Autodesk (ADSK) — Company Research

Last Updated: 14 August 2026

Autodesk sells the software that designs and builds the physical world — buildings, bridges, factories, cars and film. Fiscal 2026, which ended on 31 January 2026, was the strongest year in its recent record: revenue of $7,206m, up 18%, non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $10.43, up 23%, and billings of $7,771m, up 30%. Since then it has closed a $3.6bn acquisition of MaintainX, its largest deal ever, cut roughly 7% of its workforce, and faced a renewed board challenge from Starboard Value. Second-quarter fiscal 2027 results are due on 27 August 2026. This report sets out the segments, the five-year record from primary filings, and the raw valuation arithmetic, with no analyst price targets and no third-party ratings.

1. Company Snapshot

2. Bull and Bear Case

Bull Case

• Growth accelerated rather than faded: Revenue grew 18% in fiscal 2026 to $7,206m, the fastest rate in the five-year record and up from 11.5% the prior year, with billings up 30% to $7,771m. Q1 fiscal 2027 continued at 18%. For a business of this size and maturity, re-acceleration is unusual.
• Margins and cash flow are at record levels: GAAP operating income reached $1,578m in fiscal 2026, a 21.9% margin, and management guides a non-GAAP operating margin of around 39% for fiscal 2027 with free cash flow of $2.725–2.800bn. Free cash flow over the twelve months to 30 April 2026 was approximately $2,729m against revenue of $7,507m — a 36% conversion rate.
• The revenue base is contracted and visible: Remaining performance obligations stood at $7,810m at 30 April 2026, with current RPO of $5,383m and deferred revenue of $4,457m. Subscription revenue was $6,743m of the $7,206m fiscal 2026 total. This is a business where most of next year's revenue is already signed.
• AECO scale in a construction cycle that favours it: The architecture, engineering and construction segment grew 22% to $3,583m and is now half of revenue, with management pointing to data centre and infrastructure construction as the source of strength. Autodesk's position in building information modelling is the deepest installed base in the category.
• MaintainX extends the platform beyond design: The $3.6bn all-cash acquisition, announced on 28 May 2026 and closed on 3 August 2026, takes Autodesk into asset and facility maintenance — the operating phase that follows design and construction. MaintainX was reported to be generating more than $135m of annual recurring revenue growing above 50%.

Bear Case

• Persistent activist pressure and a governance overhang: Starboard Value settled with Autodesk in 2025, placing two directors on the board, and has since mounted a second challenge in roughly twelve months, reportedly nominating further candidates including its own chief executive. A contested board is a distraction and signals that a significant holder does not accept the current margin trajectory.
• Two consecutive years of large layoffs point to execution strain: Autodesk cut roughly 9% of staff in February 2025 and a further 7%, around 1,000 roles, on 22 January 2026 at a pre-tax cost of $135–160m. Management itself flagged, in issuing fiscal 2027 guidance, a temporary risk to billings and revenue while it operationalises the sales optimisation plan.
• The transaction-model change makes the numbers hard to read: Autodesk's shift to a direct billing relationship with customers, with partners quoting rather than transacting, distorts billings, deferred revenue and free cash flow across periods. Fiscal 2026 billings growth of 30% against revenue growth of 18% is partly a transition artefact rather than underlying demand.
• Heavy exposure to construction and manufacturing cycles: With AECO at 49.7% of revenue and manufacturing a further 19.1%, Autodesk's end markets are cyclical capital-spending markets. The company's own disclosures repeatedly cite tariffs, trade wars, recessionary conditions and foreign exchange as factors that could affect results, with EMEA now 38.8% of revenue.
• The gap between GAAP and non-GAAP earnings is wide, and the multiple is not cheap: Fiscal 2026 GAAP diluted EPS of $5.23 was half the $10.43 non-GAAP figure, the difference driven largely by stock-based compensation and acquisition-related items. At roughly 38 times trailing GAAP earnings and about 26 times trailing enterprise value to EBITDA, the shares leave little room for the growth rate to normalise.

3. Business Segments

Autodesk reports revenue by product family. Figures below are for fiscal 2026, the year ended 31 January 2026, and reconcile to total revenue of $7,206m.

