Adobe sees solid Q1 with $1.11B in revenue, 517K new paying Creative Cloud subscribers

Adobe now has 3.97 million paying Creative Cloud subscribers, the company shared within its first quarter 2015 financial report today.

Adobe aims to hit nearly six million paid subscribers by the end of 2015, and at the current rate, the company might fall short. Adobe added 517,000 new paying Creative Cloud subscribers this quarter. By contrast, the company added 644,000 paid subscribers last quarter, and ended 2014 with 3.454 million paying subscribers.

Adobe reported revenues of $1.11 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.44 for the first fiscal quarter. Analysts had expected Adobe to report earnings per share of $0.39 on revenues of $1.09 billion. Separately, Adobe expected to report earnings of $0.14 to $0.20 per share and revenues of between $1.05 billion and $1.10 billion this quarter.

In short, Adobe beat financial expectations across the board.

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In regular trading today, Adobe was up by about 1.5 percent. In after-hours trading, the stock was down by about 3 percent; this is likely due to only adding 517,000 new paying subscribers, a smallish figure when compared to last quarter’s growth.

Although Creative Cloud is Adobe’s crown jewel, the company’s marketing business shouldn’t be ignored: It earned Adobe $311 million during the first quarter. Adobe’s new Document Cloud business also packs revenue potential, though we won’t hear much about that until later this year.

Last quarter, Adobe reported a strong $1.07B in revenue. At the time, Adobe rather confidently stated that it expected “revenue and earnings to grow sequentially every quarter” in 2015.

Adobe’s Q1 2015

Adobe packed quite a bit of news into its first fiscal quarter. Starting with the company’s 2014 Q4 earnings call, Adobe dropped a bomb with its $800M acquisition of Fotolia, a stock photo site that hosts 34 million images and videos. The company also celebrated Photoshop’s 25th anniversary during its first quarter, with a major marketing push and an early look at the next big changes coming to the ubiquitous photo editor.

And in other news, Adobe’s marketing business continues to grow,  Typekit cofounder Jeffrey Veen departed, and the company found itself wrapped up again in a hiring agreement lawsuit with other tech giants.

Though not part of its first fiscal quarter, Adobe introduced a third major investment in the cloud today with the unveiling of its Document Cloud, an upcoming service for storing and sharing documents. That release will certainly play a major role in the creative giant’s Q2.