Adobe’s fourth quarter results highlighted
how the company has managed a
transitioning to cloud and services
subscriptions well, but its outlook was lower
than expectations.
The company on Friday reported fourth
quarter earnings of $65.32 million, or 13
cents a share, on revenue of $1.04 billion.
Non-GAAP earnings for the quarter were 32
cents a share.
Wall Street was looking for fourth quarter
earnings of 32 cents a share on revenue of $
1.03 billion.
In the fourth quarter, Adobe ended with
1.44 million Creative Cloud subscriptions, up
402,000 from the third quarter. Enterprises
continue to tap into Adobe’s subscriptions.
For the year, Adobe grew Creative Cloud
subscriptions by 1.1 million. The company
reported fiscal 2013 revenue of $4.05 billion,
down from $4.4 billion in fiscal 2012. Adobe
reported an annual profit of $290 million, or
56 cents a share, down from $832.78
million, or $1.66 a share, in 2012.
Research and development spending in
fiscal 2013 was $826.6 million, up from $
742.8 million a year ago.
Those figures highlight the cloud transition
to some degree. Adobe is holding the fort
on revenue, but as its dependence on
licensing revenue wanes so does its big
bang revenue potential.
Here’s Adobe’s outlook in depth:
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The problem is that those expectations are
below projections. Adobe projected first
quarter revenue of $950 million to $1 billion
with earnings of 22 cents a share to 28
cents a share. Wall Street was looking for 33
cents a share in earnings for the first
quarter.
In prepared remarks, Adobe CEO Shantanu
Narayen said that the company’s marketing
cloud revenue topped $1 billion.
CFO Mark Garrett explained that Adobe is
trading booked revenue for annualized
recurring revenue, which indicates more of
a subscription based model. Garrett said:
Given the transition to subscription with
Creative Cloud has gone more quickly
than anticipated, we expect more ARR
and less perpetual revenue in FY14 than
we last forecast. We now expect FY14
will be the last year of any meaningful
Creative perpetual revenue, and Creative
reported revenue will decline year-over-
year as we grow Creative ARR to $1.6
billion. Our Creative ARR target is based
on growing Creative Cloud subscriptions
to 3 million by year end, and includes
DPS. We also expect to overachieve the 4
million subscription target we had
originally set for the end of FY15.