Adobe Systems Earnings Call Insights: Creative Cloud and Attracting New Users

Adobe Systems (NASDAQ:ADBE) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Creative Cloud

Walter Pritchard – Citigroup: Shantanu and Mark, great disclosure and I think everybody appreciates all the transparency there, so just wanted to highlight that. Question I had around the Creative Cloud move. It does seem like customers are enduring somewhat of the price increases they move to these new offerings, and I’m wondering if you could talk about where customers are seeing the additional value that’s driving them to move, how much of it is sort of a care that you’re offering in terms of value versus the stick in terms of practices you may be using especially around, enterprise licensing to encourage the change?

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Shantanu Narayen – President and CEO: With respect to the transparency as I think both Mark and I have said right through, we want to make sure that we provide you with the information, while we go through this transition. As it relates to the cloud, I think people are really seeing the benefits of always having access to the applications and the latest applications as I mentioned we’ve actually given three updates already, we’ve introduced new services like sync and share, and we’ve really just started, in terms of the innovation. So, I think it’s just a better way to stay current. I think people see the promise of having their assets in a place which they can get location and dependent. So there really are no stick so to speak right now, it’s all about seeing that the future of creation is being delivered through the Creative Cloud.

Walter Pritchard – Citigroup: Then Mark, I didn’t hear you talk about; you gave a lot of detail on fiscal ’13. I didn’t hear you talk about cash flow, I know there is probably also some cash flow impact here based on the fact that most of these are monthly build, but maybe you could help us understand sort of where we should be thinking about cash flow for fiscal ’13.

Mark Garrett – EVP and CFO: The great news is we have a terrific cash balance, I talked about that. From a cash flow perspective, Walter, it is going to model as it has, somewhat closely with non-GAAP net income. So you should expect that cash flow will be less as we go through this pivotal year in 2013 than it has been in say 2012.