Adobe Inc. (ADBE) on Q4 2021 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Please welcome Jonathan Vaas, Vice President of Investor Relations. Jonathan Vaas: Good morning, and thanks everyone for joining us today. I'm Jonathan Vaas. And welcome to our financial analyst meeting. You should have a copy of the press release, which we filed this morning at approximately 5 A.M. Pacific Time, as well as a copy of our slides that we posted to the Investor Relations Web site. I'm hopeful to have an opportunity to meet with many of you in person this year. For now, I'm really pleased to be able to be here with Adobe's leadership team, and engage once again virtually, and we have a great program for you today. With a webcast format, the live presentation we'll be doing today will be a streamlined version of the long form information that we posted to the Investor Relations Web site that has all of the information you're used to receiving from Adobe. So, we'll cover a portion of those slides today, and then we'll go ahead and do Q&A at the end. Let's take a quick look at the agenda. Shantanu will kick things off with a brief welcome, and then, Ann will present Adobe's vision and strategy for the future. Anil will go over our digital experience strategy, and David will cover digital media strategy after that. And then, Dan Durn, who joined in October as Adobe's Chief Financial Officer, will provide a detailed financial summary, as well as discussing Adobe's long-term strategy. Then Shantanu will wrap things up sharing his vision of the long-term opportunity, and we'll go to live Q&A. Before we get started, as a reminder some of the information we'll be providing includes forward-looking statements that are subject to risk and uncertainty. Actual results may differ from those statements, and we encourage you to review the risk factors in our SEC filings for more information. Additionally, we'll be providing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial metrics. Reconciliations between the two are available on Adobe's Investor Relations Web site. I will now pass it over to Adobe's Chairman and CEO, Shantanu Narayen. Shantanu Narayen: Good morning, and thanks, Jonathan. Welcome to this Virtual 2022 Financial Analysts Meeting. Adobe had another outstanding year in 2021. I'm incredibly proud of the dedication and resilience of Adobe's 25,000 employees all around the world in delivering breakthrough technologies for our customers. I'd like to start with a recap of the tremendous accomplishments we had across every dimension in 2021. As a product geek at heart, I take immense pride in our team driving hundreds of integrations across Adobe Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud. Earlier this week, we introduced Creative Cloud Express, to enable anyone to express their ideas simply and beautifully. Creative Cloud expresses the start of a brand-new journey to introduce first time creators to Adobe Creative tools, while adding significant value to all of our current Creative Cloud subscribers. I think it marks a new chapter of creation, collaboration, and sharing on the web, and leverages the unique technology and capabilities of Adobe's flagship products. It also builds on the collaboration capabilities we debut at MAX including Illustrator and Photoshop on the web, Creative Cloud Spaces, and Creative Cloud Canvas. With the addition of Frame.io, we're now incorporating review and approval functionality to deliver a powerful collaboration platform for end-to-end video collaboration. And we're continuing to add magic to our flagship applications, and we're enabling them to run natively on new hardware like Apple's M1 chip, as well as Microsoft Windows Surface and Pen. In Document Cloud, Acrobat Web now supports 21 frictionless verbs create, export, extract, and edit for both text and images and PDF. We've seen tremendous growth in Acrobat online, as people tap our powerful, free, browser-based document tools to handle important tasks on the fly, without the need to download any software. In addition, we made outstanding progress with PDF support within both the Chrome as well as Edge browsers. And on the Experience Cloud platform, we extended our real-time customer data platform to B2B customers, bringing together individual and account profiles across systems to give B2B companies a single view of their customer for the very first time. We launched Adobe Journey Optimizer, harnessing over 20 years of industry-leading e-mail, marketing, and cross-channel campaign management expertise to empower brands to design and deliver personalized experiences across the entire customer journey in a single application. With the new acquisition of Adobe Workfront, we're now empowering companies to optimize business outcomes by connecting creative and marketing professionals to manage all creative workflows across the entire marketing lifecycle. In addition, we've advanced our industry leadership in key areas across our portfolio. Clearly underpinning our three clouds is the magic and power of Adobe Sensei, our artificial intelligence and machine learning framework, a significant differentiator for Adobe and an enabler to more rapid innovation. We continued our investment in the Adobe Experience platform as the foundational platform for strong governance capabilities across our Experience Cloud business, accelerating innovations like real-time customer data platform and Adobe Journey optimizer on a global scale. We take our responsibility in the creative community very seriously. And as part of the content authenticity initiative, we've published a drop specification as an open standard to combat online disinformation. I'm amazed at the resiliency of our employees and we pioneered all new digital event experiences with Adobe Summit and Adobe MAX, extending our reach and engaging millions of people around the world. I'm also tremendously proud of the industry recognition we continue to receive for our brand, our workplace, our culture, and our practices. And just to name a few examples, we were again named on Interbrand's Best Global brands list, we're named to Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For, for the 21st year, People Magazines Company's Companies That Care list for the fifth year, Fast Company's Brands that Matter list. And I think what's more significant for a lot of investors moving forward, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the fifth year, and one that I'm particularly proud of a 100% score for being the best place to work for disability inclusion. When you look at our financial results, it puts us in an incredibly rare position in the industry. Not many companies can drive the top line and bottom line growth with an impressive margin the way we do. And we powered through $15 billion in 2021, and we accomplished some significant milestones in Q4, our first $1 billion digital experience revenue quarter, our first $3 billion digital media, and $2 billion in cash flow; just some incredible financial statistics. Dan Durn, our new CFO will cover our Q4 as well as our FY'21 results in greater detail. Since he joined Adobe in October, I've really appreciated his experience and partnership, and I look forward to him sharing his perspective as well as having significant impact on Adobe's growth in the decade to come. I'm also delighted to announce that Anil Chakravarthy and David Wadhwani had been promoted to the President of the Digital Experience and Digital Media Businesses respectively. I value their leadership and contributions, and they will share more color around each of our businesses. While 2021 was awesome, I'm actually most excited about what's to come for 2022 and beyond in over 20 years that I've been at Adobe. We have this immense market opportunity. We have an incredible technology innovation roadmap and the best leadership team of any company on the planet. And I think what we've done is provided 2022 targets that demonstrate the strength of the underlying business, three incredibly large growing opportunities across our clouds, continued focus on execution based on the current economic climate. I think the one change that we all are experiencing is as the company scales beyond $15 billion, we also have to focus on FX expectations, given the recent of the U.S. dollar. But as excited as I am to talk about 2022, today is really sharing about Adobe's tremendous growth story and how we're going to be driving the next decade of growth, because that's really what underpins our growing over $200 billion addressable market opportunity. As you'll hear throughout the day from our leadership team, our growth has anchored across these five key pillars: our proven track record and our focus on creating and leading categories, the ever-increasing expanding set of customers that we serve, from consumers to creative pros to first time creators, to small and medium businesses, to the largest enterprises in the world, our ability to deliver incredible technology platforms that enable whole new classes of applications and accelerate our innovative cadence. The important shift we continue to make from building applications to enabling new business models, app, services, artificial intelligence and platforms, that's paying dividends. And last but not least, an incredible global ecosystem of partners that spans the entire customer lifecycle from experience creation and marketing to delivery and ongoing support. And I think the message for you as investors is across every dimension, across every business, our aspirations are higher, and we're thinking bigger. There's this incredible once-in-a-lifetime expensive opportunity in front of us, and I think we're uniquely positioned to capture it. And now to provide color on the strategy on how we're going to expand markets and categories, I'd like to welcome Ann Lewnes, who recently celebrated her 15th year at Adobe, our incredible Chief Marketing Officer, who's also taken on the additional responsibility for corporate strategy. Ann? Ann Lewnes: Thank you, Shantanu, and good morning everyone. Over the past two years, we've witnessed a profound global shift to all things digital. Everyone, from students to small businesses to the largest global brands has had to make this dramatic pivot. Technology innovation, the proliferation of new devices and platforms, and the increased desire and ability for anyone to create and deliver great digital experiences have all accelerated the move to a truly digital world. And there's no going back. Whether it's through your phone, tablet or PC, it's easy for anyone, anywhere to create, work, learn, connect, shop, unwind, and launch and grow businesses. While there continue to be massive challenges in the world, digital has also empowered us through the democratization of creativity, the development of rich digital experiences, the ability to work and learn from home, to shop and sell products online or to connect with those you love. We are moving society forward. Digital has fundamentally changed everything. According to Adobe Analytics, online spending during the 2021 holiday season is projected to be $200 billion, and total e-commerce spending is projected to reach $1 trillion in 2022. It's clear that digital is a requirement to conducting business today. From your favorite local restaurant to Fortune 500 companies, across every country and every industry, digital is powering today's businesses. Companies or automating mission-critical document processes like HR and legal to drive increased efficiency and agility. At the same time, customers now expect rich personalized digital experiences that are relevant, engaging and consistent across any device. It's well documented that digital first businesses drive greater long-term growth and customer loyalty. And Adobe our own technology has enabled us to transform into a digital first business. Companies like Adobe are measuring every single customer interaction, to understand behavior, intent, and ultimately to drive business impact. We do that by providing personalized digital experiences at scale through adobe.com. across all of our digital channels, and increasingly through our products. Digital has not only changed the way we live in work, but also how we connect with one another. Anyone can create or participate in an online community, whether it's with your family, friends, colleagues, or those with whom you share interests and passions. And with the emergence of the creator economy, it's possible for enterprising content creators to build both a large following and monetize their passions, products or services. Today there are seemingly unlimited number of social platforms and ways to engage with one's desired audience. The ease with which you can share, promote and monetize content, products, and services has enabled a whole new level of connection and commerce. We're also finding new ways to work together even when we're apart through the proliferation of collaboration solutions, like Frame.io, which we acquired in Q4. Adobe's mission to change the world through