{ "ticker": "ADBE", "company": "Adobe Inc.", "filing_type": "10-K", "year_current": "2024", "year_prior": "2023", "summary": { "added": 2, "removed": 10, "modified": 21, "unchanged": 0, "total_current": 23, "total_prior": 31 }, "source": "SEC EDGAR", "url": "https://riskdiff.com/adbe/2024-vs-2023/", "markdown_url": "https://riskdiff.com/adbe/2024-vs-2023/index.md", "json_url": "https://riskdiff.com/adbe/2024-vs-2023/index.json", "generated": "2026-05-10", "ai_summary": "Adobe substantially restructured its risk disclosures by removing 10 risks focused on marketplace operations, third-party dependencies, data center security, and macroeconomic conditions, while adding 2 new risks centered on innovation capabilities and stock price volatility. The 21 modified risks reveal a strategic shift toward emphasizing regulatory compliance, tax implications, and privacy/security regulations, suggesting Adobe prioritized disclosure of evolving legal and operational governance challenges over previous concerns about technology disruption and market dynamics. This rebalancing reflects a maturation of Adobe's risk profile away from business model vulnerabilities toward institutional and compliance-driven exposures.", "risks": [ { "status": "ADDED", "current_title": "We may be unsuccessful at innovating in response to rapid technological changes to meet customer needs, which could cause our operating results to suffer.", "prior_title": null, "current_body": "We operate in rapidly evolving markets and expect the pace of innovation to continue to accelerate. We must continually introduce new, and enhance existing, products, services and solutions to retain customers and attract new customers. Developing new products is complex and may not be profitable, and our investments in new technologies are speculative and may not yield the expected business or financial benefits. The commercial success of new or enhanced products, services and solutions depends on a number of factors, including timely and successful development; effective distribution and marketing; market acceptance; compatibility with existing and emerging standards, platforms, software delivery methods and technologies; accurately predicting and anticipating customer needs and expectations and the direction of technological change; identifying and innovating in the right technologies; and differentiation from other products, services and solutions. If we fail to anticipate or identify technological trends or fail to devote appropriate resources to adapt to such trends, our business could be harmed. For example, generative artificial intelligence technologies provide new ways of marketing, creating content and interacting with documents that could disrupt industries in which we operate, and our business may be harmed if we fail to invest or adapt. While we have released new generative artificial intelligence products, such as Adobe Firefly, and are focused on enhancing the artificial intelligence (“AI”) capabilities of such products and incorporating AI into existing products, services and solutions, there can be no assurance that our products will be successful or that we will innovate effectively to keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI across our Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud. If we do not successfully innovate, adapt to rapid technological changes and meet customer needs, our business and our financial results may be harmed." }, { "status": "ADDED", "current_title": "Our stock price may be volatile and your investment could lose value.", "prior_title": null, "current_body": "Our stock price has been and may continue to be volatile and subject to fluctuations. All factors described in this Part I, Item 1A of this report, some of which are beyond our control, may affect our stock price, including: •shortfalls in or changes to estimates, recommendations or expectations about our revenue, margins, earnings, annualized recurring revenue or other key performance metrics set forth in guidance we provide or provided by financial analysts; •changes in investor and analyst valuation models for our stock; •changes in unearned revenue, remaining performance obligations and revenue recognized at a point in time, all of which may impact implied growth rates; •developments related to products or services, technological advancements, strategic alliances, acquisitions or significant transactions by us or our competitors; •changes in the amounts or frequency of stock repurchases; •the loss of large customers or our inability to retain or increase sales to existing customers or attract new customers; •changes to our management team, including recruitment or departure of key personnel; •variations in our or our competitors’ results of operations, changes in the competitive landscape generally and developments in our industry; •general economic, political or market conditions; and •other events, such as significant litigation and regulatory actions. In addition, the market for technology stocks or the stock market in general has experienced, and may in the future experience, extreme fluctuations, which has caused, and may in the future cause, our stock price to decline for reasons unrelated to our financial performance. Volatility in our stock price has increased, and in the future may increase, our susceptibility to securities class action litigation, which could result in substantial costs and divert management’s attention and resources, which may adversely affect our business. 33 33 33 Table of Contents Table of Contents" }, { "status": "REMOVED", "current_title": null, "prior_title": "Introduction of new technology could harm our business and results of operations.", "prior_body": "The expectations and needs of technology consumers are constantly evolving. As new technology is developed, integration of our products and services with one another and other companies’ offerings creates an increasingly complex ecosystem that is also partly reliant on third parties. If any disruptive technology, or competing products, services or operating systems that are not compatible with our solutions, achieve widespread acceptance, our operating results could suffer and our business could be harmed. 20 20 20 Table of Contents Table of Contents The introduction of, or limitations on, certain technologies may reduce the effectiveness of our products and our business operations. For example, some of our products and services, including those marketed or licensed through adobe.com, rely on tracking, third-party cookies or other identifiers to help our customers more effectively advertise and detect and prevent fraudulent activity. However, consumers can, with increasing ease, implement technologies to limit the ability to collect and use data to deliver or advertise services. Increased use of methods to control the use of these technologies through customers’ browsers, operating systems, device settings or “ad-blocking” software or applications may harm our business." }, { "status": "REMOVED", "current_title": null, "prior_title": "The success of some of our product and service offerings depends on our ability to continue to attract and retain customers of and contributors to our online marketplaces for creative content.", "prior_body": "The success of some of our product and service offerings, such as Adobe Stock, depends on our ability to continue to retain existing and attract new customers and contributors to these online marketplaces for creative content. An increase in paying customers has generally resulted in more content from contributors, which increases the size of our collection and in turn attracts new paying customers. We rely on the functionality and features of our online marketplaces, the size and content of our collection and the effectiveness of our marketing efforts to attract new customers and contributors and retain existing ones. New technologies may render the features of our online marketplaces obsolete, our collection may fail to grow as anticipated or our marketing efforts may be unsuccessful, any of which may adversely affect our results of operations." }, { "status": "REMOVED", "current_title": null, "prior_title": "Security breaches in data centers we manage, or third parties manage on our behalf, may compromise the confidentiality, integrity or availability of employee and customer data, which could expose us to liability and adversely affect our reputation and business.", "prior_body": "We process and store significant amounts of employee and customer data, a large volume of which is hosted by third-party service providers. A security incident impacting our own data centers or those controlled by our service providers may compromise the confidentiality, integrity or availability of this data. Unauthorized access to or loss or disclosure of data stored by Adobe or our service providers may occur through physical break-ins, breaches of a secure network by an unauthorized party, software vulnerabilities or coding errors, employee mistakes, theft or misuse or other misconduct. It is also possible that unauthorized access to or disclosure of employee or customer data may occur through inadequate use of security controls by customers, service providers or employees. The compromise of personal, confidential or proprietary information could cause a loss of data, disrupt our operations, damage our reputation, give rise to remediation or other expenses and subject us to claims or other liabilities, regulatory investigations or fines. Adobe maintains insurance to cover operational risks, such as cyber risk and technology outages, but this insurance may not cover all costs associated with the consequences of personal, confidential or proprietary information being compromised. Further, such perceived or actual unauthorized loss or disclosure of the information we collect, process or store, or breach of our security could damage our reputation, result in the loss of customers and harm our business." }, { "status": "REMOVED", "current_title": null, "prior_title": "Our business could be harmed if we fail to effectively manage critical strategic third-party business