Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jay Vleeschhouwer: Yeah. Thank you. You noted the strength in RPO in the quarter, including the record sequential increase. Can you talk about how you’re thinking about RPO for fiscal ’24, would you expect it to continue to be able to outgrow revenue growth by several points as you did in fiscal ’23 and perhaps talk about the ingredients that will continue to drive RPO, either by segment or any other considerations that you’d like to talk about in that.

Shantanu Narayen: Yeah. Thanks, Jay. As I pull some of the threads together that we’ve heard on this call. Anil, talked about large transformational deals being the platform of choice with customer experience management, simultaneously driving topline and bottom-line productivity and the investments around driving those are an imperative in the market. We see a similar dynamic with the new technologies that we’re bringing to market on the DME side at the business, we’re streaming seeing strong pull from the enterprise. And so as I net out that environment and our performance against that opportunity, it goes to produce the type of sequential RPO progression that we saw Q3 to Q4. Every quarter won’t be that large, but the backdrop around that dynamic for the company given the setup we see, it should be another strong year for RPO throughout the year.

Jay Vleeschhouwer: Thank you.

Shantanu Narayen: Operator. We’re getting close to the top of the hour. We’ll take two more questions and then we’ll wrap up. Thanks.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Saket Kalia with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Saket Kalia: Okay. Great. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question, and congrats on a nice quarter. David maybe for you, I had a question just on Firefly and the subscription packets. I know that the commercial model for commercial — I’m sorry, for Firefly credit packets, really just started about six weeks ago. But are there any early observations that you’ve seen just on customers’ willingness to add those packets, or maybe how they’re consuming the initial credit allocation that they get with the Creative Cloud subscription?

David Wadhwani: Yeah. Happy to take that. First of all I think philosophically, going back to what we said at the investor meeting at MAX, our primary focus here is to drive usage of the generative capabilities and you see that with the 4.5 billion images generated, that strategy is working. Secondly, we price the generative packs — sorry, we integrated the generative capabilities and credits directly into our paid plans with the Express intent of driving adoption of the paid subscription plans and getting broad proliferation of the ability to use those. And what we are seeing is heavy usage within those paid plans. I think as we’ve mentioned in the past. I think I mentioned earlier today as well, Generative Fill, for example in Photoshop is the fastest-growing feature that we’ve put into Photoshop in recent memory.

So the usage is great, the utilization is great. I don’t personally expect the generative packs to have a large impact in the short-term, other than to drive more usage more customers to our paid existing subscription plans. But what will happen over the course of the year, in the next few years is that we will be integrating more and more generative capabilities into the existing product workflows. And that will drive and we’ll be integrating capabilities like video generation, which will cost more than one generation and that will drive a natural inflation in that market and that will become a driver for growth subsequently. But this year is really primarily focused on getting people into the right paid plans of our flagship applications, our Adobe Express, and then drive usage in that sense.

And then as that happens, the rest will take care of itself in the years ahead.

Saket Kalia: Makes sense. Thanks, guys.

Operator: We’ll take our final question from Mark Moerdler with Bernstein Research. Please go ahead.

Mark Moerdler: Thank you for squeezing me in. I really do appreciate. Dan, I’d like to look a little bit at MAX we discussed how excited you were on Firefly and how it drives Creative Cloud seed and paid seed adoption. Now that you had a bit of time in market, can you explain how you think about how this will drive the paid seed growth, is it how strong it could be and should we expect to seeds going to be lower unit price because they’re going to be entry-level, what do you think that we will get offset by these higher-priced Firefly driven sales into the enterprise. Thank you.

Dan Durn: Yeah. Thanks, Mark. I think at the core of bringing this technology to life, as a standalone application to drive an ideation part of the process, but value in deeply integrating these capabilities into the flagship applications and the workflows that define the creation process, it gives us a lot of surface area with customers and meeting them where they are in their particular needs and use-case specific needs. And so bringing people efficiently top of funnel, establishing the segmentation across that product portfolio, driving efficiency into the creation process and allowing the velocity to enter the ideation, creation, activation and then instrumentation of that to really refine how companies engage with customers.

So, it lays the groundwork for us to touch more customers where they are in the ecosystem, bring them on board in a use-case specific way and then take them on digital journeys which is something the company has very skilled at with our D-DOM to cross-sell and upsell over the life of their engagement with our ecosystem.

Anil Chakravarthy: From a product perspective, when you think about it, Mark, for us, the biggest thing that we want to do is, how do we further make our products accessible, fun and affordable for increasing set of customers and I think Firefly is one of those inflection points that will help everybody get over the blank screen fear that they have and so first, as you think about Firefly as an ideation and people just coming and want to have creative inspiration. This is, whether you’re an individual user, whether you’re agencies, we’re seeing a lot of adoption of Firefly to just start the entire Creative process and that sort of brings them as an on-ramp into Express, which would be the other part. Express is certainly the introductory pricing, the ability to get millions more into the fold and the ability, right now, it used to be that Express and other offerings in that is to all worry about, do I have the right templates.