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.