relationships.", "prior_body": "As our offerings expand and our customer base grows, our relationships with strategic partners become increasingly valuable. If our contractual relationships with these third parties were to terminate, or if we were unable to renew on favorable terms, our business could be harmed. This is especially the case when the third party’s offerings are integrated with our products and services, or where the third party’s offerings are difficult to substitute or replace. Alternative arrangements for such products and services may not be available to us on commercially reasonable terms, and we may experience business interruptions upon a transition to an alternative partner. The failure of third parties to provide acceptable products and services or to update their technology may result in a disruption to our business operations and those of our customers, which may reduce our revenues and profits, cause us to lose customers and damage our reputation. We increasingly utilize third-party distribution platforms, such as Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, for the distribution of certain of our product offerings. Although we benefit from the strong brand recognition and large user base of these distribution platforms to attract new customers, the platform owners have wide discretion to change the pricing structure, terms of service and other policies with respect to us and other developers, and may offer or promote products that compete with our product offerings. Adverse changes by these third parties could adversely affect our financial results." }, { "status": "REMOVED", "current_title": null, "prior_title": "Failure of our third-party customer service and technical support providers to adequately address customers’ requests could harm our business and adversely affect our financial results.", "prior_body": "Our customers rely on our customer service support organization to resolve issues with our products and services. We depend heavily, and expect to continue to rely heavily, on third-party customer service and technical support representatives to provide such services. This strategy presents risks to our business since we may not be able to influence the quality of support 25 25 25 Table of Contents Table of Contents as directly as if our own employees performed these activities. Our customers may react negatively to providing information to, and receiving support from, third-party organizations, especially if these third-party organizations are based overseas. If we encounter problems with our third-party customer service and technical support providers, our reputation may be harmed, our ability to sell our offerings could be adversely affected, and we could lose customers and associated revenue." }, { "status": "REMOVED", "current_title": null, "prior_title": "Changes in accounting principles or interpretations thereof could have a significant impact on our financial position and results of operations.", "prior_body": "We prepare our consolidated financial statements in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America (“GAAP”). These principles are subject to interpretation by the SEC and various bodies formed to interpret and create appropriate accounting principles. A change in these principles, how the principles are interpreted, or the adoption of new accounting standards can have a significant effect on our reported results, could retroactively affect previously reported transactions and may require that we make significant changes to our systems, processes and controls. Changes resulting from these new standards may result in materially different financial results and may require that we change how we process, analyze and report financial information and that we change financial reporting controls. For additional information regarding new standards that may have significant impact to our consolidated financial statements, see the section titled “Recent Accounting Pronouncements Not Yet Effective” in Note 1 of our Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements. Such changes in accounting principles may have an adverse effect on our business, financial position and results of operations, or cause an adverse deviation from our revenue and profitability targets, which may negatively impact our financial results." }, { "status": "REMOVED", "current_title": null, "prior_title": "Our investment portfolio may become impaired by deterioration of the financial markets.", "prior_body": "Our cash equivalent and short-term investment portfolio as of December 2, 2022 consisted of asset-backed securities, corporate debt securities, foreign government securities, money market funds, municipal securities, time deposits, U.S. agency securities and U.S. Treasury securities. We follow an established investment policy and set of guidelines to monitor and help mitigate our exposure to interest rate and credit risk. The policy sets forth credit quality standards and limits our exposure to any one issuer, as well as our maximum exposure to various asset classes. Should financial market conditions worsen in the future, including from impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic or the Russia-Ukraine war, investments in some financial instruments may pose risks arising from market liquidity and credit concerns. In addition, any deterioration of the capital markets could cause our other income and expense to vary from expectations. As of December 2, 2022, we had no material impairment charges associated with our short-term investment portfolio, and although we believe our current investment portfolio has little risk of material impairment, we cannot predict future market conditions, market liquidity or credit availability, and we can provide no assurance that our investment portfolio will remain materially unimpaired." }, { "status": "REMOVED", "current_title": null, "prior_title": "Climate change may have a long-term impact on our business.", "prior_body": "While we seek to partner with organizations that mitigate their business risks associated with climate change, we recognize that there are inherent risks wherever business is conducted. Access to clean water and reliable energy in the communities where we conduct our business, whether for our offices or for our vendors, is a priority. Our major sites in California, Utah and India are vulnerable to climate change effects. For example, in California, increasing intensity of drought throughout the state and annual periods of wildfire danger increase the probability of planned power outages in the communities where we work and live. While this danger has a low-assessed risk of disrupting normal business operations, it has the potential impact on employees’ abilities to commute to work or to work from home and stay connected effectively. Climate-related events, including the increasing frequency of extreme weather events and their impact on U.S., India and other major regions’ critical infrastructure, have the potential to disrupt our business, our third-party suppliers and/or the business of our customers, and may cause us to experience higher attrition, losses and additional costs to maintain or resume operations. To inform our disclosures and take potential action as appropriate, Adobe is aligned with the guidelines of the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures recommendations and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and the Global Reporting Initiative environmental metrics. Regulatory developments, changing market dynamics and stakeholder expectations regarding climate change may impact our business, financial condition and results of operations." }, { "status": "REMOVED", "current_title": null, "prior_title": "Uncertainty about current and future economic conditions and other adverse changes in general political conditions in any of the major countries in which we do business could adversely affect our operating results.", "prior_body": "As our business has grown, we have become increasingly subject to the risks arising from adverse changes in economic and political conditions, both domestically and globally, including trends toward protectionism and nationalism, other unfavorable changes in economic conditions, such as inflation, rising interest rates or a recession, and other events beyond our control, such as economic sanctions, natural disasters, pandemics, including the COVID-19 pandemic, epidemics, political instability, armed conflicts and wars, including the Russia-Ukraine war. Worsening economic conditions have had and may continue to have an adverse impact on the businesses and financial health of many of our customers and hurt their creditworthiness. As a result, current or potential customers may be unable to fund software purchases, which could cause them to delay, decrease or cancel purchases of our products and services. Uncertainty about the effects of current and future economic and political conditions on us, our customers, suppliers and partners makes it difficult for us to forecast operating results and to make decisions about future investments. If economic growth in countries where we do business slows, customers may delay or reduce technology purchases, advertising spending or marketing spending. This could result in reductions in sales of our products and services, more extended sales cycles, slower adoption of new technologies and increased price competition. Among our customers are government entities, including the U.S. federal government, and our revenue could decline if spending cuts impact the government’s ability to purchase our products and services. Deterioration in economic conditions in 32 32 32 Table of Contents Table of Contents any of the countries in which we do business could also cause slower or impaired collections on accounts receivable, which may adversely impact our liquidity and financial condition. A disruption in financial markets could impair our banking partners, on which we rely for operating cash management and derivative programs. Any of these events would likely harm our business, financial condition and results of operations." }, { "status": "REMOVED", "current_title": null, "prior_title": "Revenue, margin