Nvidia No Longer Focussing on Smartphones, Sees Future in Cars and Gaming: CEO

Nvidia no longer sees smartphones and tablets as a key focus area and is concentrating on other areas like cars and gaming instead.

In an interview to CNET, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that the smartphones market had become highly "commoditised" and the company is now choosing to concentrate on "performance-oriented, visual computing-oriented, gaming-oriented devices."

Huang confirmed that the reception to company's Tegra 4i was not as good as the company had expected.

"[Tegra 4i] wasn't that successful for us. I would say that when we first started this, we thought that bringing 4G to entry-level phones, mainstream phones, integrated with our apps processor would be a real opportunity," Huang said. "I think that the phone marketplace has commoditised really, really fast. It is not our strategy to go after commodity phones."

Huang added that MediaTek is putting pressure on Qualcomm, Broadcom and Marvell, with its low-cost offerings and the company is not interested in competing at that end of the market.

"..you can see the pressure that MediaTek is putting on Qualcomm, and you can see the pressure that MediaTek is putting on Marvell and Broadcom and all of these companies," the CEO said. "Because guess what? They're the lowest-cost provider. I think that for mainstream phones, there's one strategy that really works right now, which is price. That's not our differentiator. That's not what we do for a living."

Elaborating on the company's future strategy, Huang said that the area of visual computing, including games and technology to be used in cars would be the focus area for the company going forward.

"We're going to focus on car computers where visual computing and supercomputing technology is really important to the future of cars." He however, did not give any details as to how and when the firm will progress in this particular field. As the report notes, Nvidia processors can be be found in cars from the likes of Lamborghini, Tesla and Audi.

Huan also confirmed the company will be releasing more Shield devices, successor to company's first Android-based handheld gaming console.

(Also see: Nvidia Shield Review)

"Yeah, there are plans [for more Shield devices]. The way to say it is, obviously we have all kinds of exciting things we like to show. But at the core...of this strategy, Shield is the platform that we will use to transform Android into a great gaming platform. We believe that Android is an operating system that epitomises the future of computing."