Adobe stock climbs on a more profitable quarter than predicted
Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe
Mark Neuling | CNBC
Adobe shares rose 6% in extended trading on Thursday after the design software maker announced fiscal fourth-quarter earnings and guidance that exceeded analysts’ expectations.
Here’s how the company did:
- Earnings: $3.60 per share, adjusted, vs. $3.50 per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
- Revenue: $4.53 billion, vs. $4.53 billion as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
Total revenue grew 10% year over year in the quarter, which ended on Dec. 2, according to a statement. In the previous quarter revenue rose by 13%. Net income, at $1.18 billion, was down slightly from $1.23 billion in the year-ago quarter.
“We delivered record operating cash flows with a focus on profitability,” CEO Shantanu Narayen told analysts on a conference call. He said the company is remaining cautious and won’t be immune from a worsening economy.
With respect to guidance, Adobe called for $3.65 to $3.70 in adjusted earnings per share on $4.60 billion to $4.64 billion in revenue in the fiscal first quarter. Analysts polled by Refinitiv had expected $3.64 in adjusted earnings per share and $4.64 billion in revenue. The numbers don’t include impact from Figma. The company maintained its guidance for the full 2023 fiscal year.
Adobe’s Digital Media business, which includes Creative Cloud design software subscriptions, contributed $3.30 billion in revenue, not quite meeting the StreetAccount consensus of $3.31 billion. Creative revenue grew 8% in the quarter. The Digital Experience unit, which includes Adobe’s marketing software, delivered $1.15 billion in revenue, just over the $1.14 billion StreetAccount consensus.
The digital experience business succeeded in closing “numerous transformational deals that span our portfolio of solutions,” Anil Chakravarthy, president of the division, said on the call.
In the quarter Adobe said it would buy design software startup Figma for about $20 billion in the 40-year-old public company’s largest transaction to date.
“Overall, the regulatory process is proceeding as expected,” said David Wadhwani, president of the Digital Media business. The U.S. Justice Department and the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority is reviewing the deal, and Adobe still expects it to close in 2023, Wadhwani said.
One analyst asked how Figma is handling the current economic environment. But for now FIgma is still a private company, and Adobe isn’t able to discuss Figma’s latest performance, Narayen said.
When removing the effect of the after-hours move, Adobe shares have slid 42% this year, while the S&P 500 index has declined 18% over the same period.
WATCH: Adobe forecasts a 5.3% rise in Cyber Monday sales year-over-year
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold 100,000 shares of the chipmaker’s stock on Friday and Monday, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The sales are worth nearly $15 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The transactions are the first sale in Huang’s plan to sell as many as 600,000 shares of Nvidia through the end of 2025. It’s a plan that was announced in March, and it’d be worth $873 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The Nvidia founder still owns more than 800 million Nvidia shares, according to Monday’s SEC filing. Huang has a net worth of about $126 billion, ranking him 12th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The 62-year-old chief executive sold about $700 million in Nvidia shares last year under a prearranged plan, too.
Nvidia stock is up more than 800% since December 2022 after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was first released to the public. That launch drew attention to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were needed to develop and power the artificial intelligence service.
The company’s chips remain in high demand with the majority of the AI chip market, and Nvidia has introduced two subsequent generations of its AI GPU technology.
Nvidia continues to grow. Its stock is up 9% this year, even as the company faces export control issues that could limit foreign markets for its AI chips.
In May, the company reported first-quarter earnings that showed the chipmaker’s revenue growing 69% on an annual basis to $44 billion during the quarter.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic‘s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative,” a federal judge ruled late on Monday.
Amazon-backed Anthropic’s AI training did not violate the authors’ copyrights since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.
“The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer.”
The decision was a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. Alsup’s ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward.
A spokesperson for Anthropic said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the ruling and that the decision was, “Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.”
CNBC has reached out to the plaintiffs for comment.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August. The suit alleged that Anthropic built a “multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”
Alsup did, however, order a trial on the pirated material that Anthropic put into its central library of content, even though the company did not use it for AI training.
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote.
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