ADOBE SYSTEMS INC. $76 Nasdaq symbol ADBE

ADOBE SYSTEMS INC. $76 (Nasdaq symbol ADBE; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 500.3 million; Market cap: $38.0 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 8.8; No dividends paid since June 2005; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.adobe.com) makes software for publishing companies and website developers.

The company’s main products include Adobe Acrobat, which lets users create and edit electronic documents in the widely used PDF format, and its Creative Suite package of desktop publishing and photo editing programs, including Photoshop.

In its fiscal 2015 first quarter, which ended February 27, 2015, Adobe earned $0.44 a share, up 46.7% from $0.30 a year earlier. Revenue rose 10.9%, to $1.11 billion from $1.00 billion. The company spends a high 20% of its revenue on research.

Adobe continues to shift away from selling Creative Suite as a one-time purchase and toward a cloud-based subscription model (called Creative Cloud). That gives the company steadier revenue streams. It now gets 70% of its revenue from recurring sources, up from 52% a year ago.

The company added 517,000 Creative Cloud subscribers (net of cancellations) in the latest quarter, up 28% from a year earlier. However, that was down 19.7% from the 644,000 it signed up in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014.

Adobe ended its latest quarter with 4.0 million Creative Cloud subscribers; it aims to boost that to 5.9 million by the end of fiscal 2015.

The stock has gained 125% since the company launched Creative Cloud in April 2012, but it now trades at 36.5 times the $2.08 a share Adobe will likely earn in fiscal 2015. That’s a high p/e ratio for a company that primarily serves customers in the cyclical publishing industry.

Adobe is a hold.

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