Intuit Earnings Call Insights: Industry-wide Slowdown and Total Expected Filers

Intuit, Inc. (NASDAQ:INTU) recently reported its second quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Industry-wide Slowdown

Adam Holt – Morgan Stanley: Thanks for the detail on the tax season. That’s very helpful. I’m going to start with a couple question there. It sounds like a $140 million roughly moved from one quarter to the next related to the IRS. Do you have a sense for what the unit shift might have been and is it possible at all to give us pro forma numbers to what you think the season might be year-to-date adjusting for the shifts around the IRS?

Brad Smith – President and CEO: Adam, let me try my best to parse through what we do know right now. What we do know is that this year we’ve seen a pretty significant industry-wide slowdown based upon all the third-party data in terms of the slow start. And then we’ve seen a pickup in the pace of filing since January 30th when the IRS began accepting and processing returns. So in terms of trying to translate that into unit revenue, what we can tell you is this that we have right now seen an increase of roughly 29% in the last two weeks and that unit volume continues to process at that kind of rate. So what I would tell you is while the starting line has definitely moved up a little bit later, the finish line hasn’t moved at all, and there’s going to be a 140 million people filing returns between now and April 15th. In terms of how that unit breaks down, it’s going to be very hard for me to give you any sort of a calculation or prediction as we sit here right now. In terms of pro forma, I’m sorry Adam, the second question on pro forma just a little more around what you were looking for there.

Adam Holt – Morgan Stanley: I was just trying to see if you had any sense for what you think the impact has been thus far through the season beyond just through the end of January?

Brad Smith – President and CEO: Neil, do you have a perspective on that?