By geography, fiscal 2026 revenue split as Americas $3,178m (44.1%, up 17%), EMEA $2,794m (38.8%, up 21%) and Asia-Pacific $1,234m (17.1%, up 11%). By revenue type, subscription was $6,743m, maintenance $33m and other $430m. From the first quarter of fiscal 2027 Autodesk folded the residual maintenance line into subscription, a presentation change rather than a change in the business.

4. Business Model and Moat

How it makes money. Autodesk is a subscription business. Customers pay recurring fees for named-user product subscriptions, enterprise business agreements with large accounts, and consumption-based tokens under the Flex model. The company splits this internally into Design — the desktop-rooted franchises of AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor and Maya, worth $5,980m or 83% of fiscal 2026 revenue — and Make, the cloud products such as Autodesk Build, Fusion and Flow Production Tracking, worth $796m and growing 22%. The Make business is where the strategic bet sits, because it moves Autodesk from selling a design tool to an individual towards selling a project system to a whole firm.

Why customers stay. The moat is file formats, training and workflow. DWG and RVT are the interchange standards for their industries, so a firm that leaves Autodesk has to renegotiate how it exchanges drawings with every consultant, contractor and client it works with. University curricula and professional certification are built around the same products, so the labour market supplies Autodesk-trained staff by default. On top of that sits the multi-year contracted base: remaining performance obligations of $7,810m at 30 April 2026, of which $5,383m falls due within twelve months.

What changed in the model recently. Two shifts matter. The new transaction model, launched in June 2024 and rolled across North America and Europe by mid-2025, moved the billing relationship from resellers to Autodesk directly, with partners now quoting rather than transacting. That inflated fiscal 2026 billings growth to 30% against 18% revenue growth and makes period comparisons harder to read. Separately, the January 2026 restructuring reorganised sales and marketing, which management has warned carries near-term risk to billings while it beds in. Price action around these events can be followed on ChartsView Live Charts.

5. Financial Health

All figures below are taken from Autodesk's quarterly earnings releases, Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filings, and SEC XBRL company facts. Autodesk's fiscal year ends on 31 January and is labelled one year ahead of the calendar year it mostly covers, so fiscal 2026 ran from 1 February 2025 to 31 January 2026. The Adjusted EPS column shows Autodesk's own non-GAAP diluted EPS, which excludes stock-based compensation, amortisation of acquired intangibles and restructuring charges.

Revenue compounded at 13.2% a year across the four-year span from fiscal 2022 to fiscal 2026, with the growth rate troughing at 9.8% in fiscal 2024 and re-accelerating to 17.5% in fiscal 2026. Autodesk has paid no dividend since April 2005 and has stated no intention to resume one; capital return runs entirely through buybacks, with $1,402m of stock repurchased in fiscal 2026. Long-term debt has been stable in a $2.3–2.65bn range throughout the period, standing at $2,500m at both 31 January 2026 and 30 April 2026, though this predates the MaintainX acquisition that closed on 3 August 2026.

The four fiscal 2026 quarterly adjusted figures sum exactly to the $10.43 full-year figure; the GAAP quarters sum to $5.24 against $5.23 reported, a rounding difference. Q1 fiscal 2027 is shown above the fiscal 2026 quarters because it is the most recently reported period; it is not included in the fiscal 2026 total.

Cash generation. Operating cash flow was $2,452m in fiscal 2026, up 53% from $1,607m, against capital expenditure of just $43m — the asset-light economics of a subscription software business. Over the twelve months to 30 April 2026, operating cash flow was approximately $2,781m and capital expenditure $52m. Depreciation and amortisation was $195m in fiscal 2026, of which $53m was amortisation of intangible assets. Cash and cash equivalents were $2,671m at 30 April 2026, with short-term marketable securities of $253m and a further $385m held long term, against long-term debt of $2,500m — a net cash position before the MaintainX acquisition.

6. Valuation Metrics

Raw metrics, August 2026. Not opinions on whether the stock is cheap or expensive.

Trailing twelve-month figures below cover the twelve months to 30 April 2026, calculated as fiscal 2026 less Q1 fiscal 2026 plus Q1 fiscal 2027: revenue $7,507m, GAAP diluted EPS $6.85, non-GAAP diluted EPS $11.13, operating income $1,886m, operating cash flow $2,781m and capital expenditure $52m.

