Autodesk’s FQ3 earnings announcement yesterday surprised a lot of people, coming in well ahead of analyst estimates and near the top of its own earlier guidance. There had been concerns over Europe, the channel and how buyers would react to the suites offerings, but all of those seemed to fade away as Autodesk reported revenue of $549 million, up 15% over last year. Standouts were the growth in the Manufacturing and Platform & Emerging (PSEB) businesses and, from a geo perspective, Asia.
The details — highlights only; Autodesk offers a lot of factoids, which you can see here:
Revenue was $549 million, up 15% year/year and flat compared to FQ2.
License revenue was $331 million, essentially flat with last quarter and up 18% over last year. Within this, revenue from commercial new licenses increased 11% but decreased 5% sequentially.
Subscription (aka maintenance) revenue was $217 million, a record high, up 12% over last year.
By geography, revenue from EMEA was $202 million, up 10% year/year on “particular strength in northern Europe, partially offset by weakness in southern Europe”. Revenue from the Americas was $200 million, up 12%. Revenue from APAC was $146 million, up 28% including one large PSEB transaction of approximately $11 million. Within all of this, Autodesk reported revenue from emerging economies of $87 million, an increase of 15%.
Revenue from Suites was $151 million, and represented 27% of total revenue (not yet anywhere near the 100% the company is aiming for). Suites revenue was up 36% year/year but decreased 4% sequentially, likely due to the initial buzz and promotions around launches that occurred during FQ2.
By business segment, revenue from the manufacturing segment was $134 million, up 14% year/year but down 2% sequentially. Manufacturing suites revenue was up 15% year/year and down 7% sequentially. Autodesk said the manufacturing segment performed especially well in the Americas. Revenue from the AEC business segment was $152 million, up 12% year/year and down 4% sequentially. Suites increased 40% year/year. The AEC business had a strong quarter in APAC and EMEA, and in the government vertical. Revenue from PSEB was $210 million, up 21% year/year and 6% sequentially. Revenue from PSEB suites grew 145% (not a typo: 145%) year/year on “a small base, driven by an increase in revenue from educational suites and the recently introduced Autodesk Design Suites.” Revenue from Media and Entertainment was $53 million, up 6% compared to the third quarter last year.
As of the end of 3QFY12, Autodesk reports an installed base was 3.116 million, up 180,000 or so for the year. Just think about that base for a moment. Autodesk no longer gives info on the number of Inventor or Revit seats, so presume a couple of hundred thousand of those and perhaps a couple million AutoCAD (not LT) seats — that’s a gigantic potential audience for the PLM offering that the company continues to tease. During the earnings call for investors, CEO Carl Bass said that Autodesk’s PLM will have “a very unique approach” for manufacturing, AEC and media & entertainment customers — first time I’ve hard of a PLMish offering for media, but why not? They must also have data management, provenance and other issues which a broader offering can and should be able to address. By including them in the target list, Autodesk is clearly thinking outside the typical engineering box — I doubt that people who create Avatar would suffer through the user interface and interaction mechanisms that prevail in our world.
Mr. Bass also said that Autodesk’s offering is “cloud-based, will be easy-to-use, implement and deploy. It will be scalable, configurable and intuitive, which is a sharp contrast to the decades-old legacy technology in the market now. We think that customers are starving for this new kind of solution, and Autodesk succeeds in introducing this kind of disruptive technology.” Let’s hope this is not over-hyping a repackaging of existing Vault, Buzzsaw and whatever the M&E folks use today. [I honestly don’t think it is, but don’t know one way or the other at this point. ]
Autodesk’s material also pointed out that the company did 10 acquisitions during the fiscal third quarter for a total of $90 million. Most, according to Mr. Bass, are technology acquisitions that either enable the company to expand into adjacent markets with a more complete offering or are platform technologies that will enable Autodesk to offer engineering tools in the cloud. Mr. Bass gave no signs that the pace of acquisitions will slow — but he also gave no indications of what further technologies he might want to buy.
Autodesk also gave forward-looking guidance. It expects fiscal fourth quarter (ended January 2012) revenue to be between $575 million and $590 million, which would lead to fiscal 2012 revenue of $2.198 billion to $2.213 billon, or growth of about 13%. For fiscal 2013, Autodesk initiated guidance of about $2.4 billion, growth of 10%, with a long-term (2015) target of 12% to 14% annual growth. [The company said that no assumptions about the financial impact of Autodesk’s PLM offering are included in this guidance.]
I’ll be at Autodesk University in a few weeks and am looking forward to the formal unveiling of the company’s PLM solution and to hearing what attendees think of the offering. After all, so far we’ve only heard Autodesk’s hints — the real success measure is whether customers find it interesting enough to either abandon what they have or implement something completely new to them. Interesting times.
