NVIDIA Corporation, who reports first quarter earnings of its fiscal 2004 tomorrow, is very likely to miss its sales estimates concerning the GeForce FX product-line, a Friedman Billings Ramsey analyst said on Monday. The company’s target was to sell 1.5 million of the GeForce FX-series graphics chips by the end of its first fiscal quarter, however, NVIDIA reportedly only supplied approximately 85% or 90% of this volume.

Eric Rothdeutsch, a senior analyst and vice president for Friedman Billings Ramsey said that based on his sales-channel researches, it appeared that NVIDIA had missed its target shipments of 1.5 million GeForce FX-series graphics chips in the Q1 of its fiscal 2004 by 10% to 15%. Rothedeutsch noted in his analysis that NVIDIA was unable to sell its higher-end GeForce FX 5800 and 5600-series of products in large volumes because of manufacturing issues. In fact, NVIDIA's chip partner TSMC was unable to produce sufficient quantities of fast GeForce FX 5800 products and did not deliver the GeForce FX 5600-series on time, so, vast majority of NVIDIA's GeForce FX sales was the GeForce FX 5200 GPUs, while originally NVIDIA expected higher-end products to be sold as well.

The analyst mentioned in his research note that the company is likely to achieve his first quarter estimates of $400 million in revenue and $0.1 EPS because of strong sales of nForce integrated products. Worth to mention that Eric Rothdeutsch also lowered his fiscal 2004 full year estimates for NVIDIA Corporation, according to Reuters. Now it is estimated that NVIDIA’s annual revenue will achieve $1.76 billion with EPS of $0.59 compared to $1.91 billion in revenue and $0.54 EPS for the fiscal 2003.

Well, not far to wait until the number one graphics company reports if financial results and hosts its conference call, so, let us not make any conclusions at this point and keep in mind that everything above are only estimates.