or earnings shortfalls or the volatility of the market generally may cause the market price of our stock to decline.", "prior_body": "In the past, the market price for our common stock experienced significant fluctuations and it may do so in the future. A number of factors may affect the market price for our common stock, such as: •shortfalls in, or changes in expectations about, our revenue, margins, earnings, Annualized Recurring Revenue (“ARR”), sales of our Digital Experience offerings or other key performance metrics; •changes in estimates or recommendations by securities analysts; •whether our results meet analysts’ expectations; •compression or expansion of multiples used by investors and analysts to value high technology SaaS companies; •the announcement of new products or services, product enhancements, service introductions, strategic alliances or significant agreements by us or our competitors; •the loss of large customers or our inability to increase sales to existing customers, retain customers or attract new customers; •recruitment or departure of key personnel; •variations in our or our competitors’ results of operations, changes in the competitive landscape generally and developments in our industry; •general socio-economic, political or market conditions; •macroeconomic conditions and the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation and rising interest rates and global conflicts, including the Russia-Ukraine war; and •unusual events such as significant acquisitions by us or our competitors, divestitures, litigation, regulatory actions and other factors, including factors unrelated to our operating performance. In addition, the market for technology stocks or the stock market in general may experience uneven investor confidence, which may cause the market price for our common stock to decline for reasons unrelated to our operating performance. Volatility in the market price of a company’s securities for a period of time may increase the company’s susceptibility to securities class action litigation. Oftentimes, this type of litigation is expensive and diverts management’s attention and resources which may adversely affect our business. 33 33 33 Table of Contents Table of Contents" }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "We are subject to risks associated with compliance with laws and regulations globally, which may harm our business.", "prior_title": "We are subject to risks associated with compliance with laws and regulations globally, which may harm our business.", "similarity_score": 0.919, "confidence": "high", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"These laws and regulations relate to a number of aspects of our business, including trade compliance, import and export control, anti-boycott, economic sanctions and embargoes, data and transaction processing security, payment card industry data security standards, consumer protection, records management, user-generated content hosted on websites we operate, privacy practices, data residency, corporate governance, antitrust and competition, employee and third-party complaints, anti-corruption, gift policies, conflicts of interest, securities regulations and other regulatory requirements affecting trade and investment.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"For example, we are subject to the U.S.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"28 28 28 Table of Contents Table of Contents In addition, approximately 50% of our employees are located outside the United States.\"" ], "current_body": "We are a global company subject to varied and complex laws, regulations and customs, both domestically and internationally. These laws and regulations relate to a number of aspects of our business, including trade compliance, import and export control, anti-boycott, economic sanctions and embargoes, data and transaction processing security, payment card industry data security standards, consumer protection, records management, user-generated content hosted on websites we operate, privacy practices, data residency, corporate governance, antitrust and competition, employee and third-party complaints, anti-corruption, gift policies, conflicts of interest, securities regulations and other regulatory requirements affecting trade and investment. The application of these laws and regulations to our business is often unclear and may at times conflict. For example, we are subject to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws, but in other foreign countries, particularly those with developing economies, it is common to engage in practices that would be prohibited under such acts. We cannot provide assurance that our employees, contractors, agents, business partners and vendors will not take actions in violation of our internal policies, U.S. laws or other applicable international laws. Compliance with these laws and regulations may involve significant costs or require changes in our business practices that result in reduced revenue and profitability. Non-compliance could also result in fines, damages, criminal sanctions against us, our officers or our employees, prohibitions on the conduct of our business and damage to our reputation. 28 28 28 Table of Contents Table of Contents In addition, approximately 50% of our employees are located outside the United States. Accordingly, we are exposed to changes in laws governing our employee relationships in various U.S. and foreign jurisdictions, including laws and regulations regarding wage and hour requirements, fair labor standards, employee data privacy, unemployment tax rates, workers’ compensation rates, citizenship requirements and payroll and other taxes, which likely would have a direct impact on our operating costs.", "prior_body": "We are a global company subject to varied and complex laws, regulations and customs, both domestically and internationally. These laws and regulations relate to a number of aspects of our business, including trade protection, import and export control, anti-boycott, sanctions and embargoes, data and transaction processing security, payment card industry data security standards, records management, user-generated content hosted on websites we operate, privacy practices, data residency, corporate governance, anti-trust and competition, employee and third-party complaints, anti-corruption, gift policies, conflicts of interest, securities regulations and other regulatory requirements affecting trade and investment. The application of these laws and regulations to our business is often unclear and may at times conflict. For example, in many foreign countries, particularly in those with developing economies, it is common to engage in business practices that are prohibited by U.S. regulations applicable to us, including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. We cannot provide assurance that our employees, contractors, agents and business partners will not take actions in violation of our internal policies or U.S. laws. Compliance with these laws and regulations may involve significant costs or require changes in our business practices that result in reduced revenue and profitability. Non-compliance could also result in fines, damages, criminal sanctions against us, our officers or our employees, prohibitions on the conduct of our business and damage to our reputation. 27 27 27 Table of Contents Table of Contents In addition, approximately 49% of our employees are located outside the United States. Accordingly, we are exposed to changes in laws governing our employee relationships in various U.S. and foreign jurisdictions, including laws and regulations regarding wage and hour requirements, fair labor standards, employee data privacy, unemployment tax rates, workers’ compensation rates, citizenship requirements and payroll and other taxes, which likely would have a direct impact on our operating costs." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "Changes in tax rules and regulations or interpretations thereof may adversely affect our effective tax rates.", "prior_title": "Changes in tax rules and regulations or interpretations thereof may adversely affect our effective tax rates.", "similarity_score": 0.911, "confidence": "high", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"We are a U.S.-based multinational company subject to tax in multiple domestic and foreign tax jurisdictions.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"Tax laws in the United States as well as other countries and jurisdictions in which we conduct business are subject to change as new laws are passed and/or new interpretations are made available, which may have a material impact on our business.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"An increase in our effective tax rate would reduce our profitability.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"While we believe our tax estimates are reasonable, we cannot provide assurance that the final determination of any of these examinations will not have an adverse effect on our financial position and results of operations.\"" ], "current_body": "We are a U.S.