Autodesk’s Q2 Reports Reveals Goldilocks Results

Autodesk (NYSE: ADSK), a global leader in building design & engineering software, reported its Q2 earnings (quarter ending 7/31) results last Thursday (8/24), which appeared to furnish apprehensive market participants with a buy signal, as the shares ticked over 7% higher in post-earnings price action.

The depressed expectations set by Autodesk's seemingly conservative management team expressed as potential downside risk associated with billing changes during its year-end earnings call in early 2023 have been parsed by 2 quarters of healthy financial performance (leading to management cutting its downside projections for the year).

Despite YoY quarterly revenue growth holding just under 10%, Autodesk's AEC segment saw a proportionately outsized 11.2% increase from the year prior, while the "Make" subcategory (which is predominantly focused on commercial building construction) grew at an even hotter 15.2% YoY.

Autodesk's Goldilocks Results

This Q2 report was a Goldilocks release, in the sense that it wasn't too hot (its market share expansion wasn't a concern to founders), or too cold (AEC segment growth continued to outpace other divisions), but just right to provide industry innovators with optimism about the breadth of this growing addressable market still waiting to be controlled.

Autodesk's Q2 report depicted healthy tech adoption in the built environment as AEC-tech continued to be the primary growth driver of Autodesk's core operations, but its market share in construction tech showed little sign of expansion, which spells continued market growth opportunity for well-positioned startups in this space.

Autodesk’s ambitions to become the go-to platform for built-world stakeholders across the value chain are slowly but surely coming to fruition. Since its public debut (IPO) in the mid-1980s, Autodesk has been known for its design & engineering software, which continues to drive the vast majority of its topline (accounting for $4.44B of its $5.21B in TTM revenue).

However, since Autodesk’s over $1B acquisitions of Buildingconnected & PlanGrid in 2018, this tech giant has been embarking on a journey to lead the digital transformation of the entire construction value chain (despite its effective dissolution of the larger of the two acquisitions, PlanGrid, post-merger).

Autodesk’s Construction Cloud, which launched just one year after these two strategic acquisitions, remains in its early inning of adoption with few large contractors opting to transition from Procore to Autodesk. This illustrates the loyalty of construction customers. Despite Procore's many functional pitfalls (voiced regularly to the BuiltWorlds team), contracts will continue to use it because it's the platform they know.

The AEC space is incredibly slow to adopt new tech but once a solution is able to penetrate this market its customer base is one of the stickiest in our economy today.