7. What Are They Building

MaintainX and the move into operations. Announced on 28 May 2026 and completed on 3 August 2026, the approximately $3.6bn all-cash purchase of MaintainX is comfortably Autodesk's largest acquisition. MaintainX sells computerised maintenance management and asset-operations software, reported to be generating more than $135m of annual recurring revenue growing above 50%. Strategically it extends Autodesk from designing and building an asset into running it, which is the largest and longest phase of an asset's life and one Autodesk has never addressed.

Generative AI in the products. Autodesk Flow Studio, built on the Wonder Dynamics acquisition, launched the Wonder 3D generative model on 4 March 2026, turning text and image prompts into editable three-dimensional characters and objects for media production. In parallel, Autodesk Research continues to develop Project Bernini, an experimental generative model that produces functionally correct three-dimensional geometry from images, text or point clouds. Autodesk describes Bernini as a research proof of concept rather than a commercial product, with a possible path into the manufacturing cloud.

Platform and spending. The strategic frame is the Design and Make Platform, with Forma for AECO, Fusion for manufacturing and Flow for media as the three cloud industry clouds sitting on shared data. Research and development expenditure was $1,643m in fiscal 2026, up from $1,485m in fiscal 2025, with $421m spent in Q1 fiscal 2027 alone — roughly 22% of revenue, a level consistent with the company treating AI and cloud migration as an existential investment rather than a discretionary one.

8. Competitive Landscape

Autodesk competes against a fragmented set of specialists rather than one direct rival, with different competitors in each product family. Market capitalisations below were checked on 14 August 2026.

9. Insider Activity

Andrew Anagnost has been President and Chief Executive Officer since June 2017 and remains in post. Janesh Moorjani joined as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer in December 2024. Notably, the Form 4 activity identified for 2026 consists of open-market purchases by both the chief executive and the chief financial officer rather than the disposals more typical of a software company with heavy equity compensation.

Both executive purchases were made at prices between $197 and $203, materially below the $257.96 at which the shares traded on 14 August 2026 and close to the twelve-month low of $185.50. Readers should note that Form 4 coverage assembled from filing summaries may be incomplete; the authoritative record is the full set of Form 4 filings for Autodesk under SEC central index key 0000769397.

10. Key Risks

• Activist and governance overhang: Starboard Value settled with Autodesk in 2025, gaining two board seats, and has since launched a second challenge within roughly twelve months, reportedly nominating further directors. A proxy contest consumes management attention and creates pressure for margin action on a timetable set by an outside holder rather than by operational logic.
• Restructuring and sales-reorganisation execution: Autodesk cut approximately 9% of staff in February 2025 and a further 7%, roughly 1,000 roles, on 22 January 2026 at a pre-tax cost of $135–160m. In issuing fiscal 2027 guidance management explicitly warned of temporary risk to billings and revenue while the sales optimisation plan is operationalised. Sales disruption in a renewal-driven business is difficult to recover within a fiscal year.
• Construction and manufacturing cyclicality: AECO is 49.7% of revenue and manufacturing a further 19.1%, both tied to capital spending cycles. Management has separately noted softness in commercial construction offset by data centre demand, which concentrates the growth story in a single end market that is itself subject to a build-out cycle.
• AI disruption of seat-based design software: Autodesk's own forward-looking risk disclosures cite social and ethical issues around artificial intelligence and, explicitly, market reaction to disruption from artificial intelligence. If generative design tools reduce the number of licensed practitioners a firm needs, a per-seat subscription model faces structural pressure regardless of how good Autodesk's own AI is.
• Transaction-model transition risk: Autodesk names its ability to implement and expand the new transaction model, and its dependence on that model for the Flex consumption offering, as a disclosed risk factor. The transition distorts billings, deferred revenue and free cash flow across periods and complicates channel relationships with resellers who no longer transact.
• Subscription renewal and retention: The company discloses an inability to predict subscription renewal rates and their impact on future revenue as a risk factor. With Design revenue of $5,980m — 83% of the total — dependent on renewals, a modest deterioration in retention would outweigh most new-business gains.
• Acquisition integration and balance-sheet change: MaintainX closed on 3 August 2026 for approximately $3.6bn, funded with roughly $1.6bn of cash plus debt. This is Autodesk's largest deal by a wide margin, it takes the company into an adjacent market it has not operated in, and it converts a net cash balance sheet into a net debt one.
• Currency and trade exposure: EMEA is 38.8% of revenue and Asia-Pacific a further 17.1%, so reported results carry meaningful translation risk. Autodesk's guidance commentary and press releases repeatedly cite foreign exchange headwinds, tariffs and trade wars as factors that could affect results.