digital experiences is more important than ever before. The digital world runs on Adobe's tools and platforms, and through our unparalleled innovation, creativity, scale, and advanced data-driven operating model, we are continuing to catalyze the growth of digital. Hundreds of millions of people across the globe use our products every single day, and we're impacting every aspect of society. Adobe continues to be uniquely positioned to lead in this next digital era. Our three industry leading cloud offerings are mission critical across every geography and audience, with Creative Cloud, we're unleashing creativity for all, giving anyone, anywhere the tools to express their creativity. With Document Cloud, we're accelerating document productivity, modernizing how people view, share, and engage with documents and with Experience Cloud we're powering digital businesses of all sizes, giving them everything they need to design and deliver great customer experiences. Underpinning our three clouds is the power of Adobe Sensei, our advanced AI/ML framework that enables us to deliver a steady stream of unparalleled innovation. Over the last year, we've seen the critical role that creativity has played in the world. Creative Cloud is empowering everyone from the high school student to the social media influencer to the most demanding creative professional to tell their story. The Creative Cloud TAM is projected to be approximately $63 billion in 2024, $25 billion of that TAM comes from our core base of creative professionals who purchase Creative Cloud applications and services like Adobe Stock. New growth drivers in this segment include 3D and other immersive experiences, as well as web-first collaboration tools like Frame.io, $13 billion of the TAM is coming from communicators, non-professional creators, including small businesses, students and marketers. As you'll hear from David, many communicators are already using Creative Cloud, and we hope to see even, serve even more of them with products like Creative Cloud Express, which we just launched on Monday. The remaining $7 billion of TAM comes from consumers, including hobbyists and social media users. The biggest growth drivers here are mobile applications in categories like video and imaging, such as Adobe's Photoshop Express. Digital documents are a core to the future of work, PDFs and document workflows empower everyone from individuals to the largest enterprises to be productive anytime, anywhere. We're excited about the Document Cloud strategy and the large addressable market, which is projected to grow to $32 billion by 2024, $10 billion of that TAM is coming from knowledge workers, business professionals who typically use our core Acrobat desktop subscription offerings. Growth is expected to come from the expansion of digital document use cases, e-signatures and increase collaboration capabilities. $8 billion of the TAM is coming from communicators who are using Acrobat web and mobile applications to create, scan, and edit PDF files for both business and personal use. Growth in this segment is projected to come from expanding the premium PDF base and capturing demand from new funnels with offerings designed for web and mobile use cases. Finally, $14 billion of the TAM is coming from enterprises, who are using document services, including Acrobat and e-signature solutions, as well as APIs that developers use to seamlessly integrate with key line of business applications. Growth drivers in this segment include API's to build powerful document workflows, and expanded use cases. Whether it's B2B or B2C, businesses of every size across every category are investing in customer experience management. Adobe Experience Cloud empowers companies to deliver predictive personalized real-time digital experiences across every phase of the customer lifecycle. Our total addressable market for Adobe Experience Cloud is estimated to be $110 billion in 2024, $33 billion of the TAM is coming from the data insights and audiences category, which includes Adobe Experience platform, real time CDP, and Adobe Analytics, including our new customer journey analytics offering. Future growth drivers include the increasing demand for a unified customer profile, and personalization at scale, $49 billion of TAM is coming from the content and commerce category, which includes our Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Commerce offerings. The volume of content needed by businesses to engage customers across every touchpoint is exploding. And the pace at which it must be deployed is accelerating, the need for a seamlessly integrated commerce capability is accelerating at that same pace, $18 billion of the TAM is coming from the customer journeys category, which includes Adobe Campaign, Marketo Engage, and our new Adobe Journey Optimizer. Growth in this segment is expected to come from the continued need for businesses to engage with their customers across an ever increasing array of channels. New to the TAM this year is the $10 billion marketing workflow category, which includes Adobe Workfront acquired last year. Growth here is expected to come from the increasing need for teams to efficiently plan, track and execute marketing campaigns. Adobe has always been relentlessly focused on looking around the corner, inventing new growth opportunities and successfully driving growth within our existing businesses. We have pioneered and are leading three massive categories, creativity, digital documents, and customer experience management. This week, we announced Creative Cloud Express, our exciting new unified web and mobile offering that's perfect for anyone looking to quickly and easily make and share standout content. Creative Cloud Express is great for first time creators and communicators, but will also provide value to our current Creative Cloud subscribers. It's a great example of how we continue to expand our customer base and grow our TAM. We win by creating enduring technology platforms from Sensei to the Adobe Experience platform. They're the foundation for product innovation and our industry leading applications and services. Since transitioning Creative Cloud to a subscription model 10 years ago, we have continued to innovate our business models, building applications, services and platforms to bring value to market faster, better serve new customers, and leverage new monetization models. It would be impossible to do all this alone. We have built a large ecosystem of partners from agencies to solution integrators to ISPs that customize and extend our solutions to the needs of our joint customers. We continue to see massive opportunities from Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud, with the market tailwinds, our world-class innovation and the best employees in the world, we believe we're well positioned for our next decade of growth. And now, I'd like to introduce Anil Chakravarthy, President of our Digital Experience business. Anil Chakravarthy: Thank you, Ann. Hello everyone. Good to be here with you. And I look forward to sharing more on our momentum, opportunity and strategy for the Digital Experience business. It's really an exciting time for us as Ann shared. Let me begin by discussing a couple of highlights from Q4. We had strong performance across the board. Our segment revenue crossed over a $1 billion for the first time with 23% year-over-year growth. Our subscription revenue grew to $886 million up 27% year-over-year and our subscription bookings in Q4 were up 50% year-over-year. And with that, we were up over 40% year-over-year for full-year FY'21. A lot of that was powered by the success of our Adobe Experience platform, and the native apps that run on it. It's foundational to our Digital Experience business. We invested early in the platform, and have a significant head start having launched the platform in 2019. Our growth has accelerated. Earlier this year, we disclosed that we had passed over $100 million in revenue and at the end of Q4, we surpassed $250 million in book of business. And we've seen a 300% year-over-year growth in customer count. The scale that we're operating in production is massive, over 21 trillion segment evaluations per day and our ecosystem is extremely broad with over 300 partner integrations. And as Shantanu and Ann both mentioned, we have really accelerated our innovation over the past 18 months with new native applications and services powered by Sensei. A great example of this is Major League Baseball; they are leveraging digital to transform experiences for their customers with a focus on reaching that next generation of fans. And this is across all their channels at home, on the go and in menu in the ballpark, they're focused on personalization at scale, delivering that right experience at the right time, via the right channel to all of their fans. And it's not just Major League Baseball, it's clear that every business is a digital business, and customer experience management is critical to business success. The changes in the tailwinds that we have seen during the pandemic are here to stay. And this has contributed to a strong momentum in our Digital Experience business; couple of examples here again, significant growth in average annual recurring revenue across our Top 1125 accounts. We've seen strong growth across all accounts greater than a million dollars in ARR and all of our customers are building long-term partnerships with us. As an example, the combined total contract value of our Top 10 accounts is $760 million, which is three times higher than what it was at the end of FY'19. When we think about customer experience management, it is imperative for every company today to deliver personalization at scale to millions of customers. That's how they reach and engage all their customers across the world. And it's critical for them to do that, to deliver that next level of digital business growth. It's all about personalized experiences that are tailored to the individuals, delivered in real time, and delivered seamlessly across online and offline channels based on first party data, and making sure that they honor customer preference and privacy. And that's what we focus on, our strategy is battle tested and helps companies across the world achieve personalization at scale. We offer customers, the best of both worlds, integrated, AI enabled comprehensives applications, delivered on a real time cloud scale platform. We have strong momentum with Workfront with the ability to unify marketing workflow, and increase marketing agility for all customers. And we are the strategic partner for customer experience management; I hear this from customers all around the world every day. And our ecosystem of partners is expansive with over 4,000 partners as Ann mentioned across ISVs, tech partners, system integrators and agencies. This is how we make this happen for our customers through the Adobe Experience Cloud. We focus on four key categories, content and commerce, data insights and audiences, customer journeys and marketing workflow, all delivered on a common platform, which is the Adobe Experience platform. We've had a strong innovation engine over the last 18 months and that's continuing both on the application layer as well as the platform with AI and machine learning capabilities in the platform powered by Adobe Sensei. This is a huge moat for us with the combination of a comprehensive set of applications and an integrated platform. In closing, I am incredibly excited about the opportunity we have for the Digital Experience business. We have strong momentum and we're the clear leader in the Customer Experience Management category. We have a large growth opportunity to help every company deliver personalization at scale to millions of customers around the world. And we have the best technology across our Adobe experience platform and the native applications with the ability grow rapidly as we have shown over the last couple of years. With that, it's my pleasure to turn it over to David to cover the Digital Media business. David? David Wadhwani: Great. Thanks, Anil, and hello everyone. I've been back at Adobe now for about six months and I'm really excited about what I see. As some of you know, I ran the Digital Media business during the transition to Creative Cloud, and while the business has certainly matured since the early days of that transition, some things haven't changed. Our product teams keep delivering incredible innovation and our business continues to show strong momentum. Now, before we dive into what I'm personally excited about for FY'22 and beyond, I want to hit on some Q4 highlights. Our Digital Media business in the quarter delivered $571 million of net new ARR in total. With that Creative Cloud crossed $10 billion in ARR. And we saw continued strength in our Creative Cloud offers, while seeing outside growth for substance, which grew a 100% year-over-year, thanks to increasing demand for 3D and the emerging Metaverse platforms. We also saw outsized growth in our mobile applications, which grew over 55% year-over-year. Our