adobeq3

Adobe estimate CC subscriptions now account for more than half of their 16.9 million userbase

I always think it’s a good idea to keep a corner of my eye on Adobe’s financial results – after all, it’s goodbye Lightroom if Adobe went belly up. So I notice they just released theirĀ  FY2015 year results which appear in line with market expectations and kept the stock price on its upward trend.

One interesting detail in the headline numbers was under “Fiscal Year 2015 Financial Highlights”:

Net new Creative Cloud individual and team subscriptions grew by more than 2.71 million during fiscal year 2015 to 6.17 million.

50% above target

To put thatĀ 6.17 million in context, I’ve a post from Dec 2013 saying they had 1.4 million subscribers at the end of FY2013 and were targeting 4 million by now, the end of 2015. OK, published targets tend to be conservative, but it’s still a clear indication of their progress, isn’t it?

35% of user base

Another way to see this 6.17 million is that it represents 35% of their installed base. This comes from slide 22 of their recent investor relations presentation November 2015 where Adobe estimate 16.9 million existing users of CC and CS products. Notice too that 16.9 is up on their May 2013 estimate of 12.8 million (source: investor relations presentation in May 2013).

Of course, you can interpret these numbers however you wish, as signs of their progress, benevolent or not, or as a high watermark. The numbers don’t lie though, do they?