Why Adobe Stock Crashed 12% After Earnings

Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) stock tumbled 12.4% through 10:30 a.m. ET Thursday despite beating earnings in its fiscal Q4 2024 report last night.

Heading into the report, analysts forecast Adobe would earn $4.67 per share on $5.5 billion in sales. In fact, Adobe earned $4.81 per share, and its sales exceeded $5.6 billion.

Adobe's Q4 earnings

The news wasn't all good. Adobe grew sales 11% year over year, helping to make fiscal 2024 a "record" year for the company. (Sales for the year also rose 11%.)

The company's "$4.81" quarterly profit, though, turns out to have been a non-GAAP number. Actual earnings as calculated according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) were significantly lower -- just $3.79 per share.

Still, that was a 17% increase in quarterly profit, lifting full-year net income to $12.36 per share -- 4.6% growth year over year.

Adobe also performed admirably on cash generation, reporting quarterly free cash flow of $2.9 billion -- a year-over-year increase of 85%. And for all of fiscal 2024, Adobe generated $7.9 billion in positive free cash flow, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence -- 14% growth over last year.

Is Adobe stock a buy?

Impressively, that works out to 46% more real cash profit than the $5.4 billion Adobe reported as net income for fiscal 2024. As a result, while Adobe stock looks expensive when valued on net income (its P/E is 39.3x), when valued on cash profits, Adobe sports a slimmer 26.9 price-to-free cash flow ratio.

Is that cheap enough to make Adobe stock a buy?

Ordinarily, I'd say no. Earnings growth was anemic, and a 26.9 P/FCF divided by Adobe's 14% FCF growth rate gives me a P/FCF/growth ratio of 1.9 -- nearly twice what I'd like to see before calling a stock "cheap." Still, in an overpriced market, Adobe looks cheaper than many other tech stocks. If you absolutely, positively feel you need to own a tech stock, at the very least, I'd say Adobe remains a strong performer.

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Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Adobe. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.