Adobe Systems F4Q07 (Qtr End 11/30/07) Earnings Call Transcript

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2007-12-17 17:56:01.0

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) We’ll take our first question from Jay Vleeschhouwer with Merrill Lynch.

Jay Vleeschhouwer - Merrill Lynch

Thanks. Shantanu, the first question has to do with how you think about the long tail for Creative Suite. What if any are the key leading or coincidental indicators that you look at to substantiate the view that you will have the long tail? For example, do you look at OS mix? Do you look at upgrade volume versus new units or what if anything are the variables that you take into account versus how products would have behaved in the past?

Secondly, with respect to Acrobat, can you comment at all on how the increase in the installed base compared with the previous couple of years? I believe in ’05 and ’06, based on your disclosures, you increased the base by about 5 million a year each. And the question therefore is how that base increase performed in ’07.

Shantanu Narayen

On the first question associated with CS3, first, we are really pleased with the performance that we had for CS3 in Q4 and as you know, we do a lot of research by talking to our creative customers to understand adoption cycles and the research continues to indicate that the key trends that we talked about prior to the release of CS3, namely the excitement around the fact that it was our first release of the integrated Adobe Macromedia products, that fact that we were supporting Mactel on this, the amount of video that we are seeing on the web -- those trends are absolutely continuing.

Mac performance also continues to be strong. That’s clearly one of the indicators that we do look at and our research tells us that Mac customers, while we are seeing adoption, there is still a fair amount of adoption left to go.

So fundamentally, the slope of CS3 adoption is very similar to that of CS2 and CS1, with the one exception that the revenue is significantly outpacing those other two previous cycles, which is why we continue to be optimistic about CS3 and we continue to believe that we will see a fairly long tail for CS3 this cycle.

With respect to your second question on Acrobat, we’re not updating the total number right now but when you look at Acrobat units, both as standalone, the fact that we had a record quarter a year after the release was very, very pleasing. We are starting to see some significant adoption within enterprises and when you consider the Acrobat adoption within each of the suites as well, two things come to mind: one is, it’s clear that higher value users of PDF are really what are driving the PDF usage, both within the suites as well as through Acrobat Professional and there continues to be significant unpenetrated seats with the knowledge workers that we are continuing to target against.

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