Adobe celebrates bumper Creative Cloud subscription growth

Adobe has added almost half-a-million new subscribers to its Creative Cloud offering in the past quarter, boosting its shares.

In an analyst call to discuss the company’s Q4 2013 and fiscal year 2013 results, CEO Shantanu Narayen said strong growth in the number of individuals subscribing to the cloud-based creativity software service had been paralleled by strong growth in licensing for teams and enterprises.

“Teams of creatives are realising the benefits of collaboration, and enterprises are increasing their adoption due to simplified licensing models and integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud’s digital asset management capabilities,” said Narayen, as reported in a call transcript from Seeking Alpha.

Along with Creative Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, the firm’s cloud marketing platform, which was released in autumn 2012, saw year-on-year revenue growth of 38 per cent. The company predicts that, overall this year, Marketing Cloud will have contributed $1 billion more than (£613.64 million) towards its revenue.

Mark Garrett, Adobe’s CFO, said: “We had an amazing year in transitioning our Creative business to a subscription model, and building a fast-growing, market-leading Marketing Cloud business.”

Garrett also listed the addition of more than 400,000 net new Creative Cloud Subscriptions and the growth of Marketing Cloud as key financial highlights of the quarter.

However, the company’s net income fell from $222.3 million in Q4 2012 to $65.32 million in Q4 2013, which Garrett blamed primarily on the drop-off of perpetual license purchases as the organisation moves to a SaaS business model.

Adobe’s growth in the cloud sector comes despite a hack in October that saw at least 38 million usernames and passwords stolen, along with parts of the source code for Photoshop, Acrobat and ColdFusion. Cloud customers were reportedly amongst those worst affected.