Adobe sees strong Q2 with $1.16B in revenue, 639K new Creative Cloud subscribers

Adobe now has 4.61 million paying Creative Cloud subscribers, the company shared within its second quarter 2015 financial report today.

Adobe aims to hit nearly 6 million paid subscribers before 2015’s end. As we said last quarter, there’s a good chance Adobe will slightly miss that target. The company added 639,000 new paying Creative Cloud subscribers in Q2, 517,000 in Q1, and 644,000 in Q4 of 2014.

Despite falling behind on subscriber expectations, Adobe once again beat financial expectations across the board.

Adobe reported revenues of $1.16 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.48 for its second fiscal quarter. Analysts had expected Adobe to report revenues of $1.16 billion and earnings per share of $0.45. In March, Adobe anticipated it would report revenues of between $1.125 billion and $1.175 billion and non-GAAP earnings of $0.41 to $0.47 per share this quarter.

In regular trading today, Adobe was up by about 1.5 percent. In after-hours trading, Adobe is down slightly.

Adobe’s Q2 2015

Compared to last quarter, the past few months have been relatively slow for Adobe. Following the March 16 unveil of Document Cloud and Acrobat DC — Adobe’s third big investment in “the cloud” — the company’s kept quiet, preparing for today’s launch of Creative Cloud 2015 and Adobe Stock.

As we’ll detail later in our CC 2015 review, even Adobe’s latest Creative Cloud update lacks suspense — but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Adobe has now fully transitioned into a subscription business that favors regular, functional releases over flashy product launches designed to the specs of its sales team. And at least for now, investors appear content with that direction.