the new chips, instead of buying current chips...
So, how my point that durring new chips release of the major competitor did not optimizing and tweaking cash flow can keep the cash flow, could be more relevant and going to the core of the problem? :toast:
As to whether AMD make inroads into Nvidia's profit line (and personally I think that Intel are the bigger threat here), that depends upon AMD's ability to wrest OEM contracts away from Nvidia (given AMD's concentrated efforts in the mobile discrete market I would have expected better)- and harping back to the segmentation of the product lines...Year, right. Nvidia presently hold between 80 and 85 percent of the professional GPGPU market and derives a large portion of its revenue from these parts
No doubt there are people putting off a purchase until the announcement on the 25th- I count myself amongst them as I'm in the market for a GTX 780/Hawaii or two, but the vast majority of consumers never upgrade or buy a discrete card.
Nvidia faces challenges for sure - but that has been the case since Intel squeezed them out of the chipset market and IGP's started making inroads into low end discrete sales. It is also the reason why AMD and Nvidia are pushing image quality enhancements into games and why they will both embrace 4K gaming to keep the discrete gaming GPU market alive. Nvidia has an uncertain long term future for sure, but unlike the AMD flag waving fanboys I recognise where the real threat comes from, and it has less to do with Sunnyvale than it does Intel and ARM licensees.
The tesselated invisible ocean in Crysis 2 is one of the good examples of such things :(
BTW, unlike you, I did seen nVidia long term future as good, because the IGP and APU never can make games like Crysis (2-3) or FarCry (2-3) or latest Assasin Creed work at decent framerate AND nice visuals even in low resolutions such as 1280x1024 I typing now. And since gaming market is not going to back down with level of detail and visual quality of their titles, then dedicated graphic cards will have still lot to offer.
Sure nVidia will be pushed to abandon some of their limitations (the voltage limit to the GPU, the Titan only on reference design, etc.) enforced now, but that is a good thing and it survive. I just did not like to see things that are downright wrong to happen during the battle, but we can enforce them to compete with dignity.
I wonder what Hawaii bring us too - it seems to not be anything technologicaly superior, but at least it seems to be just a huge chip with plenty of rendering cores that should pack considerable power (and heat) :)