Adobe Designs on China Include Acrobat Documents

Adobe Systems Inc, the US-based software developer, has been a major player in the graphic design, publishing and imaging software market. With its acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, another graphics development company, Adobe achieved $2.575 billion in sales revenue in fiscal year 2006, up 31 percent on the previous year.

Adobe is aiming for 15 percent growth in 2007. It just released Acrobat 8, its first release with Macromedia Inc. In China, the US- based company seems to have loftier aims, given the nation’s growing demand. Tom Hale, senior vice-president and general manager of Adobe, spoke to China Daily reporter Wang Xu about the company’s strategy in China.

Q: Adobe’s global performance in 2006 has been great. How about your performance in China?

A: Our business has also been very strong in China in 2006, which is faster than the company’s overall rate.

The growth is mainly from two areas. One is from our partnership with Lenovo, Sony and Dell. The second is the growing acceptance of our standard technology PDF, Acrobat and Photoshop.

Q: Globally, Adobe is now targeting a 15 percent revenue growth in fiscal year 2007. What’s your expectation for the China market? How will Adobe achieve that aim?

A: We expected our growth rate in China to be roughly double our global level, given the nation’s fast-growing economy. We have a tremendous product line-up, which is crucial for our growth. This year, we have already released Acrobat 8, and later we will also release Creative Tools, the first release to include Macromedia products and it will also be the first release on the Windows Vista platform. Moreover, we have new business agendas some of them suit the Chinese market well. Like our mobile agenda, we got partnerships with mobile operators worldwide and we got a partnership with China Mobile.

Q: What’s Acrobat’s current contribution to Adobe’s business? How do you see the launch of Acrobat 8 helping Adobe’s growth?

A: We focus on the usability of Acrobat 8. It contains new kinds of communication technology, Acrobat Connect, which allows voice and video over Internet protocol. For Chinese companies that are working either with multinationals or working with a web of supply chain partners, the product can make the cooperation more efficient.

We also made a commitment to work with the Chinese government to advance digital document standards to ensure China is able to inter- operate with the rest of the world. The rest of the world is now using PDF as its electronic document standard. China is now at the point that it makes sense for the Chinese government and standard bodies to adopt our standard for archiving and documenting.

Q: Can you give us some details about Adobe’s cooperation with the Chinese government? The government has been actively promoting its local standards in recent years. Will that impact Adobe’s growth here?

A: We are a local company. We have a large R&D center in Beijing. Some of the core code and applications are developed there. I think it’s not too far to imagine that the Chinese market and government have some specific requirements they need to see, whether that be support for the local format or technologies, we have the capabilities to do that and we will do that.

Q: Microsoft has launched its Expression Web, which could compete with Macromedia Flash. How do you think the competition will affect Adobe’s overall growth? And will Adobe lose market share to its competitors in China?

A: In terms of changing the way creative and publishing professionals work, I think the incentive is very low as the cost of retraining and retooling with the new software is high. Microsoft has a much bigger problem than Adobe, which is Google. They are far more concerned with Google than with us.

(c) 2007 China Daily; North American ed.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.