Adobe (ADBE) Declined Despite Reporting Record Revenue

Soumya Eswaran

Tue, Apr 15, 2025, 4:37 AM 4 min read

Aristotle Capital Management, LLC, an investment management company, released its “Value Equity Strategy” first quarter 2025 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. The U.S. equity market started the year with a modest decline, with the S&P 500 Index declining 4.27% during the quarter. Conversely, the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index rose 2.78% during the same period. The composite returned 0.78% gross of fees (0.73% net of fees) in the first quarter underperforming the 2.14% return of the Russell 1000 Value Index and outperforming -4.27% return of the S&P 500 Index. In addition, you can check the fund’s top 5 holdings to determine its best picks for 2025.

In its first quarter 2025 investor letter, Aristotle Value Equity Strategy emphasized stocks such as Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE). Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) is a technology company that operates through Digital Media, Digital Experience, and Publishing and Advertising. The one-month return of Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) was -10.34%, and its shares lost 26.31% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On April 14, 2025, Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) stock closed at $350.91 per share with a market capitalization of $149.558 billion.

Aristotle Value Equity Strategy stated the following regarding Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) in its Q1 2025 investor letter:

"Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE), the leading provider of content creation and publishing software, was a notable detractor during the quarter. This came despite the company reporting record revenue of over $5.7 billion in the first quarter—a 10% year-over-year increase, with double-digit increases across both its Digital Media and Digital Experience segments. The disconnect between strong fundamentals and share price weakness reflects ongoing market concerns around intensifying competitive threats from generative AI and lower-cost design platforms. Market sentiment has remained cautious around the perceived disruption risk posed by new AI-driven entrants, including OpenAI’s Sora for video generation and platforms like Canva, which cater to the broader prosumer and small and medium-sized business segment. However, we continue to view these as largely non-overlapping with Adobe’s core base of creative professionals, enterprises and agencies—audiences that demand precision, control and integration within larger workflows. Canva, while expanding its feature set, remains limited in its enterprise readiness and depth. Sora, meanwhile, remains early-stage and experimental, with limited commercial application at this point. Crucially, Adobe is not standing still. The company is actively embedding generative AI across its ecosystem through Firefly, which is commercially safe (i.e., free of copyrighted sources to train its models) and integrated natively into Creative Cloud applications like Photoshop and Illustrator. Firefly has shown strong early traction, generating $125 million in annualized recurring revenue, with management expecting that figure to double by year end. While modest in size relative to Adobe’s total revenue, Firefly’s monetization strategy is still in its early innings, with further potential through upselling, usage-based pricing and expanded use cases. Beyond monetization, AI integration enhances Adobe’s long-term competitive moat through product functionality, stronger customer engagement and increased switching costs. Adobe’s unique access to proprietary data, content workflows and creative content allows it to fine-tune models that serve the high-end needs of professionals—capabilities that generic AI models lack. Strategic partnerships with Microsoft (e.g., Firefly in Microsoft 365 Copilot) and ongoing momentum in Adobe Express further extend its reach into new user segments. Ultimately, we believe Adobe has a durable competitive advantage, underpinned by a large installed base, subscription-led business model, strong brand equity and a long track record of innovation. While short-term concerns over AI disruption have weighed on the stock price, we believe Adobe is well-positioned to harness AI as a driver of value rather than being displaced by it.”