Citi analyst, Atif Malik, reiterated his Buy rating on shares of NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) after the company issued an outlook for 2019 that was better than feared. Guidance is for the April quarter to be the trough as gaming demand normalizes leaving full year sales down slightly. This compares with the consensus expectation for down 4% Y/Y.

The analyst stated "While management comments of 1-2 quarter gaming and 2-3 quarter data center corrections were in-line with our expectations, we remain conservative on gaming with China as a big swing factor (China ~25% of gaming). We feel better about data center business post hyper scale digestion on new analytics opportunities with the recent product introductions. With Y/Y comps as a headwind on both data center and gaming, we think stock works better in 2H once near-term demand trends become clearer e.g. NVDA provided no specific guidance on 1Q data center since the near term visibility is relatively low".

No change to the price target of $200.

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Shares of NVIDIA closed at $162.24 yesterday.