-based multinational company subject to tax in multiple domestic and foreign tax jurisdictions. Significant judgment is required in determining our current provision for income taxes and deferred tax assets or liabilities. Tax laws in the United States as well as other countries and jurisdictions in which we conduct business are subject to change as new laws are passed and/or new interpretations are made available, which may have a material impact on our business. These countries, governmental bodies, such as the European Commission of the European Union, and intergovernmental economic 30 30 30 Table of Contents Table of Contents organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, have made or could make unprecedented assertions about how taxation is determined and, in some cases, have proposed or enacted new laws that are contrary to the way in which rules and regulations have historically been interpreted and applied. Changes in our operating landscape, such as changes in laws or interpretations of tax rules, could adversely affect our effective tax rates and/or cause us to respond by making changes to our business structure, which could adversely affect our operations and financial results. Our future effective tax rates are likely to be unfavorably affected by changes in the tax rates in jurisdictions where our income is earned, changes in jurisdictions in which our profits are determined to be earned and taxed, changes in the valuation of our deferred tax assets and liabilities, changes in or interpretation of tax rules and regulations in the jurisdictions in which we do business, or unexpected negative changes in business and market conditions that could reduce certain tax benefits. An increase in our effective tax rate would reduce our profitability. Moreover, we are subject to the examination of our income tax returns by domestic and foreign tax authorities. We regularly assess the likelihood of outcomes resulting from these examinations to determine the adequacy of our provision for income taxes and have reserved for potential adjustments that may result from these examinations. While we believe our tax estimates are reasonable, we cannot provide assurance that the final determination of any of these examinations will not have an adverse effect on our financial position and results of operations.", "prior_body": "We are a United States-based multinational company subject to tax in multiple domestic and foreign tax jurisdictions. Significant judgment is required in determining our current provision for income taxes and deferred tax assets or liabilities. Tax laws in the United States and in foreign tax jurisdictions are dynamic and subject to change as new laws are passed and new interpretations are issued. The applicability and impact of changes in tax laws and interpretations thereof could adversely affect our effective income tax rate and cash flows in future years. Unanticipated changes in our tax rates could affect our future results of operations. Our future effective tax rates are likely to be unfavorably affected by changes in the tax rates in jurisdictions where our income is earned, changes in jurisdictions in which our profits are determined to be earned and taxed, changes in the valuation of our deferred tax assets and liabilities, changes in or interpretation of tax rules and regulations in the jurisdictions in which we do business, or unexpected negative changes in business and market conditions that could reduce certain tax benefits. In addition, the United States and other countries and jurisdictions in which we conduct business, including those covered by governing bodies that enact tax laws applicable to us, such as the European Commission of the European Union, 29 29 29 Table of Contents Table of Contents could make changes to relevant tax, accounting or other laws and interpretations thereof that have a material impact to us. These countries, governmental bodies and intergovernmental economic organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, have or could make unprecedented assertions about how taxation is determined and, in some cases, have proposed or enacted new laws that are contrary to the way in which rules and regulations have historically been interpreted and applied. In the current global tax policy environment, any changes in laws, regulations and interpretations could adversely affect our effective tax rates, cause us to respond by making changes to our business structure, or result in other costs to us which could adversely affect our operations and financial results. Moreover, we are subject to the examination of our income tax returns by domestic and foreign tax authorities. We regularly assess the likelihood of outcomes resulting from these examinations to determine the adequacy of our provision for income taxes and have reserved for potential adjustments that may result from these examinations. We believe our tax estimates to be reasonable; however, we cannot provide assurance that the final determination of any of these examinations will not have an adverse effect on our financial position and results of operations." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "Increasing regulatory focus on privacy and security issues and expanding laws and regulatory requirements could impact our business models and expose us to increased liability.", "prior_title": "Increasing regulatory focus on privacy and security issues and expanding laws could impact our business models and expose us to increased liability.", "similarity_score": 0.875, "confidence": "high", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"We are subject to global data protection, privacy and security laws, regulations and codes of conduct that relate to our various business units and data processing activities, which may include sensitive, confidential, and personal information.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"This scrutiny can result in new and shifting interpretations of existing laws, thereby further impacting our business.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"The mechanisms that we and many other companies rely upon for European data transfers (for example, Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU - US Data Privacy Framework) are the subject of legal challenge, regulatory interpretation and judicial decisions by the Court of Justice of the European Union.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"Several other countries, including China, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Hong Kong and Japan, have also established specific legal requirements for cross-border transfers of personal information and certain countries have also established specific legal requirements for data 29 29 29 Table of Contents Table of Contents localization (such as where personal data must remain stored in the country).\"" ], "current_body": "We are subject to global data protection, privacy and security laws, regulations and codes of conduct that relate to our various business units and data processing activities, which may include sensitive, confidential, and personal information. These laws, regulations and codes are inconsistent across jurisdictions and are subject to evolving and differing (sometimes conflicting) interpretations. Government officials and regulators, privacy advocates and class action attorneys are increasingly scrutinizing how companies collect, process, use, store, share and transmit personal data. This scrutiny can result in new and shifting interpretations of existing laws, thereby further impacting our business. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) in the European Economic Area, and the United Kingdom continues to be interpreted by European and UK courts in novel ways leading to shifting requirements, country specific differences in application and uncertain enforcement priorities. More recently enacted laws, such as the Personal Information Protection Law in China, and new and emerging state laws in the United States on privacy, data and related technologies, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act, the California Privacy Rights Act, the Colorado Privacy Act and the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act, as well as industry self-regulatory codes and regulatory requirements, create new privacy and security compliance obligations and expand the scope of potential liability, either jointly or severally with our customers and suppliers. As a security example, pursuant to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Rules on Cybersecurity Risk Management, Strategy, Governance, and Incident Disclosure we are required to make certain disclosures related to material cybersecurity incidents and the reasonably likely impact of such an incident on Form 8-K and will be required to make certain other cybersecurity disclosures on Form 10-K. Determining whether a cybersecurity incident is notifiable or reportable may not be straightforward and any such mandatory disclosures could be costly and lead to negative publicity, loss of customer confidence in the effectiveness of our security measures, diversion of management’s attention and governmental investigations. While we have invested in readiness to comply with applicable requirements, the dynamic and evolving nature of these laws, regulations and codes, as well as their interpretation by regulators and courts, may affect our ability (and our enterprise customers’ ability) to reach current and prospective customers, to respond to both enterprise and individual customer requests under the laws (such as individual rights of access, correction and deletion of their personal information), to implement our business models effectively and to adequately address disclosure requirements. These laws, regulations and codes may also impact our innovation and business drivers in developing new and emerging technologies (for example, AI and machine learning) and may impact demand for our offerings and force us to bear the burden of more onerous obligations in our contracts. Perception of our practices, products, services or solutions, even if unfounded, as a violation of individual privacy, data protection rights or cybersecurity requirements, subjects us to public criticism, lawsuits, investigations, claims and other proceedings by regulators, industry groups or other third parties, all of which could disrupt or adversely impact our business and reputation and expose us to increased liability, fines and other punitive measures including prohibition on sales of our products, services or solutions, restrictive judicial orders and disgorgement of data. Additionally, we collect and store information on behalf of our business customers and if our customers fail to comply with contractual obligations or applicable laws, it could result in litigation or reputational harm to us. Transferring personal information across international borders is complex and subject to legal and regulatory requirements as well as active litigation and enforcement in a number of jurisdictions around the world, each of which could have an adverse impact on our ability