Adobe Q1 earnings soar as Creative Cloud subscriptions surpass 500K
As the company's digital marketing and cloud strategies continue to unfold, Adobe's latest quarterly earnings report was closely watched after the bell on Tuesday.
The software giant reported first fiscal quarter earnings of $65.1 million, or 13 cents a share (statement). Non-GAAP earnings were 35 cents a share on a revenue of $1.008 billion.
See also: Adobe confirms CTO's departure in SEC filing
Wall Street expected Adobe to report first quarter earnings of 31 cents a share on revenue of $986 million. Following the relese, Adobe shares were initially up by six percent in after hours trading.
Adobe's push to shift its Creative Suite desktop applications to the cloud have proven to be a spectacular success so far.
To get an idea, right ahead of publishing Q1 results, Adobe also revealed a milestone for its Creative Cloud suite as the number of paid subscriptions has surpassed 500,000 in less than one year of availability.
On top of that, free and trial memberships have exceeded at least two million.
In the Q1 earnings report, CEO Shantanu Narayen only highlighted Creative Cloud when reflecting on the quarter:
Creative Cloud is quickly becoming mainstream, with the overwhelming majority of Creative purchases on Adobe.com now being Creative Cloud subscriptions. With Adobe Marketing Cloud, we are the partner of choice for Chief Marketing Officers as we help our customers migrate their businesses online.
Adobe's chief financial officer Mark Garrett hinted that the Creative Cloud is still being built out, remarking that the San Jose-based company is working on "building a stronger, more predictable recurring revenue model which will drive higher long-term growth."
For reference, the paid version of Creative Cloud includes everything from the desktop version of Adobe's popular applications (i.e. Photoshop, etc.) along with additional developer tools, cloud storage, device syncing capabilities and now social media features from the recent acquisition of Behance.
While largely ignored in the report despite being in center stage at the 2013 Adobe Summit this month, the Marketing Cloud platform also performed solidly with a quarterly revenue of $215.4 million, up 20 percent annually.
As for the outlook, analysts are expecting Adobe to report earnings of 34 cents a share on revenue of $1.015 billion.
Adobe is projecting Q2 revenue to fall within the range of $975 million to $1.025 billion with non-GAAP earnings of 29 to 35 cents per share.
Slides via Adobe Investor Relations