mobile applications have now generated over 400 million mobile IDs to-date. And it's been a great source of new user acquisition for us. On the Document Cloud size we grew ARR of 31% for the year ending at $1.9 billion. A bit of color behind these numbers, we now have 2.5 billion mobile and desktop devices with reader or Acrobat installed on them. We're seeing explosive growth in Acrobat Web, where we saw monthly active users grow over a 100% since last year. And our strategy of integrating Adobe Sign and Acrobat is clearly paying off for us with 85% year-over-year growth in Adobe Sign transactions in Acrobat. In aggregate, we ended the year with approximately 12.2 billion of ARR. And while we posted a great FY'21, we have even more exciting opportunities ahead for us. Let's start by talking a little bit about Creative Cloud. The big picture here is that we're living in a time where content and creativity and design has never been more valued, where content is fueling the global economy, where the digital consumption is exploding, and where virtually every business needs a digital presence. We're living in a world where creative expression is considered a 21st century skill in education. And we're living in a world, where we're seeing emerging 3D and immersive technologies like the Metaverse creating demand for all new types of content. All of this continues to drive incredible tailwinds for Creative Cloud. In particular though, I wanted to spend a minute on the rise of the creator economy, where we're seeing a growing number of individuals, solopreneurs and small business owners, creating businesses from their passions and monetizing their content, their goods, or their services online. The creator economy is already big with nearly a 100 million small businesses on social media. And with the majority of them saying that their online presence is more important to their success than their physical presence. Now despite it being big, it continues to grow at an incredible rate with nearly 4.5 million new businesses minted in the U.S. alone last year, which was a record. This has been a significant contributor to our success and a major contributor to the over 600 million free and paid monthly active users across our Digital Media products, who are not considered creative professionals. And of course this expansive opportunity needs an expand strategy that drives our mission for creativity for all. In the next few minutes, I'll lay out how Adobe can help anyone who wants to express themselves in creative ways from a small business owner to the highest end production house. Adobe has a solution for them because of our investment in five key areas. And since we just launched Creative Cloud Express, I wanted to start by discussing how we empower the world with content first task-based creativity. Let's go ahead and start by looking at a video of Creative Cloud Express and what it can do. Creative Cloud Express is the result of years of in-market learning from our web and mobile products. And it's built on four key pillars. First, we remove all barriers to adoption. It's free to get started, it doesn't require a desktop download because it's a 100% web and mobile, it doesn't have a learning curve and users can create an account and publish content in minutes. Second, it's got an unparalleled content library. So, novice users can build beautiful images and social media posts, digital flyers and more in minutes. This includes 175 stock images from Adobe Stock, 20,000 fonts and 1,000 of templates and design assets. And it's all powered by a universal search capability that surfaces the right content and recommendations at the right time. Third, it leverages decades of Adobe's product innovation. As you'd expect, we have great workflows with our Creative Cloud applications, but it also include a slew of Sensei-based quick actions that make creating and editing images, videos and PDF easier than ever before. And fourth, we understand that people create content with the intent to distribute it. So Creative Cloud Express has integrations for single click publishing to social media services. And you can expect to see that our recent acquisition of ContentCal will benefit CCX users with even more social planning and publishing capabilities in the very near future. Creative Cloud Express is easy to use and it's easy to get started with, users can have a lot of success with the free tier, but they're also presented with premium features and content for at affordable monthly price. CCX is also entitled with most CC existing plans, which we expect will drive higher engagement and retention in our core Creative Cloud customer base. And the go-to market motion is very familiar to us. We will combine our digital acquisition funnels and our product led growth motion tuned for web and mobile. This gives us an opportunity to continually iterate and optimize user journeys while ramping this business over time. We also plan to leverage our existing footprint across education, reseller, and enterprise to scale the business. We're thrilled to have Creative Cloud Express in market today it's been amazing to see what people can make with it. And we really couldn't be more excited about this moment and what this means for a start of a whole new journey for Adobe. So moving beyond Creative Cloud Express, we also have a lot going on across Creative Cloud as a whole. We're advancing the state-of-art in imaging, video and design and more by building new capabilities across desktop web and mobile. For example, we're introduced Photoshop and Illustrator for web at Adobe MAX, and we released a series of new Sensei driven AI ML capabilities including neural filters and auto masking in Photoshop and auto captioning in premier just to name a few. We also continue to - our focus on democratizing 3D and immersive. Substance 3D now supports end-to-end 3D workflows, users can design parametric 3D assets and designer compose rendering virtual scenes in stager, add texture, color, effects and painter, and create 3D materials with sampler. This enables fully virtual photo shoot saving companies a lot of money and a lot of time and speeds up asset and scene creation for inclusion and games, videos, and the emerging Metaverse platforms. Collaboration is another big area of focus for us. We're putting -- we're integrating collaboration directly into our apps and existing creative workflows. We're very excited about the Frame.io acquisition and see tremendous opportunity across individual corporate and media workflows with that product. We shipped a public beta of share for review work workflows at MAX, and we demoed spaces on canvas, which we believe will enable teams to organize their creative assets and host live working sessions. And last, but certainly not least, we continue to produce content that inspires and educates our users through services like Adobe Live. We help users monetize their work through services like Adobe Stock, and we help them connect and inspire each other through services like Behance, which now is closing in on almost 29 million members. These five strategic pillars work together to ensure that anyone with creative needs can find a solution at Adobe, whether they're a creative professional, trying to keep up with the increasing content demand, or they're a communicator participating in the creator economy or a consumer looking to up their game in photography or a student developing 21st century skills. We use our data driven operating model DDOM to engage them as they express their interests online by perhaps searching for something like compositing in Photoshop or designing a Twitter post. Based on their intent, we then route them to one of our Creative Cloud apps, one of our mobile apps or one of our frictionless web quick actions. We make sure that they have early success and we introduce them to other capabilities in Creative Cloud or Creative Cloud Express before converting them to and engaging them as a paid user. This digital motion combined with our reseller partners, our direct sales teams gives us an amazing global footprint and reach. So in summary, everything is going digital and content is for fueling the digital economy. The result is a massive and growing TAM for Creative Cloud as Ann talked about earlier and our offerings, which now include Creative Cloud Express continue to expand to meet market demand for both professionals and non-professionals. We couldn't be more excited about the opportunity ahead for the creative business. And as you know, the other part of the Digital Media business is of course our Document Cloud, which is also experiencing significant tailwinds. Demand for PDF has never been greater. In fact, web searches for PDF have doubled in the last decade, and we believe the reason for this is that PDF has become the de facto format for unstructured data. PDF has also been the de facto standard for business-to-business collaboration where nowhere is this more pronounced of course them with e-signatures. This makes PDF an essential part of modernizing any business workflow. And Adobe is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this trend. Our apps are installed on over 2.5 billion devices and we've opened and in our apps. We've opened or created 320 billion PDFs in the last 12 months alone. We continue to be a leading destination for PDF viewing and we saw a 100 million free and paid signups over the last year. And we see that Acrobat can be a gateway to related services. Adobe Sign transactions in Acrobat, as I mentioned earlier, have increased 85% year-over-year, as we continue to deepen the integration between the two offers. Our strategy here is clearly working and we're investing across five key motions to make sure it continues to. First, our document verb strategy has been very effective. We now have 21 verbs market, everything from edit PDF to convert PDF, to rotate PDF, and we're seeing continued -- we're continuing to optimize our digital acquisition and increasing our share of voice across the 80 million PDF related searches that happen every month. Second, we're proliferating e-signatures by integrating them into Acrobat across all services, desktop, web, and mobile. Given our early success here over the last year, you can expect to see us continue bringing these products closer together in the years ahead. Third, we remain committed to making PDF more intelligent for both interacting and reading. Adobe is reinventing mobile PDF viewing with liquid mode. We're accelerating document productivity with automated form field detection, and we're helping transform unstructured data to structured actionable data with our AI, ML based extract function. Fourth, we're unlocking business workflows through our PDF and sign APIs. This empowers developers to build document automation solutions that transform how their businesses work. And fifth we're leveraging our diversified go to market motions to reach anyone with a document need. Our global resellers and inside sales teams give us amazing access to a broad base of business demand. Our enterprise sales team allows us to sell tops down to CIOs, looking to transform their business. And perhaps most importantly, our digital funnel continues to drive individuals' users into our conversion funnels. Knowledge workers, communicators, IT decision makers and developers all have frictionless onboarding pathways. Our data driven operating model helps customers discover Adobe technology when they're searching for PDF related verbs and we engage them in ways that provide quick success on web mobile and desktop before upselling them to premium features, premium features products, services, or APIs that broaden their engagement with Adobe over time. In short, Document Cloud is incredibly well positioned for the years ahead. I hope this gives you a sense of why we're excited about both the creative and document businesses. In summary, both businesses are benefiting from significant tail winds that are underpinning their large and growing TAMs, both businesses are realizing the market benefits by leveraging our amazing brand awareness, our go to market footprint and our incredible pipeline of innovation. And both businesses have the opportunity supercharge their existing data driven operating model by pairing it with a product led growth motion, as our capabilities increasingly are accessed by users on web and mobile. So we're really excited about the year ahead. And with that, I wanted to turn it over to Dan. Dan Durn: Thanks, David, and before I jump in, I also want to thank him for letting me borrow his sweater today. Let me begin by saying how thrilled I am to be here today and be a part of this amazing team at Adobe. Having just been here for a few months, it's obvious what a special company this is, and I couldn't be more excited about what's ahead. Now, let me jump in with Adobe's Q4 results. Adobe achieved revenue of $4.11 billion, a significant milestone, which represents 20% year-over-year growth. GAAP diluted EPS was $2.57 and non-GAAP diluted EPS was $3.20. Digital Media segment revenue was $3.01 billion, the business's first $3 billion quarter, which represents 21% year-over-year growth with net new digital media ARR of $571 million. Digital Experience achieved its first billion dollar quarter, which represents 23% year-over-year growth. Digital Experience subscription revenue was $886 million representing 27% year-over-year growth. We had record cash flows from operations of $2.05 billion in the quarter, and we repurchased approximately 1.6 million shares of our stock. Turning to our three strategic clouds, it was a tremendous finish to the year. In Q4, Adobe achieved $2.48 billion in Creative revenue, and added $430 million of net new Creative ARR. We exited the year with more than $10 billion of ending Creative ARR with strong performance throughout the year. Growth drivers in the quarter included acquisition of new users on adobe.com, strength in our teams offering, seasonal Q4 strength in the enterprise and success co selling frame.io with our Creative Cloud Enterprise offerings. However, while we saw increased demand for offerings during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weeks, we did not see the traditional spikes we have had in previous years. This is consistent with this year's industry trends in line with e-commerce holiday shopping data from the Adobe Digital Economy Index. Adobe Document Cloud achieved $532 million in Q4, revenue continues to be -- and continues to be our fastest growing business. We added a record $141 million of net new Document Cloud ARR in the quarter with ending ARR of $1.93 billion growing 31% year-over-year. Our Integrated Document platform is clearly resonating with customers around the globe. We continue to see momentum with enterprises, small businesses and individuals using web and mobile first tools. In Digital Experience, we achieved our first billion dollar revenue quarter. We're seeing strong demand for our real time experience platform and app services, as large enterprises are making investments in Adobe to drive customer experience management and personalization at scale. We drove record Q4 net subscription bookings and for the full fiscal year, we grew net ASP greater than 40% year-over-year. Let's look quickly at the annual numbers. Adobe's financial performance in the year was outstanding, with both top line acceleration and margin expansion in the year, resulting in more than $7 billion of operating cash flow and remaining performance obligations grew 23% year-over-year to nearly $14 billion, absolutely world class performance. Now let's discuss what a unique investment opportunity Adobe is. These are some of the outstanding qualities of Adobe that have energized me about the opportunity and it's what ultimately brought me here today. There's a fundamental shift towards digitization, that's accelerating around the globe. And I believe Adobe is better positioned than any other company to capitalize on these opportunities. Combining that with Adobe's financial track record, as well as industry defining products and platforms, the result is an immense runway ahead of this company for growth. Let me elaborate a bit more on my view of this opportunity. In the years ahead, there's going to be fundamental shifts in all aspects of our lives, all of them digitally enabled. Digital enablement will increasingly shape and define how we live, how we create, how we communicate, how we collaborate, how companies serve their customers, how companies compete, and how economies function. These changes are both powerful, and pervasive. I call it the digitization of everything. The digitization of everything is accelerating. And I believe what happens in the next 10 years is going to define the rest of the century, similar to what happened in the Industrial Revolution. Except now, digital content and data are going to be the fuel of the digital economy. This is a generational opportunity. And we're talking about unlocking trillions of dollars of economic value in the global economy. When you look at Adobe's foundational strengths, there's very few companies that is leveraged to the digitization of the global economy, as well as we are. From the way people create and communicate to the future of productivity and digital collaboration in a distributed work environment, to the digitization of businesses, driving customer engagement with data driven insights to personalize customer experiences, but do it at massive scale to AI and machine learning. Global trends towards digitization have so many intersections with Adobe's unique strengths. Again, digital content and data are the fuel of the digital economy. And I believe no one is better positioned than Adobe to be the digital enabler of the world. How many companies on the planet have this profile? How many companies have this opportunity, not very many. When I think about our near-term strengths, combined with our long-term opportunities, there's a uniqueness here, that's incredibly exciting. Let's double click on the company's financial performance and take a closer look at what I'm talking about. Starting with revenue growth, you can see consistent sustained revenue growth over the last four years as the company has grown subscription revenues at a 24% CAGR. That has been the strategy continuing to grow while producing a revenue stream that's even more ratable and predictable. I'm incredibly impressed by this team's acumen, what they've been able to accomplish, as well as by the contribution to revenue growth from newer initiatives, including Adobe Stock, Substance 3D, Acrobat Web, Sign, Creative Cloud mobile apps, and the Adobe Experience platform. Underlying this financial performance is an incredibly diverse business, from our broad base of customers to diversified products and platforms, comprehensive business models, and go to market reach that spans across all geographies. With growing and diverse revenue streams, the company's been able to expand profitability over the last four years, while accelerating the top line. Adobe's disciplined execution and investment rigor has enabled the company to balance long-term investments while also focusing on profitability. This time period also includes the integration of several strategic acquisitions Magento, Marketo, Algorithmic, Workfront, Frame.io, it's impressive the way Adobe has managed to combine expanded profitability with strong sustained top line growth and M&A integration. Let's talk about RPO, contractually committed future revenues which make Adobe's future performance incredibly predictable and reliable. Exiting fiscal year 2021, RPO grew 23% on the strength of our Enterprise bookings. RPO consists of deferred revenue and unbilled backlog with the current portion expected to flow into revenue over the next 12 months. It's also important to note that most of our adobe.com subscriptions are billed monthly and don't show up as deferred revenue, the remaining contractual commitments of those subscriptions, which average about six months in length at any given time, are included in unbilled backlog. The cash flow performance really speaks for itself, as you can see the way our operating cash flows have accelerated over the last two fiscal years. Sustained growth and profitability at scale is not easy to achieve. The momentum at Adobe is strong, as evidenced by our first $2 billion quarter of operating cash flows. A strong capital structure with robust investment grade credit rating positions us to continue to drive growth and provides flexibility making access to capital affordable for Adobe. Let's talk about our capital allocation strategy. First, we focus on investing in the business to drive long-term growth. Given the tremendous opportunities in front of us, some of our recent innovative R&D initiatives include our next generation data platform, as well as Creative Cloud Express, which we announced earlier this week. We're going to continue to invest in sales and marketing to scale those businesses globally. Second, our cash and investment balances as well as our debt capacity, enable inorganic growth opportunities. You've seen the way we've accelerated growth and made a creative strategic addition over the last fiscal year with Workfront and Frame.io. Lastly, and importantly, we focus on returning capital to our shareholders. Our stock repurchase program is funded through growth in our operating cash flows, and you can see how successful we've been in driving down the average shares outstanding over the last 4 years. Since 2018, we've returned approximately $12 billion to shareholders through our stock repurchase program. Exiting Q4, we have $13.1 billion of remaining stock repurchase authority through the end of our fiscal 2024. The hallmark of a great technology company is consistent innovation in category defining products. Adobe's done that across all its businesses, and we'll dive into each of them next to discuss the performance drivers. First, creative, the company has driven sustained ARR and revenue growth, which accelerated from fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2021. Let me tell you about the underlying data-driven operating model used to drive this performance. It all starts with innovation, and the most comprehensive industry defining portfolio of products. Our brilliant marketing campaigns generate awareness about Adobe's offerings and drive traffic to adobe.com to engage customers to try, buy, use, and renew. It's about taking creators on a journey. First with simpler applications, including our mobile, tablet, and web applications, connecting them with vibrant creative communities, and then providing journeys that empower them to do more as they advance, including services like Adobe Stock, Cloud libraries, and collaboration features. Now, with the addition of Frame.io, and Creative Cloud Express, we're continuing to grow the business by broadening the aperture and reaching new creators and stakeholders that will power the world's content. We continue to drive strong growth for Document Cloud. Again, you see this in sustained revenue growth with ARR growing even faster, as the business shifts to being increasingly subscription based, with approximately 90% of Document Cloud revenues in FY 2021 now being subscription. The main Document Cloud growth driver continues to be new user acquisition. We're seeing strong growth of Acrobat on adobe.com across geographies, growth on the web, as well as in mobile, and seed expansion in the enterprise. PDF and doc that workflows are mission critical to the way people work and collaborate in the digital first world. As Anil mentioned earlier, there's tremendous growth opportunity within our cohort of large customers. As we focus on cross-selling and moving them along the maturity curve towards the transformational adoption of our entire platform instead of customer experience management solutions. The average ARR and total contract value of our largest customers demonstrate how massive this opportunity is. And we grow by adding new logos to our customer base and then expanding within those accounts, a multiyear journey. As impressive as this company's track record is, I believe there's even more growth ahead of us. I fundamentally believe there's a trillion-dollar market cap opportunity in Adobe's future, having crossed the $15 billion mark in revenue, what is the path to $30 billion look like? And then from there, how are we going to get to $45 billion? It starts with an estimated $205 billion TAM, and a huge ecosystem that we built around our market leading products and services. How are we going to get there? We're going to continue to broaden our appeal to a wider universe of customers, engage and retain our current customers across all geographies. We're also going to grow by innovating and investing to enter new categories that further complement and expand our growth trajectory and better enable our customers in the digital era. When we execute on that strategy over the next decade, our scale and success, we'll put Adobe in a class that only a few software companies have achieved. Having passed the $15 billion revenue mark, we're going to start reporting revenues in constant currency given the potential impact of foreign exchange movements. Following the year in which FX was a tailwind to reported revenues. The recent U.S. dollar strength is expected to result in a headwind to our reported revenue and growth rates for fiscal year 2022. Consistent with our annual practice, we've revalued our digital media ARR balance to account for the movements and the FX rates. For operating expenses, we continue to save on travel and facilities in fiscal year 2021. While many of our employees continue to work from home, we expect these expenses to ramp throughout FY 2022. We also plan to invest in increasing headcount in integrating Frame.io. We believe these are critical investments and we're making -- we believe these are critical investments we're making and we're going to focus relentlessly on the organic growth opportunities ahead Lastly, fiscal year 