You ran two interesting stories this week, one on the active CAD users and the other on ADSK’s most recent results.
In terms of the former, in a report earlier this year, I noted that the active maintenance base of 3D CAD seats was in a range of 925,000-1.0 million, as of the end of 2009, including, for instance, 133,500 Pro/Engineer seats and about 220,000 Solid Works seats. Catia would appear to have the largest number of such seats, accounting for roughly just over a fourth of the industry base.
In addition, I calculated that the annual maintenance revenues for such seats was about $1.25-$1.30 billion. Dassault therefore would have the largest active base in the traditional 3D CAD market, i.e., planes, trains and automobiles. My numbers by the way do not include educational seats.
If the 4 million total industry active base mentioned in the story is correct, then it’s highly likely that the bulk of those consist of Autodesk products when we consider that more than 4.6 million seats of AutoCAD seats have shipped since inception, including more than 1.6 million “vertical” versions, such as Map, Civil, Mechanical, and so on (that amount would not be the same as current active seats of course, but keep in mind that AutoCAD very likely surpassed Inventor as Autodesk’s largest maintenance revenue product some time ago).
In addition, more than 4.1 million seats of AutoCAD LT have shipped since inception in 1994 although the maintenance retention is probably relatively low as compared with the higher end products. We can infer from the previous disclosures that the base to date for Revit may now be in excess of 300,000 copies of the different configurations they offer.
In terms of the Autodesk results, your numbers are correct but incomplete. For instance, the company noted that the effect of the upgrade pricing change was an incremental $15 million for the quarter. Presumably, without that amount upgrades revenues would have been only about $36 million, down 16% year/year and a mere 8% of revenues.
More interesting is that maintenance billings were down only 3% from the record set in the preceding quarter ending January 2010 and up 26% year/year (to what I infer was about $223 million, the second-best maintenance billings quarter to date).
Recall that maintenance revenues reported now are always an artifact of cumulative billings and that in FY10 (the January 2010 fiscal year), billings were down year/year for the first three quarters of the year and down 7% for the whole year. This year the billings should see a double-digit recovery; upgrades will likely see a temporary bump this year but then resume their long-term decline.
Thanks for the clarification. Why do you say that maintenance billings down by only 3% is "interesting"? After all, one of the benefits of maintenance is to smooth out the troughs.
Posted by: Owen Wengerd | May 28, 2010 at 08:58 AM