"We are a highly-tuned product machine," exclaimed ceo Carol Bartz at Autodesk's earnings conference call last week. This year's emphasis is on "Quick ROI" -- return on investment, because companies now need to be convinced that new purchases will result in increased profits.
Revenues were up by 22% over a year ago, to US$280 million. The next quarter, however, is predicted to be flat: this is good news, because Q3 apparently is historically down. Subscription revenue is now 16%; aim is to reach 25%.
ADT was up over 70% over the previous year; sales increase for Revit was not reported. Seats of LT increased by 27% over last year, while revenues from AutoCAD increased 54%. <-- Notice the mix of units, "seats" and "revenues," which means Autodesk is cherry picking the best results. Upgrades sales to AutoCAD 2005 are better than any other upgrade.
Autodesk continues to claim that it is "uniquely positioned to provide open, secure file format" for sharing and transmitting drawings. <-- They're talking about DWF [design Web format], for which they claim 3.5 million users. That's based on downloads of DWF Viewer, a free product, and one that I've downloaded a couple of times, but don't use much.
A financial analyst asked if discounts and rebates will continue. Answer: There is always room for marketing and stimulating customers to buy.
The company has $572 million in the bank and no debt; it bought back 1.7 million shares. Perhaps not good news for employees is that the company is increasing the number of R&D [research and development] positions off-shore.
For the year 2005, expect to see improvements to 3D across all divisions, as well as enhancements to PLM [product lifecycle management]. The next AutoCAD (2006?)is scheduled to ship in March; perhaps it too will have enhancements to its 3D.
You want to bet they didn't stuff the channel?
Posted by: anon | Aug 23, 2004 at 03:58 PM