The biggest Creative Software company: Adobe

Recently Adobe became the talk of the business world following their $20 Billion offer to acquire Figma. This is considered to be a premium, considering we're currently in a bear market. Let's take a look at the biggest creative software company in the market: Adobe.

The company claims that over 90% of the world's creatives use its biggest product: Adobe Photoshop.

The company is currently valued at $160 Billion. By market capitalization, Adobe is the 65th most valuable company in the world. Revenue in the 2022 fiscal year was $17.61 Billion, and the annual net income in 2022 was $4.82 Billion. As of 2022, Adobe has 26,000 Employees.

In spite of the presence of other companies in the space such as Corel, Avid and Autodesk, Adobe is currently they’re the unquestionable leader in the Creativity software market. Their suite of products includes

• Adobe Photoshop (Photo Editing)
• Adobe Illustrator (Vector Graphics Software)
• Adobe Premier Pro (Video Editing)
• Adobe InDesign (Layout and Page Design)
• Adobe After Effects (Motion Graphics and Visual Effects)
• Acrobat (Collaborative PDF creating and editing)
• Lightroom (Cloud-based Photo Editing)
• Adobe Dreamweaver (Responsive website design)

Today the company has 3 main pillars

1. Adobe Creative Cloud
2. Adobe Document Cloud
3. Adobe Experience Cloud

In the Adobe Creative Cloud Space, Behance, which is Adobe's online creative community, has over 30 Million members.

In the Adobe Document Cloud space, more than 400 Billion PDFs were opened in Adobe Products, and more than 8 Billion electronic and digital signature transactions were processed through Adobe Document Cloud in the past year.

In the Adobe Experience Cloud space, Adobe Analytics analyzes 1 Trillion+ visits to retail websites in the US and 100 Million+ product SKUs in 18 categories to provide e-commerce and online inflation insights to businesses, policymakers, and consumer categories.

Adobe Systems Incorporated was founded in 1982 in California, USA by Charles Geschke and John Warnock. The company's original purpose was to make physical copies of computer texts and images. The 2 Co-founders were ex-employees of Xerox and had developed the idea for a page description language called ‘PostScript’ while they were working at the company. However, Xerox rejected this idea, and the founders left Xerox to start Adobe.

The company was named after Adobe Creek, which is a place in Los Altos, California. Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs attempted to buy Adobe for $5 Million in 1982, but the founders refused to sell. Since Adobe investors urged the founders to work something out with Jobs, they sold 19% of the company to him. Apple bought the Postscript license, making Adobe the first company in Silicon Valley to become profitable within the 1st year.

In 1987 Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based program for creating logos, designs and posters, was released.

It’s largest product ‘Photoshop’ was developed by 2 brothers, Thomas and John Knoll in 1987. They sold the distribution license of Photoshop to Adobe in 1988. In 1995, Adobe purchased the rights to the product from the Knoll Brothers for $34.5 Million. Such acquisitions have been one important reason why Adobe became this dominant. The company has made 61 acquisitions to date.

In 1991 Premier was released, making it the first non-linear editor on the market. In 2003 this evolved into a more robust and customizable video editing tool in Premiere Pro. Adobe Premiere Pro is now the undisputed leader in video editing and is even used in Hollywood movies.

Aftereffects, a product closely associated with Premiere Pro, was acquired in 1993. This visual effects and motion graphics tool was originally developed by the Company of Science and Art (CoSA).

Did you'll know that the PDF was one of Adobe's creations? Before the PDF, the concept of sending documents full of text and graphics was inconceivable. This was co-founder Warnock's pet project, and took 3 years to develop. The PDF revolutionized the way information was shared. After going through several iterations, it is still one of the most powerful file formats.

In 1999, Adobe released InDesign, a professional software publishing package which boosted its sales to more than $1 Billion.

In 2003, the company released Adobe Creative Suite, which unified many of its creative software under one umbrella. This is one of the 1st purchases of our Marketing Agency Ladder Global.

The Cloud Computing revolution was taking place in the 2010s, and Adobe released the Adobe Creative Cloud in 2013 to keep up with the latest technology. In 2018 the company officially changed its name from 'Adobe Systems Incorporated' to 'Adobe Inc.'

The current CEO of Adobe is Shantanu Narayen, who has held this position since 2007 and was responsible for most of the company's major deals. He has a very high approval rating from his team, often making it to the top 5 lists of most popular CEOs measured by Employee voting. Even though the company stock has lost some value at the time of the writing (largely due to the announced Figma deal, which many think is overpriced), the company is expected to rebound primarily because of its strong position in the market.