Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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So being on the critical path, being mission critical to customers, we think this is the type of environment where the power of Adobe and the performance of the company gets to shine.

David Wadhwani: Yes. And I’ll just add a little bit specific to Digital Media. The foundation of the growth that we have, we still feel a very significant tailwind even in this market. Shantanu talked about the strength of the enterprise business. Every business needs to be a digital business. Digital content is fueling the global economy. That’s true for smaller organizations and individuals as well. If you look at the creator economy, we’re seeing more people come in to start to create their own personal online brands. So we saw a very strong digital funnel. As well, we had the highest traffic that we’ve ever had come to adobe.com. And even in small, medium businesses, the part of their business that they need to invest most in is the digital channel as Dan was talking about.

You look at that diversity, you then layer on the diversity of the growth drivers that we have in the business, whether it’s new user acquisition, whether it’s upsell of existing users, whether it’s retention rates, whether it’s new businesses like Substance or Stock or the pricing and packaging opportunities that we have. Every one of those levers has been very productive for us. In terms of primary growth driver, it is and always has been new user acquisition. It is by far the biggest contributor, and a lot of the PLG work that we’ve done over the last year or 1.5 years is contributing to not just top of funnel, but also conversion of that top of funnel. In terms of upsell and migration, we’ve been investing for a decade or more in education, and we have a very efficient channel now where students that graduate effectively upgrade and migrate into full priced offerings.

That drove a very strong Creative Cloud individual all apps quarter for us. Retention, we’ve been doing a lot of work in retention through PLG, but we’ve also been driving a lot of utilization of Adobe Express as part of the Creative Cloud business. All of that combined makes for a very strong retention rate. New businesses, we talked about Substance and Frame having outsized growth. And of course, the pricing and packaging work that we’ve been doing and all along continues to contribute to that, both for CC and Acrobat CCDC as a whole. So looking ahead, all of these drivers and these levers are intact, and we have lots of opportunities going forward as well.

Shantanu Narayen: And maybe just putting it altogether if you look at it and say that, hey, we did $410 million in Q1, we are targeting $420 million of net new ARR in Q2. The question you would have asked us if we hadn’t done this was what are you signaling about the second half of the year. So I think it’s a way of showing that the momentum is there in the business.

Keith Weiss: Super helpful. Thank you, guys.

Operator: And we will take our next question from the line of Jake Roberge with William Blair. Please proceed.

Jake Roberge: Hey, congrats on great results. I just want to double click on that retention commentary you said, you called out several €“ in several areas of the business during the prepared remarks. Is there anything specific that you’re doing differently in this period of macro uncertainty that’s driving those results? And have you started to see Express help at all with retention metrics as customers now the tier that they can actually graduate down to?

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