2021 was a 53-week fiscal year with an extra week in Q1. That week added approximately to $267 million of revenue and $25 million of net new digital media ARR the math around the return to a 52-week fiscal year is expected to be a two-point headwind on our full-year, FY'22 growth rates and a seven-point headwind in Q1. Here's Adobe's fiscal year 2022 annual targets. We show our segment growth targets on an actual and adjusted basis and constant currency factoring for the additional week last year: Total Adobe revenue of approximately $17.9 billion, net new digital media ARR of approximately $1.9 billion, digital media segment revenue growth of approximately 14% year-over-year, or 17% on an adjusted basis, digital experience segment revenue growth of approximately 14% year-over-year or 17% on an adjusted basis, digital experience subscription revenue growth of approximately 16% year-over-year or 19% on an adjusted basis, tax rate of approximately 17.5% on a GAAP basis and 17% on a non-GAAP basis, GAAP earnings per share of approximately $10.25 and non-GAAP earnings per share of approximately $13.70. For Q1 of fiscal 2022, we're targeting revenue of approximately $4.23 billion. Net new digital media ARR of approximately $400 million, digital media segment revenue growth of approximately 8% year-over-year or 17% on an adjusted basis, digital experience segment revenue growth of approximately 11% year-over-year or 18% on an adjusted basis, digital experience subscription revenue growth of approximately 13% year-over-year or 20% on an adjusted basis, tax rate of approximately 16% on a GAAP basis and 17% on a non-GAAP basis, GAAP earnings per share of approximately $2.63 and non-GAAP earnings per share of approximately $3.35. I want to conclude by sharing what this company has achieved over the last four years, whether it's revenue growth and profitability, outstanding cash flow generation and shareholder returns, Adobe's track record demonstrates why this company is in a class of its own. I firmly believe that our best days are ahead. Thanks so much for your time today. I'm going to now pass it back to Shantanu. Shantanu Narayen: Thank you, Dan. And thanks and welcome Ann, Anil and David for outlining the opportunities across our three industry leading clouds. As I said earlier, I'm incredibly excited about Adobe's future and our ability to not only lead, but also create new categories. I think if you zoom out a little bit and think about it from a macro perspective, all over the world, it's clear that digital is empowering individuals, transforming businesses and connecting communities. And frankly, digital is going to play a much bigger role in work, life and entertainment going forward. We've seen the rise of the creator economy and the democratization of creativity. Work and education are now hybrid and here to stay in that form. Cloud and web technology advances are powering unprecedented levels of real time collaboration. Document workflows are increasingly going to be automated. And most important mandate for a digital business is more urgent than ever before, as customers now expect digital first experiences that are both contextual as well as personalized. E-commerce growth is building on the record highs achieved during the pandemic. From a technology base, artificial intelligence and machine learning have become indispensable facilitators of our daily lives. And so I think in short, digital technologies are enabling more people to create, collaborate, learn, work, be productive, and make a living than ever before. I love our mission and the ability to change the world through digital experiences, puts us as the nexus of all of these trends. We're incredibly well positioned to drive meaningful impact across every aspect of society and that'll benefit billions of people around the world for years to come. As we think about the company at Adobe, we believe it's not just what we do, but it's also how you do that it really matters. From the very beginning, John Warnock and Charles Geschke, our founders committed to building a company that does the right thing. And the sense of purpose has guided our evolution and growth over the past four decades. I think we're all witnessing the shift in the role that companies have to play in social issues and the expectations that stakeholders and investors have for corporations. As you reflect on how companies have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, it's remarkable. With that stakeholders around the world are looking to the private sector to become more active in social issues. And people are making decisions on the products that they buy and the places that they work based on where companies stand. As our products have become ubiquitous, and we've helped many more companies harness the transformative power of our digital technologies, our responsibility and our commitment to corporate citizenship has also grown dramatically. And I believe that the issues on which Adobe is uniquely positioned to make an impact are on Adobe for all, making sure we create a diverse and inclusive culture for our employee, as well as position that for our customers and partners .On the belief that technology will transform, and in addition to providing technology, we have a responsibility to understand what that means. And I think most important to being able to allow everyone who has a story to tell their story, the notion of creativity for all. The reality is that we've been leaning into these for several areas already. And our efforts are making a real impact across the company and our customer communities for many years. But I think it's this purpose that motivates our employees to focus on having more impact and frankly inventing the future. I love the fact that our strategy has remained relatively consistent for the past decade. Our strategy to unleash creativity for all to accelerate document productivity and to power digital businesses is more mission critical than ever before. I think most companies would be thrilled frankly, to have one of these growth opportunities. And we're fortunate that we have three businesses that are absolutely in the sweet spot of where the world needs technology to play a more important role. We have the right strategy. It's applied to an exceptional and growing opportunity. And so we're no way opportunity constrained. I'm going to end with how I started. I believe that Adobe is uniquely positioned to drive the next decade of growth. We have a proven capability to create and lead categories and we're always looking around the corner to the whitespace that exists that will provide new opportunities for Adobe. We're thinking bigger about every part of our business, how we scale and how we expand the customers that we serve. We continue to focus on innovation, delivering leading products, services, and platforms as we leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning. We're continuously thinking about innovating in business models as well to rapidly deliver more value to a larger set of customers to capitalize on global growth opportunities, and to enable new monetization models that are emerging. And at the end of the day, our technologies support a vibrant and growing ecosystem of partners that create, customize and extend our solutions to meet the unique needs of our joint customers. But at the end of the day, our greatest asset as being an intellectual property company and what's truly driving our growth is our highly engaged global employee base, over 25,000 strong to whom I'm eternally grateful. Thank you again for joining us today. I believe 2021 was a fantastic year, and we clearly expect that momentum to continue in 2022 and beyond. As we look forward to our 40th anniversary next year, Adobe stands in an enviable position, an impressive track record of innovation, category and brand leadership, great financial performance and multiple growth opportunities. Coupled with the expanding market opportunity, the depth of our technology platforms, and the motivated employee base, I certainly believe that Adobe's best days are ahead of us. And with that, we'll roll a video while we assemble the management team for our Q&A. Okay, are we on for Q&A? Great, I know we're on for Q&A. Before we get started, let me introduce two other members of the Executive team who are also here with us to answer the questions that you might have. Gloria Chen, our Chief Human Resources Officer, who has also run strategy in the past, as it relates to any questions that people have about the pandemic, or what we are doing with our global employee base, how do we continue to make sure we ensure that we have the best talented and motivated employees, and Scott Belsky, our Chief Product Officer of Creative Cloud, frankly, the visionary behind all of the great innovation that we're delivering across desktop, mobile collaboration, including the new web related functionality that we showed at MAX as well as what we did with Creative Cloud Express. And so with that, I'll turn it over to Jonathan to help navigate the Q&A. Jonathan Vaas: Thanks, Shantanu. So, we've shared a lot of information today, you can clearly see the team's enthusiasm around the growth opportunity ahead. Now, we'd like to go ahead and take your questions. So for folks who are on the phone, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and queue up for questions. Quick reminder, we do ask that each of you limit yourself to just one question per person that'll allow us to get through as many people as possible. And with that, I'd like to go to the operator. Operator, could we go ahead and take the first question, please? Operator: Absolutely. First question will come from Saket Kalia with Barclays. Please go ahead. Saket Kalia: Okay, great. Hey, folks, thanks for taking my question here, and congrats Anil and David on the promotion, and welcome, Dan. Dan Durn: Thank you. Saket Kalia: Maybe the question is -- maybe to start us off, I'd love if we can address the digital media net new ARR in the quarter, particularly within Creative. I think Dan you had mentioned that we hadn't seen spikes that maybe as high as we've historically seen around Cyber Monday and Black Friday. I was wondering if the team could just go in a little bit deeper into the result verse versus the guide, and then maybe comment on the competitive backdrop within Creative specifically? Shantanu Narayen: Why don't I start with that, Saket, and then I'll certainly have others add. I mean, as we look at the Digital Media ARR accomplishment over the quarter, firstly, it was record quarter as well as it was a record year. And when we think about what our Digital Media guide was, I mean we certainly expected Frame to close in the quarter, and it closed pretty early in the quarter. And so what we do is, we think about a range of outcomes and what that might do. And certainly we wanted to focus on Frame as well, but it was probably not explicitly factored into the quarter. When you consider it from different customer segments, the Team business actually performed really well right through the quarter. And so, the Teams is offering and the strength in the small and medium business was great. Enterprise, we actually actively redirected and pivoted the team to think about video and Frame and how we were continuously selling it, as I said, it closed early in the quarter. And so, Enterprise had the traditional Q4 strength as well, that we normally expect. The individual demand was actually fairly strong right through the year. As Dan mentioned, maybe the one slight change is that as you think about what's happening with online shopping, while we continue to see demand up into the right, we perhaps did not see as much of the spike, as you would have perhaps seen traditionally in either the Black Friday or the Cyber Monday weeks. But apart from that, strength and demand continues to be strong. And clearly, we factored that into our guidance for fiscal 2022, which is the strongest ARR guide that we've ever guided to. I think as it relates to the product and the differentiation, maybe I'll have Scott touch on that, and then David can certainly speak to other issues of the business. Scott Belsky: Sure, in terms of product differentiation for Creative Cloud, I mean what a year we had. We delivered some of the mind-blowing Adobe magic throughout our actual Pro Products, neuro filters and Photoshop for example, a lot of the collaboration features and we really made a proclamation that Creative Cloud going forward will be as much about collaboration, as it is about Creativity, which if you think about it invites many more stakeholders of Creativity into the fold. And that's where we're seeing across all of our enterprise as well as small businesses. Everyone wants to be a stakeholder and have a say and be able to jump in and give feedback. And so we're building our products for the future to enable that. I also want to mention, o
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Adobe Beats Q4 Estimates, But Shares Drop 12% on Weak Revenue Outlook

Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) delivered strong fourth-quarter results, surpassing analyst expectations for earnings and revenue, yet a softer revenue outlook for the coming periods caused its stock to slide over 12% intra-day today.

For the fiscal fourth quarter, Adobe reported adjusted earnings per share of $4.81 on revenue of $5.61 billion, both ahead of market estimates, which had forecast EPS of $4.67 on revenue of $5.54 billion. The company’s net new digital media annualized recurring revenue reached $578 million, while its digital experience segment saw revenue grow 10% year-over-year to $1.40 billion.

Adobe’s total remaining performance obligations (RPOs) climbed to $19.96 billion, reflecting a 16% year-over-year increase and slightly accelerating from the 15% growth posted in the prior quarter.

However, the company’s guidance for fiscal Q1 raised concerns among investors. While adjusted EPS was forecasted between $4.95 and $5.00, slightly ahead of the $4.94 estimate, revenue was guided between $5.63 billion and $5.68 billion, falling short of the $5.72 billion consensus.

Looking ahead to fiscal 2025, Adobe projected adjusted earnings per share in the range of $20.20 to $20.50 and revenue between $23.30 billion and $23.55 billion. These forecasts came in below analyst expectations of $20.53 EPS and $23.80 billion in revenue. The revenue outlook implied a growth rate of approximately 9%, or about 10% on a constant currency basis.

Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) Q4 Earnings Preview: What to Expect

  • Adobe's anticipated EPS is $4.66, with projected revenue of approximately $5.54 billion, indicating a 9.71% year-over-year growth.
  • The company has a history of earnings surprises, with an average of 2.59% over the last four quarters.
  • Analysts remain optimistic, with a majority recommending a "buy" rating and an average price target suggesting a 12% upside.

Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) is a leading software company known for its creative and digital marketing solutions. As it prepares to release its fourth-quarter earnings for fiscal 2024 on December 11, analysts are closely watching the company's performance. Adobe's anticipated earnings per share (EPS) is $4.66, with projected revenue of approximately $5.54 billion, reflecting a 9.71% increase from the same quarter last year.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate aligns with Adobe's revenue projection, indicating a stable outlook with a 9.13% growth in earnings from the previous year. Adobe has a track record of surpassing expectations, with an average earnings surprise of 2.59% over the last four quarters. This consistent performance is attributed to strong demand for its Generative AI solutions, despite facing competition and valuation challenges.

Analysts are optimistic about Adobe's growth, with 11 out of 15 tracked by Visible Alpha recommending a "buy" rating. The average price target for Adobe's stock is $619, about 12% higher than its recent closing price. This positive sentiment is supported by Adobe's ability to revise its EPS estimate upward by 0.1% over the past month, signaling confidence in its financial performance.

Adobe's financial metrics, such as a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 45.49 and a price-to-sales ratio of 11.51, reflect high market expectations for future growth. The company's enterprise value to sales ratio of 11.46 and enterprise value to operating cash flow ratio of 35.66 highlight its valuation in relation to revenue and cash flow generation. With a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.39 and a current ratio of 1.11, Adobe demonstrates strong financial health, maintaining a low level of debt and a good balance of current assets to liabilities.

Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) Maintains "Outperform" Rating by RBC Capital

  • RBC Capital reiterated its "Outperform" rating for Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), highlighting the company's leadership in creative and digital marketing solutions.
  • Adobe's integration of AI technologies, particularly the Firefly AI platform, is central to its growth strategy and positions it strongly in the expanding AI market.
  • Despite providing soft guidance, Adobe's Price/Earnings to Growth (PEG) ratio suggests the stock may be undervalued, indicating potential for investors.

On December 5, 2024, RBC Capital reiterated its "Outperform" rating for Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), with the stock priced at $534.61. Adobe is a leading software company known for its creative and digital marketing solutions. It competes with other tech giants like Microsoft and Salesforce in the software industry. Adobe's innovative AI technologies, such as the Firefly AI platform, are key to its growth strategy.

