Mark Garrett
Analyst · UBS
Thanks, Shantanu. This is an exciting time to be the CFO of Adobe. We have a focused strategy, and we are executing well against that strategy, transforming our business and setting the company on a path for a higher long-term growth rate with a large recurring revenue stream. In addition to briefly commenting on our Q3 results, I'm going to spend some additional time today discussing our Creative Cloud results and the positive effect it is having on our business model. Understanding this transition and where we are in the migration of our customers to a subscription model will help in understanding our Q3 results, give context for our Q4 financial targets and set up our discussion on how to begin to think about fiscal 2013. In the third quarter of fiscal 2012, Adobe achieved revenue of $1,081,000,000. Driving these results was overachievement of Creative Cloud subscriptions and strong Digital Marketing Suite revenue. In Q3, we added approximately 8,000 Creative Cloud subscriptions per week, exceeding the 5,000 subscriptions per week we assumed in our targets. This overachievement in subscriptions effectively transitioned approximately $29 million more perpetual revenue to Creative Cloud than expected. In addition, currency impacted Q3 revenue negatively by approximately $9 million. Adding both of these back to our reported results would have put third quarter revenue toward the high end of our targeted range. We continue to manage expenses appropriately. Q3 GAAP operating expenses were $682.7 million compared to $688.4 million last quarter. Non-GAAP operating expenses in Q3 were $592.2 million compared to $611.7 million last quarter. This yielded diluted earnings per share in Q3 fiscal 2012 of $0.40 on a GAAP basis and $0.58 on a non-GAAP basis. In Q3, Adobe's effective tax rate was 23.5% on a GAAP basis and 22.5% on a non-GAAP basis, in line with the targets we provided for the quarter. Geographically, our Q3 results on a percent of revenue basis were as follows: the Americas, 52%; Europe, 27%; Asia, 21%. We experienced stable demand in the U.S. and Asia and continued softness in Europe during Q3. From a year-over-year currency perspective, FX decreased revenue by $21.8 million. We had $7.7 million in hedge gains in Q3 FY '12 versus no hedge gains in Q3 FY '11. Thus, the net year-over-year currency decrease to revenue considering hedging gains was $14.1 million. From a quarter-over-quarter perspective, FX decreased revenue by $5.8 million. Considering the $7.7 million in current quarter hedging gains versus the $10.7 million hedging gains we had in Q2 FY '12, the net sequential currency decrease to revenue was $8.8 million. Employees at the end of Q3 totaled 10,811 versus 10,474 at the end of the last quarter. The sequential increase was driven by hiring in R&D as well as in our field organization. Our trade DSO was 48 days, which compares to 50 days in the year-ago quarter and 43 days last quarter. During the quarter, cash flow from operations was $263.3 million. Our ending cash and short-term investment position was $3.25 billion compared to $3 billion at the end of Q2. Our ending deferred revenue balance decreased by $32.5 million to $560.3 million. This decrease is typical in the quarter following a major desktop product launch. Free-of-charge upgrade recognition from the CS6 launch builds short-term deferred revenue during the launch quarter and is recognized as revenue in the quarter following a launch, causing the decline. In addition, our Digital Marketing business invoices customers on the first day of each calendar month, and the timing relative to our quarter end caused some of the sequential decline. As a reminder, Creative Cloud subscriptions are billed monthly and are essentially not reflected in deferred revenue on the balance sheet. In Q3, we repurchased approximately 2.4 million shares at a total cost of $76.1 million. I will now discuss Adobe's key business segment results. Digital Marketing segment revenue in Q3 was $257.1 million compared to $211.7 million in Q3 fiscal 2011 and $250.9 million last quarter. Within the Digital Marketing segment, we achieved record Digital Marketing Suite revenue of $192.4 million. This represents annual growth of 40%. Mobile device use continues to be a driver in this business. Mobile transactions increased to 18% of the 1.6 trillion SiteCatalyst transactions in the quarter, up from 17% last quarter. Turning to the Digital Media segment. Revenue in Q3 was $769.1 million compared to $745.9 million in Q3 fiscal 2011 and $818.4 million last quarter. The 2 major components of revenue in our Digital Media segment are our Creative family of products and our Document Services products. Document Services products, consisting of the Acrobat family as well as the new cloud-based services such as EchoSign, had a solid quarter. We achieved Document Services revenue in Q3 of $185.5 million, driven by continued Acrobat adoption in the enterprise as well as strong growth in EchoSign and related Acrobat cloud services. Looking to Q4, we are excited about the next major release of Acrobat, which will ship late in the quarter. Now, as promised, I'd like to provide more insight on our Creative product results. The goal of Creative Cloud is to deliver more value to customers, which will drive higher revenue growth that is more predictable. During the transition, we measure performance as a combination of perpetual revenue recognized up front and the number of our paid Creative Cloud memberships that is recognized ratably. We've highlighted frequently that 2 additional goals with Creative Cloud are to attract new customers to our offering and keep our existing customers more current on the latest release. As we track against these objectives, it's important to understand where we are in the phased delivery of different versions of Creative Cloud. Creative Cloud for individuals shipped in May, and individual users represent the vast majority of Creative Cloud members today. We intend to release Creative Cloud for teams this quarter, which will be targeted at groups of users in small and medium businesses as well as departments in larger companies. In 2013, we intend to deliver an enterprise offering that is subscription based and will supplement how we engage large customers who today license Creative products via volume licensing agreements. Combined, all of these offerings will help us achieve the goals we set forth at our analyst meeting last November, including 10% unit growth in fiscal 2012 and accelerated new customer acquisition. Our research shows that approximately 40% of subscribers paying list price for Creative Cloud in Q3 were new to the Adobe Creative product family. On a regular basis, we intend to provide insight into key data points which will help you understand and model our transition to subscription. Some of these metrics will fluctuate with product mix from quarter-to-quarter. In Q3, all of our key subscription run rates and metrics increased and exceeded our expectations. We added more than 100,000 net new subscriptions, and we exited Q3 with approximately 200,000 total paid subscriptions. As I said earlier, we achieved an average of 8,000 new subscriptions per week in Q3. Entering the quarter, we expected an average of approximately 5,000 subscriptions per week. In Q3, 86% of subscribers chose annual subscription over month-to-month terms. This grew from 75% that chose annual in Q2. In addition, 75% of subscribers chose the full Creative Cloud offer over point product options in Q3, up from 65% last quarter. Our average revenue per user per month was $37 in Q3, up from approximately $36 we achieved in Q2. 