Adobe sees ‘record’ $1.4B revenue in Q2, stops disclosing new Creative Cloud subscribers

Today Adobe announced that it saw “record” revenues of $1.4 billion and $0.71 earnings per share during its second 2016 quarter (yes, another record). Analysts had expected revenues of about $1.4 billion and earnings of $0.68 per share.

With today’s earnings report, Adobe’s biggest business, its Creative Cloud subscription service for apps like Photoshop, is becoming a little more opaque; the company is no longer disclosing its number of paying Creative Cloud subscribers. Last we heard, Adobe had 4.252 million of them, and was still adding members at a relatively brisk pace.

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A company spokesperson tells VentureBeat that Adobe made the change to focus on annual recurring revenue. Adobe says its Digital Media business, which includes both Creative Cloud and Document Cloud, ended the second quarter “with $3.41 billion of annualized recurring revenue, a net increase of $285 million.”

Adobe’s Creative business specifically drove $755 million in revenue last quarter, up 37 percent compared to last year. Meanwhile, Adobe’s other big cloud business, its Marketing Cloud, was responsible for $385 million, up 18 percent from last year.

Aside from withholding new subscriber numbers, Adobe’s report today doesn’t really offer investors anything new. With regularly rising revenues, it’s pretty clear that the company’s multi-year pivot — from boxed software to cloud services and subscriptions — has worked out pretty well.

However, in after-hours trading, Adobe fell by more than 4 percent on low revenue expectations for the third quarter (this, after closing up by nearly two percent and meeting revenue expectations).

Interesting.

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