Autodesk will be reporting 3QFY11 on Thursday, November 18th. In keeping with improving trends elsewhere in the group (at least in the manufacturing vertical market, with Ansys’, Dassault Systèmes’, and PTC’s results), Autodesk – the most diverse vendor in terms of addressed markets - will have seen gains more or less across the board.
I’m estimating total revenues of $465.8 million, up 12% year/year, with non-GAAP earnings of $0.33 a share (the third quarter revenues last year were down 31%). The 4QFY11 (January 2011) estimate assumes revenues of slightly more than $500 million, up 10%, driven mostly by Platform and Manufacturing (AEC, however, has the “easiest” comparison). In light of Cisco’s comments, it might be useful for Autodesk to comment on its public sector business; this has typically been under a tenth of the total, but it has been growing proportionately (public sector results in the US very likely vary by region, and by federal vs. state).
By geographic results, Europe, Autodesk’s largest region, should have seen double-digit growth, as we can infer from the publicly-reported results of one of its two largest distribution partners (Mensch und Maschine); manufacturing and infrastructure did well, AEC improved, but not by as much, and the overall business recovery was apparently not confined to Germany.
This morning, Avatech Solutions, perhaps Autodesk’s largest domestic reseller (though still less than a tenth of Autodesk’s Americas revenues), reported results for its 1Q11 (ended September): while year/year comparisons are skewed by the recent merger of Avatech with Rand Worldwide (another large domestic Autodesk partner under the Imaginit logo), management noted that its results were not quite up to plan. It attributed almost all of the shortfall to Canada (which was mostly covered by the old Rand business); interestingly, it noted that in the US, government was the strongest market (sequentially), while manufacturing was the weakest.
In terms of key segment and business metric results, I’m assuming the following for Autodesk:
Platform (AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT, emerging products): $172 million, up 11% year/year, assuming that AutoCAD LT, Autodesk’s second-largest product, declines sequentially from the second quarter (which it has done the majority of the time from 2Q to 3Q over the past ten years).
Manufacturing (mostly Inventor, plus the Alias and Moldflow lines): $114.5 million, up 28% against a very weak 3QFY10, but not quite back to where it was two years ago. Given trends elsewhere in the group, it could be more likely that Autodesk would report upside here than in AEC.
AEC (Revit, Civil, Buzzsaw, plus other infrastructure and building products): $135 million, up 8%.
Media & Entertainment: $44.5 million, down 8%, though this could be conservative.
Subscriptions (maintenance): I’m estimating a mid-teens increase in maintenance billings, to about $180 million.
The two underlying trends in the subscriptions part of the business are, first, that deferred maintenance revenues have generally been increasing faster than the number of subscribers (implying higher average revenues per subscriber over time), and, second, the "book/bill" is getting back to parity, or better. Excluding estimated subscriptions revenues and upgrades revenues from total estimated revenues yields an increase estimated new license and services revenues of about 30% (leaving a lot of headroom still to get back to pre-recession levels given the magnitude of the decline in new business last year).
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