Jun
23
Written by:
Tim
Wednesday, June 23, 2010 9:39 AM
Adobe has released its financial results for its second quarter, reporting $227.3 million net income (GAAP) compared to $161.4 million in the same quarter last year; and revenue of $943 million which it says is 34% year on year growth.
Much of this is thanks to a successful launch for Creative Suite 5, which accounts for 56% of Adobe’s revenue. However, Adobe has also reported 12% year-on-year growth for LiveCycle, its enterprise server products about which I learned last week in Amsterdam. The “platform” segment, which includes the Flex development tools, Cold Fusion, and Flash media services, is also growing, from $36.8 million in Q2 2009 to $45.4 million in Q2 2010.
CEO Shantanu Narayen is upbeat, saying “we believe Adobe is significantly undervalued today” and backing his judgement with a share buyback program.
I was particularly interested in the focus on Flash in Adobe’s statements and conference call:
Approximately 3.5 million Flash designers and developers are working with Flash-based solutions today, and their ranks grew by 59 percent in 2009
said Narayen; while Executive VP Mark Garrett noted:
CS5 products containing Flash authoring and output as a product component achieved revenue growth of 22% version-over-version to date
making the point that this exceeded the growth of CS5 overall.
Any clouds on the horizon? Two that I can think of. One is that Apple wants to kill Flash. CEO Steve Jobs says:
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
The other issue is that Adobe is dependent on Creative Suite, desktop software that arguably will be a business hard to sustain in the cloud and device era.
Still, these are good figures, the best we have seen from Adobe for a while, and despite the efforts of Steve Jobs both Adobe and Flash are prospering right now. A side-effect of Apple’s Flash downer is that competitors have hastened to support it, with Google building Flash support deeply into its Chrome browser.
Detailed figures from Adobe are here.
Related posts:
- Adobe news: Flash Builder 4, Creative Suite 5, quarterly results
- Adobe to announce Flash, Creative Suite roadmaps at MAX 2009
- First Look at Adobe Creative Suite 4
Originally published in Tim Anderson's blog here