Avid Finances Looking Strong

A lot of people have been pretty down on Avid from time to time (myself included), but the company is still strong, and it’s growing. In its most recent earnings call, Avid announced a first quarter 2019 revenue of $103.3 million which is a second consecutive quarter of 5 percent year-over-year growth.

The company also announced that it had secured $100 million in additional bank debt at a reduced interest rate and more favorable terms, which it’s going to use to repurchase its outstanding convertible notes. This action should be transparent to users and stockholders as it will not change the total debt for the company once the transactions are completed.

What was interesting is that as much as users hate subscriptions, they appear to be paying them. Avid announced that its revenue from software subscriptions increased 10 percent year-over-year. It had approximately 137,000 cloud-enabled software subscriptions at the end of Q1 2019, according to the report. Recurring revenue from subscriptions was 57% of the company’s revenue in the 12 months ending March 2019, up from 50 percent in the 12 months ending March 2018. Its ecommerce revenue also grew 33 percent from last year.

One of the things that’s easy to forget for those of us in the recording industry is that Pro Tools is just one side of Avid’s business, and it’s much smaller than the video side of things. For years, many users complained that Avid video received more development resources than Avid audio, but things seem to be evening out. It just released the latest version of Pro Tools 2019 that finally supports Apple’s Mojave operating system, and upgraded its base voice limit increase to 384 with the ability to increase the number of available voices up to 768 per system, for you power users out there. It also unveiled Nexis Cloudspaces, a SaaS storage offering that enables production teams to free up local storage, although that seems more useful for video editors than for audio production.

We all complain about various aspects of Pro Tools, but you have to give Avid credit for at least trying to keep up as compared to the past. Its market share may be slipping, but it’s still the favorite DAW of pros everywhere.

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