to process and transfer personal data as part of our business operations. For example, European data transfers outside the European Economic Area are highly regulated and litigated. The mechanisms that we and many other companies rely upon for European data transfers (for example, Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU - US Data Privacy Framework) are the subject of legal challenge, regulatory interpretation and judicial decisions by the Court of Justice of the European Union. The suitability of Standard Contractual Clauses for data transfer in some scenarios has recently been the subject of legal challenge, and while the United States and the European Union reached agreement on the EU - US Data Privacy Framework, there are legal challenges to that data transfer mechanism as well. We continue to closely monitor for developments related to valid transfer mechanisms available for transferring personal data outside the European Economic Area (including the EU - US Data Privacy Framework) and other countries that have similar trans-border data flow requirements and adjust our practices accordingly. The open judicial questions and regulatory interpretations related to the validity of transfers using Standard Contractual Clauses have resulted in some changes in the obligations required to provide our services in the European Union and could expose us to potential sanctions and fines for non-compliance. Several other countries, including China, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Hong Kong and Japan, have also established specific legal requirements for cross-border transfers of personal information and certain countries have also established specific legal requirements for data 29 29 29 Table of Contents Table of Contents localization (such as where personal data must remain stored in the country). If other countries implement more restrictive regulations for cross-border data transfers or do not permit data to leave the country of origin, such developments could adversely impact our business and our enterprise customers’ business, our financial condition and our results of operations in those jurisdictions.", "prior_body": "As a global company, Adobe is subject to global data protection, privacy and security laws, regulations and codes of conduct that apply to our various business units and data processing activities. These laws, regulations and codes may be inconsistent across jurisdictions and are subject to evolving and differing (sometimes conflicting) interpretations. Government officials and regulators, privacy advocates and class action attorneys are increasingly scrutinizing how companies collect, process, use, store, share and transmit personal data. This increased scrutiny may result in new interpretations of existing laws, thereby further impacting Adobe’s business. Globally, laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) in Europe and the Personal Information Protection Law (“PIPL”) in China, and new and emerging state laws in the United States on privacy, data and related technologies, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act, the California Privacy Rights Act and the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act, as well as industry self-regulatory codes, create new compliance obligations and expand the scope of potential liability, either jointly or severally with our customers and suppliers. While we have invested in readiness to comply with applicable requirements, the dynamic and evolving nature of these laws, regulations and codes, as well as their interpretation by regulators and courts, may affect our ability (and our enterprise customers’ ability) to reach current and prospective customers, to respond to both enterprise and individual customer requests under the laws (such as individual rights of access, correction and deletion of their personal information) and to implement our business models effectively. These laws, regulations and codes may also impact our innovation and business drivers in developing new and emerging technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence and machine learning). These requirements, among others, may impact demand for our offerings and force us to bear the burden of more onerous obligations in our contracts. Any perception of our practices, products or services as a violation of individual privacy or data protection rights may subject us to public criticism, class action lawsuits, reputational harm, or investigations or claims by regulators, industry groups or other third parties, all of which could disrupt or adversely impact our business and expose us to increased liability. Additionally, we collect and store information on behalf of our business customers and if our customers fail to comply with contractual obligations or applicable laws, it could result in litigation or reputational harm to us. Transferring personal information across international borders is complex and subject to legal and regulatory requirements as well as active litigation and enforcement in a number of jurisdictions around the world, each of which could have an adverse impact on our ability to process and transfer personal data as part of our business operations. For example, European data transfers outside the European Economic Area are highly regulated and litigated. The mechanisms that we and many other companies rely upon for European data transfers (e.g., Standard Contractual Clauses) are the subject of regulatory interpretation and judicial decisions by the Court of Justice of the European Union. We are closely monitoring for developments related to valid transfer mechanisms available for transferring personal data outside the European Economic Area (including the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework) and other countries that have similar trans-border data flow requirements and adjusting our practices accordingly. The open judicial questions and regulatory interpretations related to the validity of transfers using Standard Contractual Clauses have resulted in some changes in the obligations required to provide our services in the European Union and could expose us to potential sanctions and fines for non-compliance. Several other countries, including China, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Hong Kong and Japan, have also established specific legal requirements for cross-border transfers of personal information and for data localization (i.e., where personal data must remain stored in the country). If other countries implement more restrictive regulations for cross-border data transfers or do not permit data to leave the country of origin, such developments could adversely impact our business and our enterprise customers’ business, our financial condition and our results of operations in those jurisdictions." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "If our goodwill or intangible assets become impaired, then we could be required to record a significant charge to earnings.", "prior_title": "If our goodwill or amortizable intangible assets become impaired, then we could be required to record a significant charge to earnings.", "similarity_score": 0.871, "confidence": "high", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"We test goodwill for impairment at least annually.\"" ], "current_body": "We test goodwill for impairment at least annually. We review our goodwill and intangible assets for impairment when events or changes in circumstances indicate the carrying value may not be recoverable, including declines in stock price, market capitalization or reduced future cash flow estimates and slower growth rates in our industry. Depending on the results of our review, we may be required to record a significant charge to earnings in our consolidated financial statements during the period in which any impairment of our goodwill or intangible assets was determined, negatively impacting our results of operations.", "prior_body": "GAAP requires us to test for goodwill impairment at least annually. In addition, we review our goodwill and amortizable intangible assets for impairment when events or changes in circumstances indicate the carrying value may not be recoverable, including declines in stock price, market capitalization or cash flows, and slower growth rates in our industry. Depending on the results of our review, we could be required to record a significant charge to earnings in our consolidated financial statements during the period in which any impairment of our goodwill or amortizable intangible assets was determined, negatively impacting our results of operations." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "Our intellectual property portfolio is a valuable asset and we may not be able to protect our intellectual property rights, including our source code, from infringement or unauthorized copying, use or disclosure.", "prior_title": "Our intellectual property portfolio is a valuable asset and we may not be able to protect our intellectual property rights, including our source code, from infringement or unauthorized copying, use or disclosure.", "similarity_score": 0.816, "confidence": "high", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"Our patents, trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights and other intellectual property are valuable assets to us.\"", "Added sentence: \"If we cannot protect our intellectual property against unauthorized copying, use, or other misappropriation, our business could be harmed.