ADSK celebrates two full years of losses

Autodesk Reports Strong First Quarter Results, says the press release.

Autodesk co-CEO Amar Hanspal:

Broad-based strength across all subscription types and geographies led to another record quarter for total subscription additions and a fantastic start of the new fiscal year. Customers continue to embrace the subscription model, and we’re expanding our market opportunity with continued momentum of our cloud-based offerings, such as BIM 360 and Fusion 360.

 
Autodesk co-CEO Andrew Anagnost:

We’re executing well and making significant progress on our business model transition as evidenced by our first quarter results. We’re starting the year from a position of strength and are excited to kick off the next phase of our transition when we offer our maintenance customers a simple, cost effective path to product subscription starting next month.

Thanks to this fantastic progress into the exciting new customer-embraced rental-only business model, Autodesk has now recorded eight successive strong quarters of losses totalling $969 million. Another strong quarter like this one will see those losses exceed a billion dollars, and then it will really be time to crack open the champagne.

Here’s how those results look. Green shows profit; red shows loss. The black lines are trend lines. The thick one is linear, the thin one is a 4-quarter moving average.

Here’s an Adobe graph for comparison; it covers a wider date range. The linear trend line is not directly comparable because the Adobe graph includes a recovery phase which Autodesk has yet to enter.

Both graphs represent GAAP results that do not reflect deferred revenue (money that is received but not counted immediately). Autodesk is still making a loss in non-GAAP terms, but a smaller one than shown in the graph. Full details of Autodesk’s financials are available here. Make your own financial decisions based on your own interpretations and/or using the advice of parties better qualified than myself.

8 thoughts on “ADSK celebrates two full years of losses

  1. Miles

    Deep doo doo !
    I jumped ship as soon as I received the ‘Great news, up yours’ letter. My transition to other software vendors is now complete which consist of Bricscad, Solid Edge and Rhino.
    Happy days….

    Reply
    1. Steve Johnson Post author

      The years are correct, US financial years make sense in the same way as Autodesk product years do, i.e. they don’t.

      I got my numbers from Autodesk’s financials, but I’ll double check.

      Reply
  2. James Maeding

    Steve, your “read fiull post” link on current article downloads the service pack in link above it. must be a typo but startled me so you should look at it.

    Reply
    1. Steve Johnson Post author

      Thanks, the theme I use has that problem when the read more split occurs at a link or an image so I have to either manipulate the content to avoid that or use a post type that doesn’t do that split. Should be OK now.

      Reply
  3. David matthews

    Not sure what the point you’re trying to make here is. I can understand getting upset with the move to subscription but not sure what you’re getting at here.

    Reply

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