ADBE - a closer look at alternative data points

March 21, 2021, 8:22 am

I’ve been thinking about buying ADBE for a long time and with the stock 15% below its 52-week high (and earnings coming up), this might be a good buying opportunity. So before I made my decision, I decided to look at some alternative data points. This is what I found.

Not a popular stock on social media

Adobe is only being mentioned a handful of times per day on social media platforms such as Reddit and StockTwits. But the bullish sentiment is high, currently sitting at 78%.

When it comes to Facebook and Instagram, we can see some minor growth with about 20 new followers per day on Facebook and 320 new followers on Instagram.

Traffic is going up

Despite the “low interest” on social media, web traffic for Adobe is significantly up. Adobe.com had an estimate of 129M visitors in February, up by almost 20% since September last year.

The Adobe Target product is growing in popularity which could be an indicator of growth for Adobe’s Marketing products.

Customer Satisfaction is high

Adobe's Net Promoter Score (NPS) is sitting at 39 (a good score since NPS is a grade from -100 to 100) with 60% Promoters, 19% Passives, and 21% Detractors. And that number gets even more impressive when longterm clients are surveyed. Clients that have used Adobe’s products for over 10 years gives the company a 67.

Increase in patents

Innovation never sleeps at Adobe, at least not if you’re looking at patent fillings. Just in the last quarter, Adobe has added over 200 patents to their portfolio. Now this is on par with companies such as Oracle and Salesforce, but it’s still an impressive number. Some of their latest patents focuses on machine learning and neural networks - lots of cool innovative ideas!

Workforce is growing and employees are satisfied

According to their SEC filings in 2013, Adobe had 11k employees. Last year, they reportedly had over 22k employees. Impressive growth, and around the same growth as Apple. And it seems like Adobe is not slowing down. Right now they have 1,464 open positions, up from 294 in mid December last year.

Current employees are also satisfied, the average employee rating is 4.4 (out of 5) which would mean a higher employee satisfaction than Oracle and Microsoft. Adobe’s CEO, Shantanu Narayen, is getting stellar reviews from the employees, 4.9 out of 5.

Take-away

The stock might a bit expensive relative to competitors and current earnings, but based on the data, and with ESG Risk ratings being low and revenue almost doubling in the last four years, I think Adobe has a lot more room to grow and so I add the stock to my portfolio this morning.

Note: This is not financial advice. Do your own DD.

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