\"" ], "current_body": "Our patents, trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights and other intellectual property are valuable assets to us. Infringement or misappropriation of such intellectual property could result in lost revenues and ultimately reduce their value. We protect our intellectual property by relying on federal, state and common law rights in the United States and internationally, as well as a variety of administrative procedures and contractual restrictions. Despite our efforts, protecting our intellectual property rights and preventing unauthorized use of our intellectual property are inherently difficult. For instance, we actively combat software piracy, but we continue to lose revenue due to illegal use of our software. Third parties may illegally copy and sell counterfeit versions of our products. To the extent counterfeit installations and sales replace otherwise legitimate ones, our operating results could be adversely affected. We apply for patents in the United States and in foreign countries, but we are not always successful in obtaining patent protection or in obtaining such protection timely to meet our business needs. Our patents may be invalidated or circumvented. Moreover, due to challenges in detecting patent infringement pertaining to generative AI technologies, it may be more difficult to protect our generative AI and related innovations with patents. Additionally, if we use generative AI in the creation of our source code, we may not be able to rely on copyright to protect such intellectual property. Further, the laws of some foreign countries do not provide the same level of intellectual property protection as U.S. laws and courts and could fail to adequately protect our intellectual property rights. If unauthorized disclosure of our source code occurs through security breach, cyber-attack or otherwise, we could lose future trade secret protection for that source code. Such loss could make it easier for third parties to compete with our products by copying functionality, which could cause us to lose customers and could adversely affect our revenue and operating margins. If we cannot protect our intellectual property against unauthorized copying, use, or other misappropriation, our business could be harmed.", "prior_body": "Our intellectual property portfolio is a valuable asset. Infringement or misappropriation of our patents, trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights and other intellectual property rights could result in lost revenues and ultimately reduce their value. Preventing unauthorized use or infringement of our intellectual property rights is inherently difficult. We actively combat software piracy as we enforce our intellectual property rights, but we nonetheless lose significant revenue due to illegal use of our software. If piracy activities continue at historical levels or increase, they may further harm our business. We apply for patents in the United States and internationally to protect our newly created technology and if we are unable to obtain patent protection for the technology described in our pending patent, or if the patent is not obtained timely, this could result in revenue loss, or have other adverse effects on operations and harm our business. We offer our products and services in foreign countries 28 28 28 Table of Contents Table of Contents and we may seek intellectual property protection from those foreign legal systems. Some of those foreign countries may not have as robust or comprehensive of intellectual property protection laws and schemes as those offered in the United States, and the mechanisms to enforce intellectual property rights may be inadequate to protect our technology, which could harm our business. We also seek to protect our confidential information and trade secrets through the use of non-disclosure agreements with our customers, contractors, vendors and partners. However, there is a risk that our confidential information and trade secrets may be disclosed or published without our authorization, and in these situations, enforcing our rights may be difficult or costly. If unauthorized disclosure of our source code occurs through security breach, cyber-attack or otherwise, we could lose future trade secret protection for that source code. Such loss could make it easier for third parties to compete with our products by copying functionality, which could cause us to lose customers and could adversely affect our revenue and operating margins." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "Contracting with government entities exposes us to additional risks inherent in the government procurement process.", "prior_title": "Contracting with government entities exposes us to additional risks inherent in the government procurement process.", "similarity_score": 0.8, "confidence": "high", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"We provide products, services and solutions, directly and indirectly, to a variety of domestic and foreign government entities, which introduces certain risks and challenges not present in private commercial agreements, including varying governmental budgeting processes, fluctuations due to government spending cuts and shutdowns, highly competitive and lengthy bidding process that may be subject to political influence and adherence to complex procurement regulations and other government-specific contractual requirements.\"" ], "current_body": "We provide products, services and solutions, directly and indirectly, to a variety of domestic and foreign government entities, which introduces certain risks and challenges not present in private commercial agreements, including varying governmental budgeting processes, fluctuations due to government spending cuts and shutdowns, highly competitive and lengthy bidding process that may be subject to political influence and adherence to complex procurement regulations and other government-specific contractual requirements. We incur significant up-front time and costs without any assurance that we will win a contract. Operating within a highly regulated industry, we have been and may in the future be subject to audits and investigations relating to our government contracts and any violations could result in termination of contracts and various civil and criminal penalties and administrative sanctions, including payment of fines and suspension or debarment from future government business, as well as harm to our reputation and financial results. We have made, and may continue to make, significant investments to support future sales opportunities in various government sectors, including to obtain various security authorizations and certifications. Such processes are complex, lengthy and can often be delayed. Furthermore, requirements may change, or we may be unable to achieve or sustain one or more government authorizations or certifications, which could affect our ability to sell to government entities until we meet any revised requirements.", "prior_body": "We provide products and services, directly and indirectly, to a variety of domestic and foreign government entities, which introduces certain risks, including extended sales and collection cycles, varying governmental budgeting processes and adherence to complex procurement regulations and other government-specific contractual requirements. We have been, are currently and may in the future be subject to audits and investigations relating to our government contracts and any violations could result in various civil and criminal penalties and administrative sanctions, including termination of contracts, payment of fines and suspension or debarment from future government business, as well as harm to our reputation and financial results." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "If we are unable to recruit and retain key personnel, our business may be harmed, and our hybrid work model may present challenges, which could adversely impact our business.", "prior_title": "If we are unable to recruit and retain key personnel, our business may be harmed, and our attempts to operate under a hybrid work model may not be successful and adversely impact our business.", "similarity_score": 0.739, "confidence": "medium", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"Much of our future success depends on the continued service, availability and performance of our senior management and highly skilled personnel across all levels of our organization.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"Our efforts to attract, develop, integrate and retain highly skilled employees may be compounded by intensified restrictions on travel, immigration or the availability of work visas.\"" ], "current_body": "Much of our future success depends on the continued service, availability and performance of our senior management and highly skilled personnel across all levels of our organization. Our senior management has acquired specialized knowledge and skills with respect to our business, and the loss of any of these individuals could harm our business, especially if we are not successful in developing adequate succession plans. Our efforts to attract, develop, integrate and retain highly skilled employees may be compounded by intensified restrictions on travel, immigration or the availability of work visas. The technology industry is often subject to substantial and continuous competition for talent, particularly with cybersecurity and AI backgrounds, and demand for cutting-edge or unique skill sets can be highly competitive, both of which are heightened with the increased availability of hybrid or remote working arrangements. We face an increasingly difficult challenge to attract and retain highly qualified security personnel to assist us in combating security threats. We may experience higher compensation costs to retain and recruit senior management and highly skilled personnel that may not be offset by improved productivity or increased sales. Our hybrid work environment may also present operational and workplace culture challenges, which could negatively affect our ability to execute against our business objectives and retain and recruit personnel. We continue to hire personnel in countries where exceptional technical knowledge and other expertise are offered at lower costs, which increases the efficiency of our global workforce structure and reduces our personnel-related expenditures. Nonetheless, as globalization continues, competition for talent in those countries has increased, which may impact our ability to retain these employees and increase our compensation-related expenses.", "prior_body": "Much of our future success depends on the continued service, availability and performance of our senior management and highly-skilled personnel across all levels