97% of subscriptions were ordered through adobe.com. Anyone trying to do channel checks by calling contacts in the distributor and reseller channels to understand the status of CS6 and Creative Cloud for individuals should balance the findings of those checks with the knowledge that a mix shift is happening. The introductory $29.99 per month promotion has proven to be an effective strategy for onboarding existing customers into Creative Cloud, and we decided to extend it beyond August. We believe that once users try Creative Cloud and see the value it gives them over the perpetual offer, they will stick with Creative Cloud after the monthly price resets to $49.99 after the first year. We continue to build a healthy pipeline for potential Creative Cloud paid subscribers through marketing programs, trial downloads and free memberships. Getting prospects into the marketing and conversion funnel is therefore a key part of the strategy to drive the transition to subscription. Now let's look at revenue and the financial model of the subscription transition. For Q3, given the subscription mix, we estimate we would have recognized $750 of average license revenue per unit if the perpetual option was chosen instead of subscription. We expect this average to fluctuate as we add more subscribers and deliver new offerings for teams and enterprises. Put another way, when a perpetual commercial customer migrates to subscription, instead of recognizing the approximately $750 of revenue immediately, we are instead recognizing revenue month-to-month with a subscription model. As I said earlier, in Q3, we added approximately 8,000 Creative Cloud subscriptions per week, exceeding the 5,000 subscriptions per week we assumed in our targets. This overachievement of 39,000 subscriptions multiplied by the ASP of approximately $750 yields $29 million more than expected in Q3 revenue effectively transitioned to Creative Cloud. Using the more than 100,000 subscriptions we added in Q3, we believe we saw a total effective shift in revenue of approximately $75 million from perpetual to Creative Cloud during Q3. In total, the approximately 200,000 subscriptions we achieved to date equates to approximately $150 million in revenue that has effectively transitioned away from perpetual to Creative Cloud. This leads to one of the most important metrics we will want the financial community to follow going forward. That's the total amount of annualized recurring revenue being driven by Creative Cloud subscriptions. ARR is calculated by multiplying the number of current paid subscriptions by the average monthly revenue per user multiplied by 12. We exited Q2 with Creative Cloud annualized recurring revenue of $39 million with an average monthly revenue per user of $36. With the success we had in Q3, that ARR amount increased to $86 million with an average monthly revenue per user of $37. Average monthly revenue per user will fluctuate based on product and geographic mix. Overall for Adobe, our percent of recurring revenue across all of our businesses exceeded 25% in Q3, driven primarily by growth in Digital Marketing, the initial success of Creative Cloud and the emergence of our document exchange services. With that context, I'd now like to discuss Q4. We are targeting the addition of 125,000 new paid subscriptions to Creative Cloud in Q4. At the same ASP of $750 we used for Q3 estimates, this would represent approximately $94 million in Q4 perpetual revenue which would effectively move to subscription and ratable monthly recognition. At the Q3 average revenue per user per month of $37, this would add $55 million to our annualized recurring revenue balance as we exit the fiscal year. We are targeting a Q4 revenue range between $1,075,000,000 and $1,125,000,000. This factors knowledge of our hedges based on the spot currency rates as we ended the quarter. At the midpoint of the Q4 targeted range, as a result of continued momentum with Creative Cloud adoption, we expect our Digital Media segment to be down sequentially. In our Digital Marketing segment, we expect Digital Marketing Suite revenue to grow sequentially in Q4, offset by a slight sequential decline in our legacy enterprise products. In addition, we're targeting our Q4 share count to be 500 million to 502 million shares. We are targeting nonoperating expense to be between $18 million and $20 million on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. We are targeting a Q4 GAAP tax rate of 23.5% and a non-GAAP tax rate of 22.5%. We are targeting a Q4 GAAP earnings per share range of $0.34 to $0.39 per share and a Q4 non-GAAP earnings per share range of $0.53 to $0.58. These EPS targeted ranges also factor in the continued success of Creative Cloud adoption. Exiting the year, in just 7 months since the launch of Creative Cloud, we expect to have 325,000 paid subscriptions, bringing the expected total of annualized recurring revenue to more than $140 million. This means we will have effectively transitioned over $240 million of perpetual license revenue to subscription. Looking beyond 2012, it is clear we are rapidly transforming our business. Our Creative Cloud results to date are exceeding our expectations, and we intend to accelerate the migration to subscription next year. We are also the leader in the fast-growing Digital Marketing category and are quickly building a $1 billion business in the cloud for marketers. The true health of our growth businesses will be represented by increasing recurring revenue in Digital Media and Digital Marketing, which will be recognized over time. While we aggressively build this recurring revenue stream during fiscal 2013, it will reflect on reported revenue and earnings per share, as is seen in our Q4 targets. The resulting overall financial health of the company will be even stronger, and we will drive higher growth rates for revenue and EPS in 2014 and beyond. We will provide more financial details regarding next year on our Q4 earnings call. This concludes my section. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Shantanu.