Adobe Systems Incorporated share price has gone up by as much as 15% in the last 6 months, and it continues to soar. With the new e-Signature feature in the Document Cloud (DC) service, Adobe is taking one step at a time. In addition to that, Adobe recently partnered with Dropbox, Salesforce and Workday to enter the Enterprise IT industry.
What’s New At Adobe: e-Sign et al.
Adobe’s online support of the e-sign feature allows for the usage of a physical smart card with a secure chip, making it more secure and authentic. Be it the medicine or the financial market, these cards will be part of the identity of users across countries.
N0t to mention the eSign Manager app and the Fill & Sign app – quite liked in the business world. eSign Manager helps in getting photo of your handwritten sign and use it on documents again and again. Fill & Sign, which lets users scan any document to digital format, is now available on iPhones. Needless to say, Adobe is targeting people who are busy and working, that is, B2B clients.
While new features are being designed in the lab, Adobe is out looking for friends to walk the scary path to Enterprise IT market. A place where monsters like Alphabet Inc and Microsoft Corp. romp around.
That is the reason why it recently partnered with Dropbox. This unique option lets its users work on Dropbox documents from its DC platform, making it more efficient and useful. It is available on the iOS platform right now. But Adobe and Dropbox is working to make another version for the Android users soon.
Recently, Adobe made the Lightroom photo workflow apps totally subscription free for the iPhone and iPad users. “We’re seeing a lot of people come in first on Lightroom mobile, so now we’re allowing people to use it locally on their local assets, their local photos and videos on their phone and tablet for as long as they like,” Adobe’s director of product management for digital imaging, Tom Hogarty, explained to The Next Web.
A Look Into The Numbers
Adobe’s strategy seems to be working. The switch to web-based subscriptions from previous licensed software is attracting more predictable recurring revenue by the look of it.
Creative Cloud (CC), comprising of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, forms the biggest segment of firm’s cloud computing businesses. The other two are Marketing Cloud (MC) and Document Cloud (DC). The firm released its earnings number back on September 17.
Adobe garnered 684,000 new CC net subscriptions in the third quarter, compared with the 640,000 net additions that analysts were expecting, bringing extra revenue of $5.3 million.
Compared to that, the firm’s DC segment turned in revenues of $194 million, while the MC segment saw 27 percent YoY growth to contribute $368 million in revenues.
The company’s net income went up to $174.5 million, or 35 cents per share, in the 3rd quarter this year, from $44.7 million, or 9 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 21 percent to $1.22 billion.
This beat analysts’ expectation of profit of 50 cents per share and revenue of $1.21 billion.
“Our record Q3 financial results set us for a strong financial 2015,” said Mark Garrett, Adobe executive VP and CFO. “Our recurring revenue has reached 73 percent of total revenue, providing a strong foundation for long-term growth.”
Analysts are upbeat about the future of Adobe . Here’s what FBR analyst Samad Samana, being positive, said, “Adobe’s large market opportunity, robust and expanding product set, and investments for growth gave it the confidence to guide to a 20% revenue CAGR and a 30% EPS CAGR from FY15 to FY18. We believe delivering on this combination of top- and bottom-line growth concurrently puts Adobe in a rare class, and that investors should be pleased with the outlook.”