Generative AI is creating significant opportunities for companies like Adobe, as highlighted at Bloomberg Intelligence's conference. Adobe is at the forefront of this productivity revolution, alongside key players like Nvidia and PayPal. The integration of AI technologies has contributed to the resurgence of software stocks, including Adobe, which have outperformed semiconductor stocks in the second half of 2024.

Adobe's third-quarter results exceeded expectations, but the company provided soft guidance, leading to a decline in its stock price. Despite this, Adobe's Price/Earnings to Growth (PEG) ratio suggests that the stock may be undervalued. The company's Firefly AI platform shows significant potential, positioning Adobe well in the expanding AI market.

Adobe is set to release its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 earnings results on December 11, 2024. This announcement will be followed by a conference call with investors, streamed live on the Adobe Investor Relations Site. The company continues to use its website as a primary channel for distributing important information to investors.

Currently, Adobe's stock is trading at $535.76, with a slight decrease of 0.1361% from the previous day. The stock has seen a low of $529.79 and a high of $536.125 today. Over the past year, Adobe's stock has reached a high of $638.25 and a low of $433.97. The company's market capitalization is approximately $235.84 billion, with a trading volume of 367,608 shares.

Adobe Positioned for Growth Amid AI Opportunities, DA Davidson

DA Davidson analysts reiterated their Buy rating on Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE), highlighting the company’s strong prospects for sustained growth and margin expansion.

The analysts emphasized Adobe’s ability to enhance its already market-leading margins, driven by increased operational scale and contributions from artificial intelligence. Adobe's durable growth engine, supported by its market leadership and consistent innovation, was viewed as a key factor in maintaining its competitive edge.

Adobe’s valuation was noted as particularly attractive, trading at 26 times next twelve months (NTM) earnings per share—currently the lowest among its large-cap peers. The analysts attributed this discount to concerns about AI’s potential impact on Adobe's business, which they argued were unfounded. Instead, the exponential growth of AI-generated content was seen as a significant monetization opportunity, positioning Adobe for both near- and long-term success.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Invests in Adobe Inc. Amidst Market Fluctuations

  • Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) sees a 19.4% decline in share price over the past year, contrasting with the tech sector's growth.
  • Despite challenges, Adobe's strong demand for Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Adobe Experience Cloud drives top-line growth.
  • Adobe is considered a laggard with significant upside potential, trading at $511.69 with a market cap of approximately $225.25 billion.

On November 20, 2024, Marjorie Taylor Greene made a purchase transaction involving shares of Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE). Adobe is a leading software company known for its creative and digital marketing solutions. It competes with other tech giants in the digital content and marketing industry.

Despite a 19.4% decline in Adobe's share price over the past year, Wall Street analysts view Adobe as a promising investment, as highlighted by Zacks. This decline contrasts with the broader Zacks Computer & Technology sector's 32.9% return and the Zacks Computer Software industry's 16.9% appreciation. The challenging macroeconomic environment and increased competition in the generative AI space have impacted Adobe's performance.

Adobe's strong demand for its creative products, such as Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Adobe Experience Cloud, is driving top-line growth. The company's robust cloud-enabled products and expanding generative AI capabilities enhance its business prospects. Rising subscription revenues and solid momentum in mobile apps are significant positives for Adobe.

Adobe is identified as a laggard with significant upside potential for the remainder of 2024. Despite the impressive rally in U.S. stock markets, Adobe has underperformed. However, it is among a select group of stocks expected to achieve double-digit gains in the near term, supported by a favorable Zacks Rank.

Currently, Adobe is trading at $511.69 on the NASDAQ, with a market capitalization of approximately $225.25 billion. The stock has experienced a 1.44% increase, translating to a rise of $7.25. Over the past year, Adobe's stock has fluctuated between a high of $638.25 and a low of $433.97, indicating potential for future growth.

Adobe Stock Drops 8% After Q3 Results Beat Estimates but Q4 Guidance Falls Short

Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) reported its fiscal third-quarter results on Thursday, surpassing analysts' expectations, but its guidance for the upcoming quarter fell short of forecasts, leading to a drop in its stock price of more than 8% pre-market today.

The company posted earnings of $4.65 per share on revenue of $5.41 billion, beating analysts’ predictions of $4.53 EPS on $5.37 billion in revenue.

The company reported $504 million in new digital media annualized recurring revenue (ARR), but concerns arose over its guidance for the fourth quarter. Adobe projected Q4 earnings between $4.63 and $4.68 per share, with a midpoint of $4.66, on revenue ranging from $5.50 billion to $5.55 billion. This missed market expectations, which forecasted $4.67 in EPS and $5.60 billion in revenue.

While Adobe’s Document Cloud business maintained strong momentum, growing over 25%, concerns emerged around the projected growth rate for its Creative Cloud segment. Analysts noted that the expected ARR growth of around 11.5% for Creative Cloud in Q4 was slightly below the growth rates seen in previous quarters.

The company anticipates new digital media ARR for the fourth quarter to be around $550 million, which aligns with the guidance but failed to ease investor concerns over the overall outlook.

Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) Surpasses Q3 Earnings and Revenue Estimates

  • Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) reported a Q3 EPS of $4.65, beating the estimated EPS of $4.53, and revenue of $5.41 billion, exceeding estimates.
  • The company demonstrated significant year-over-year growth with a 10.6% increase in revenue and an EPS growth from $4.09 to $4.65.
  • Adobe's financial health is highlighted by a P/E ratio of 48.70, a P/S ratio of 12.42, and a strong track record of exceeding analyst projections for four consecutive quarters.

Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE), a leading software company known for its creative and digital marketing solutions, recently reported its earnings for the third quarter of 2024. The company announced an earnings per share (EPS) of $4.65, surpassing the estimated EPS of $4.53. Additionally, Adobe reported revenue of $5.41 billion, exceeding the estimated revenue of approximately $5.37 billion. This performance underscores Adobe's ability to outperform market expectations and demonstrates its continued growth and financial health.

During the Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call, key executives, including Chair and Chief Executive Officer Shantanu Narayen and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Dan Durn, discussed Adobe's financial performance and strategic direction. The presence of analysts from prestigious firms such as Wolfe Research and JPMorgan highlighted the investment community's significant interest in Adobe's financial health and future prospects. This level of engagement from the analyst community reflects confidence in Adobe's market position and its ability to sustain growth.

Adobe's revenue of $5.41 billion for the quarter ending in August 2024 marked a significant year-over-year growth of 10.6%, outperforming the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 0.79%. The company's EPS for the same period was $4.65, compared to $4.09 a year earlier, surpassing the consensus EPS estimate of $4.53 by 2.65%. These figures not only demonstrate Adobe's ability to grow its revenue and earnings year-over-year but also its capacity to exceed Wall Street expectations, making it an attractive option for investors.

The company's financial metrics, such as the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of approximately 48.70 and the price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of about 12.42, provide insights into the market's valuation of Adobe. With an enterprise value to sales (EV/Sales) ratio of roughly 12.09 and an enterprise value to operating cash flow (EV/OCF) ratio of approximately 37.63, Adobe showcases its valuation in relation to its sales and cash flow generation. The low debt-to-equity (D/E) ratio of 0.03 indicates minimal reliance on debt for financing, while the current ratio of about 1.11 suggests a balanced ability to meet short-term liabilities with its short-term assets.

Adobe's consistent performance, as evidenced by its ability to surpass consensus EPS and revenue estimates for four consecutive quarters, positions it as a key player in the Zacks Computer - Software industry. This track record of exceeding analyst projections underscores Adobe's strong financial health and potential for sustained growth and profitability.