By Tatyana Shumsky
Adobe Systems Inc., which built its reputation on getting people
to buy its photo and video-editing software, says it will no longer
tell the public how many customers it has.
About two-thirds of Adobe's revenue comes from online
subscriptions, instead of packaged discs. Still, the company
eliminated quarterly subscriber numbers in favor of reporting
"annualized recurring revenue," a performance indicator that
combines subscription fees with corporate contracts.
"What I don't want, frankly, is to mislead investors with this
huge subscriber number," said Adobe finance chief Mark Garrett.
Adobe is just the latest company to change the way it defines
success. As they are forced to adjust to new delivery methods or
changing consumer tastes, corporate finance chiefs are
reconsidering what benchmarks they should share with investors.
"You ultimately have to be proactive in having the right data to
be able to show the ongoing health of an enterprise," said Ryan
Senter, a managing director at management consulting firm Protiviti
Inc.
Such moves can be risky. Investors tend to be skeptical of
changes in a company's financial reporting, and uncertainty can
hurt stock prices.
"It's usually a bad sign when companies pull back from
transparency," said Jim McDonald, chief investment strategist at
Northern Trust Corp., which manages $875 billion in assets.
In Adobe's case, reaction has been mixed. Subscriber growth in
recent quarters has fallen at the lower end of the range of
analysts' expectations. Even so, what likely matters most to
investors is that the business is growing overall.
"Ultimately, you want more revenues and more earnings, and
whether it's achieved through units or revenue growth per unit is
not really that important," said Deutsche Bank equity analyst
Nandan Amladi, who follows Adobe.
A change in the way a company discloses financial information
can also alarm regulators, even if it doesn't involve figures
defined by conventional accounting standards. The Securities and
Exchange Commission has expressed concern about the spread of such
customized benchmarks.
"People choose metrics that make them look better, but if you
report it one period and don't report it the next, that's going to
raise questions, " said Angela Newell, national assurance partner
with auditing firm BDO USA.
Even so, investors often want more insight into a business than
required accounting can provide. That can leave them reliant on
metrics that can change at the company's discretion.
For years, analysts say, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International
Inc. used customized accounting measures such as "cash earnings per
share" to paint a more appealing picture of its business. Like many
companies, Valeant steered investors away from putting too much
stock in standard accounting figures.
"Management doesn't create [custom accounting] metrics to look
worse, they create them to look better; that's the case with
Valeant and with many others," said Dimitry Khmelnitsky, analyst
with Veritas Investment Research in Toronto.
Valeant declined to comment.
"The SEC is critical of metrics that you've made up, especially
if they're not relevant to your results," said DBO's Ms.
Newell.
As Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Co. morphed from a traditional
textbook publisher to selling a combination of print and electronic
teaching materials, it also changed the way it accounts for those
sales.
Even though it collects cash upfront for books and online guides
that will be distributed over time, the company isn't allowed to
record those revenues until the final product is delivered to the
customer. But, to show investors that sales were improving, even if
the improvement wasn't fully reflected in the company's
disclosures, Houghton in 2014 began reporting the sums it actually
collected during a given period as "billings."
"Without this tool, we couldn't have the ability to communicate
the performance of both what we have and what we expect for the
year," said finance chief Joseph Abbott.
Still, finance chiefs must be vigilant to avoid reporting
customized accounting benchmarks that have become irrelevant.
Sticking with an outdated indicator can warp investors' view of a
company's performance.
McDonald's Corp. last year began reporting same-store sales on a
quarterly basis, rather than monthly. The quarterly data smoothed
out big swings in the monthly numbers, making it easier for
investors to see trends, said UBS equity analyst Keith Siegner.
The shift allows "us to focus our attention and resources on
longer-term drivers of financial performance," McDonald's said in a
statement, adding that it also brought the company into line with
most competitors.
"Investors want clarity, consistency and relevancy in terms of
metrics, and I think that's what CFOs are generally striving for,"
said David Garfield, managing director with consulting firm
AlixPartners LLP. "If a change in strategy warrants a change in
metrics, you can't always know how that strategy is going to
evolve," he said.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 28, 2016 20:33 ET (00:33 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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