11. Recent Developments

• 03 Aug 2026 — MaintainX acquisition completed. Autodesk closed the approximately $3.6bn all-cash purchase of the asset-maintenance software company, ahead of the fiscal 2027 year-end target originally guided. It is Autodesk's largest acquisition to date.
• 17 Jun 2026 — 2026 annual meeting of stockholders held. The virtual meeting covered the election of directors and an amendment to the certificate of incorporation providing for officer exculpation.
• 28 May 2026 — First-quarter fiscal 2027 results and the MaintainX agreement. Revenue of $1,934m, up 18%, with GAAP diluted EPS of $2.32 and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $2.99. Full-year fiscal 2027 guidance was raised to revenue of $8,155–8,215m and non-GAAP EPS of $12.40–$12.65, excluding the pending MaintainX deal announced the same day.
• 06 May 2026 — Proxy statement filed. The definitive proxy for the 2026 annual meeting proposed the election of eleven directors alongside the officer exculpation amendment.
• 04 Mar 2026 — Wonder 3D launched in Autodesk Flow Studio. A generative artificial intelligence model that turns text and image prompts into editable three-dimensional characters and objects, built on the Wonder Dynamics technology.
• 26 Feb 2026 — Fiscal 2026 results and initial fiscal 2027 guidance. Full-year revenue of $7,206m, up 18%, with billings of $7,771m, up 30%, and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $10.43. Initial fiscal 2027 guidance was revenue of $8,100–8,170m, non-GAAP operating margin of 38.5–39% and free cash flow of $2.700–2.800bn.
• 22 Jan 2026 — Workforce reduction of approximately 7%. Autodesk announced the elimination of around 1,000 roles as part of a sales reorganisation, at a pre-tax cost of $135–160m, following a 9% reduction in February 2025.
• Feb 2026 to Aug 2026 — Renewed Starboard Value board challenge. Following a 2025 settlement that added directors Jeff Epstein and Christie Simons, Starboard has again nominated candidates to the board, reportedly including its own chief executive Jeff Smith. Exact filing dates for the 2026 nominations were not confirmed from primary sources as at 14 August 2026 and should be verified against Autodesk's SEC filings.

12. Key Dates

• 27 Aug 2026 — Second-quarter fiscal 2027 results, covering the quarter ended 31 July 2026, with a conference call at 2:00pm Pacific Time. Company guidance for the quarter is revenue of $2,005–2,015m, GAAP diluted EPS of $1.84–$1.97 and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $3.10–$3.14. This will be the first report to include any contribution from MaintainX.
• 17 Jun 2026 — 2026 annual meeting of stockholders, held virtually. This date has passed and is included for reference.
• Expected Nov 2026 — Third-quarter fiscal 2027 results, covering the quarter ending 31 October 2026, on Autodesk's established late-November reporting cadence.
• Expected Feb 2027 — Fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2027 results, covering the year ending 31 January 2027, together with initial fiscal 2028 guidance.
• Expected Jun 2027 — 2027 annual meeting of stockholders, at which any Starboard Value board nominations would be voted on if the matter is not settled beforehand.
• TBC — Investor day. No 2026 or 2027 investor day had been scheduled or announced by Autodesk as at 14 August 2026.

With results due within a fortnight of publication, the near-term set-up is unusually event-driven. Readers can follow the price action on ChartsView Live Charts, check the wider macro calendar that shapes construction and manufacturing demand on the Economic Calendar, and discuss the print in the ChartsView Forum.

Disclaimer: This research is produced by ChartsView for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All information is sourced from publicly available company filings, press releases, and official data. ChartsView does not use analyst opinions or third-party ratings. Always conduct your own due diligence and consider your personal financial situation before making investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.