of our organization. Our senior management has acquired specialized knowledge and skills with respect to our business, and the loss of any of these individuals could harm our business, especially if we are not successful in developing adequate succession plans. Our efforts to attract, develop, integrate and retain highly skilled employees with appropriate qualifications may be compounded by intensified restrictions on travel, immigration or the availability of work visas. Competition for experienced personnel in the information technology industry is intense and has recently intensified further due to industry trends in many areas where our employees are located. Further, the increased availability of hybrid or remote working arrangements has expanded the pool of companies that can compete for our employees and employment candidates. We may experience higher compensation costs to retain senior management and experienced personnel that may not be offset by improved productivity or increased sales. A hybrid work environment may also present operational, cybersecurity and workplace culture challenges. If we are unable to continue to successfully attract and retain highly skilled personnel and maintain our corporate culture in a hybrid work environment, our business may be harmed. We continue to hire personnel in countries where exceptional technical knowledge and other expertise are offered at lower costs, which increases the efficiency of our global workforce structure and reduces our personnel related expenditures. Nonetheless, as globalization continues, competition for employees in these countries has increased, which may impact our ability to retain these employees and increase our compensation-related expenses. We may continue to expand our international operations and international sales and marketing activities, which would require significant management attention and resources. We may be unable to scale our infrastructure effectively or as quickly as our competitors in these markets, and our revenue may not increase sufficiently to offset these expected increases in costs, causing our results to suffer. We believe that a critical contributor to our success to date has been our corporate culture, which we have built to foster innovation, teamwork and employee satisfaction. As we grow, including from the integration of employees and businesses acquired in connection with previous or future acquisitions, we may find it difficult to maintain important aspects of our corporate culture, which could negatively affect our ability to retain and recruit personnel who are essential to our future success." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "We may not realize the anticipated benefits of investments or acquisitions, and they may disrupt our business and divert management’s attention.", "prior_title": "We may not realize the anticipated benefits of past or future investments or acquisitions, and integration of acquisitions may disrupt our business and management.", "similarity_score": 0.73, "confidence": "medium", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"Investments and acquisitions involve numerous risks and uncertainties, the occurrence of which may have an adverse effect on our business.\"" ], "current_body": "Investments and acquisitions involve numerous risks and uncertainties, the occurrence of which may have an adverse effect on our business. These risks and uncertainties include: •inability to achieve the financial and strategic goals of the investment or acquisition; •difficulty in effectively integrating the operations, technologies, products, services, solutions, culture or personnel of the acquired business; •disruption of our ongoing business and distraction of our management and other personnel; •challenges to completing or failure to complete an announced investment or acquisition related to the failure to obtain regulatory approval, or the need to satisfy certain conditions precedent to closing such transaction (such as divestitures, ownership or operational restrictions or other structural or behavioral remedies) that could limit the anticipated benefits of the transaction; •entry into markets in which we have minimal prior experience and where competitors in such markets have stronger market positions; •inability to retain personnel, key customers, distributors, vendors and other business partners of the acquired business; •delay in customer and distributor purchasing decisions due to uncertainty about the direction of our product and service offerings; •incurring higher than anticipated costs to effectively integrate an acquired business, to bring an acquired company into compliance with applicable laws and regulations, additional compensation issued or assumed in connection with an acquisition, to divest products, services or solutions acquired in unsuccessful investments or acquisitions, to amortize costs for acquired intangible assets or because of our inability to take advantage of anticipated tax benefits; •increased collection times, elevated delinquency or bad debt write-offs related to receivables of an acquired business we assume; •difficulty in maintaining controls, procedures and policies during the transition and integration and inability to conclude that our internal controls over financial reporting are effective; •potential identified or unknown security vulnerabilities in acquired products that expose us to additional security risks or delay our ability to integrate the product into our offerings; •exposure to litigation or other claims in connection with, or inheritance of claims or litigation risk as a result of, an acquisition; •incurrence of additional debt to finance an acquisition, which will increase our interest expense and leverage, and/or issuance of equity securities to finance acquisitions, which will dilute current shareholders’ percentage ownership and earnings per share; and •failure to identify significant problems, liabilities or other challenges during due diligence. 23 23 23 Table of Contents Table of Contents Our ability to acquire other businesses or technologies, make strategic investments or integrate acquired businesses effectively may also be impaired by adverse economic and political events, including trade tensions, and increased global scrutiny of acquisitions and strategic investments. A number of countries, including the United States and countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, are considering or have adopted more stringent restrictions or guidelines for such transactions. Governments may continue to adopt or tighten restrictions of this nature, and such restrictions or government actions could negatively impact our business and financial results. Further, if we are not able to complete an announced acquisition or investment, or we do not achieve the financial and strategic goals of an acquisition or investment, we may not realize the anticipated benefits of such acquisition or investment or we may incur additional costs, which may negatively impact our business and financial results.", "prior_body": "We may not realize the anticipated benefits of an investment or acquisition of a company, division, product or technology, each of which involves numerous risks. These risks include: •inability to achieve the financial and strategic goals for the acquired and combined businesses; •difficulty in, and the cost of, effectively integrating the operations, technologies, products or services, and personnel of the acquired business; •potential identified or unknown security vulnerabilities in acquired products that expose us to additional security risks or delay our ability to integrate the product into our offerings; •entry into markets in which we have minimal prior experience and where competitors in such markets have stronger market positions; •disruption of our ongoing business and distraction of our management and other employees from other opportunities and challenges; •inability to retain personnel of the acquired business; •inability to retain key customers, distributors, vendors and other business partners of the acquired business; •inability to take advantage of anticipated tax benefits; •incurring acquisition-related costs or amortization costs for acquired intangible assets that could impact our operating results; •elevated delinquency or bad debt write-offs related to receivables of the acquired business we assume; •additional costs of bringing acquired companies into compliance with laws and regulations applicable to a multinational corporation; •difficulty in maintaining controls, procedures and policies during the transition and integration; •impairment of our relationships with employees, customers, partners, distributors or third-party providers of our technologies, products or services; •failure of our due diligence processes to identify significant problems, liabilities or other challenges of an acquired company or technology; •exposure to litigation or other claims in connection with, or inheritance of claims or litigation risk as a result of, an acquisition, such as claims from terminated employees, customers, former stockholders or other third parties; •incurring significant exit charges if products or services acquired in business combinations are unsuccessful; •inability to conclude that our internal controls over financial reporting are effective; •inability to obtain, or obtain in a timely manner, approvals from governmental authorities, which could delay prevent or impose conditions on such acquisitions; •the failure of strategic investments to perform as expected or to meet financial projections; •delay in customer and distributor purchasing decisions due to uncertainty about the direction of our product and service offerings; 21 21 21 Table of Contents Table of Contents •additional stock-based compensation issued or assumed in connection with an acquisition, including the impact on stockholder dilution and our results of operations; •increased accounts receivables collection times and working capital requirements associated with acquired business models; and •incompatibility of business cultures. Mergers and acquisitions of technology companies are inherently risky. If we do not complete an announced acquisition transaction, including the pending acquisition of Figma, Inc., or integrate an acquired business successfully and in a timely manner, we may not realize the benefits of the acquisition to the extent anticipated, and in certain circumstances an acquisition could harm our financial position. Our ability to acquire other businesses or technologies, make strategic investments or integrate acquired businesses effectively may also be impaired by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including government actions in light of the pandemic, trade tensions, restrictions and increased global scrutiny of foreign investments. For example, a number of countries, including the United States and countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, are considering or have adopted restrictions on foreign investments. Governments may continue to adopt or tighten restrictions of this nature, and such restrictions could negatively impact our business and financial results." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "Service interruptions or failures of our or third-party information technology systems may impair the availability of our products, services and solutions, which may expose us to liability, damage our reputation and harm our future financial results.", "prior_title": "We rely on data centers managed both by Adobe and third parties to host and deliver our services, as well as access, collect, process, use, transmit and store data, and any interruptions or delays in these hosted services, or failures in data collection or transmission could expose us to liability and harm our business and reputation.", "similarity_score": 0.729, "confidence": "medium", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"Much of our business, including our online store at adobe.com and our Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud solutions, relies on hardware and services that are hosted, managed and controlled directly by us or third-party service providers to be available to customers and users without disruption.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"If a transition among data centers or to third-party service providers encounters unexpected interruptions, unforeseen complexity or unplanned disruptions despite precautions undertaken during the process, this may impair our delivery of products, services and solutions to customers and result in increased costs and liabilities, which may harm our operating results, reputation and our business.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"We may also find, on occasion, that we cannot deliver data and reports to our customers in near real-time due to factors such as significant spikes in customer activity on their websites or failures of our network or software (or that of a third-party service provider).\"" ], "current_body": "Much of our business, including our online store at adobe.com and our Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud solutions, relies on hardware and services that are hosted, managed and controlled directly by us or third-party service providers to be available to customers and users without disruption. We do not have redundancy for all our systems, many of our critical applications (“apps”) reside in only one of our data centers, and our disaster recovery planning may not account for all eventualities. If any critical third-party service provider of hosting or content delivery services is negatively affected or becomes unavailable to us for any reason, we may not be able to deliver the corresponding products, services or solutions to our customers and users. Failure of our systems or those of our third-party service providers could disrupt our business operations and those of our customers, subject us to reputational harm, require costly and time-intensive notifications, and cause us to lose customers, users and future business. Occasionally, we migrate data among data centers and to third-party hosted environments. If a transition among data centers or to third-party service providers encounters unexpected interruptions, unforeseen complexity or unplanned disruptions despite precautions undertaken during the process, this may impair our delivery of products, services and solutions to customers and result in increased costs and liabilities, which may harm our operating results, reputation and our business. It is also possible that hardware or software failures or errors in our systems (or those of our third-party service providers) could result in data loss or corruption, cause the information that we collect or maintain to be incomplete or contain inaccuracies that our customers regard as significant, or cause us to fail to meet committed service levels or comply with applicable notification requirements or other relevant contractual obligations to our customers. Furthermore, our ability to collect and report data may be delayed or interrupted by a number of factors, including access to the internet, the failure of our network or software systems, security breaches or significant variability in visitor traffic on customer websites. We may also find, on occasion, that we cannot deliver data and reports to our customers in near real-time due to factors such as significant spikes in customer activity on their websites or failures of our network or software (or that of a third-party service provider). If we fail to plan infrastructure capacity appropriately and expand it proportionally with the needs of our customer and user base, and we experience a rapid and significant demand on the capacity of our data centers or those of third parties, service outages or performance issues could occur, which may impact our customers. Such a strain on our infrastructure capacity may subject us to regulatory and customer notification requirements, violations of service level agreement commitments or financial liabilities and result in customer dissatisfaction or harm our business. If we supply materially inaccurate information or experience significant interruptions in our systems, our reputation could be harmed, we could lose customers and we could be found liable for damages or incur other losses.", "prior_body": "Much of our business relies on hardware and services that are hosted, managed and controlled directly by Adobe or third-party service providers, including our online store at adobe.com and our Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud solutions. We do not have redundancy for all of our systems, many of our critical applications reside in only one of our data centers, and our disaster recovery planning may not account for all eventualities. If our business relationship with a third-party provider of hosting or content delivery services is negatively affected, or if one of our content delivery suppliers were to terminate its agreement with us without adequate notice, we might not be able to deliver the corresponding hosted offerings to our customers, which could disrupt our business operations and those of our customers, subject us to reputational harm, costly and time-intensive notification requirements, and cause us to lose customers and future business. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted and may continue to disrupt the supply chain of hardware needed to maintain these third-party systems and services or to run our business. In addition, supply chain disruptions stemming from the Russia-Ukraine war may harm our customers and suppliers and further complicate existing supply chain constraints. Occasionally, we migrate data among data centers and to third-party hosted environments. If a transition among data centers or to third-party service providers encounters unexpected interruptions, unforeseen complexity or unplanned disruptions despite precautions undertaken during the process, this may impair our delivery of products and services to customers and result in increased costs and liabilities, which may harm our operating results, reputation and our business. It is also possible that hardware or software failures or errors in our systems (or those of our third-party service providers) could result in data loss or corruption, cause the information that we collect or maintain to be incomplete or contain inaccuracies that our customers regard as significant, or cause us to fail to meet committed service levels or comply with applicable notification requirements. Furthermore, our ability to collect and report data may be delayed or interrupted by a number of factors, including access to the internet, the failure of our network or software systems, security breaches or significant variability in visitor traffic on customer websites. In addition, the loss of data resulting from computer viruses, worms, ransomware or other malware may harm our systems could expose us to litigation or regulatory investigation, and costly and time-intensive notification requirements. We may also find, on occasion, that we cannot deliver data and reports to our customers in near real time due to factors such as significant spikes in customer activity on their websites or failures of our network or software (or that of a third-party service provider). If we fail to plan infrastructure capacity appropriately and expand it proportionally with the needs of our customer base, and we experience a rapid and significant demand on the capacity of our data centers or those of third parties, service outages or performance issues could occur, which would impact our customers. Such a strain on our infrastructure 23 23 23 Table of Contents Table of Contents capacity could subject us to regulatory and customer notification requirements, violations of service level agreement commitments or financial liabilities and result in customer dissatisfaction or harm our business. If we supply materially inaccurate information or experience significant interruptions in our systems, our reputation could be harmed, we could lose customers and we could be found liable for damages or incur other losses." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "Our existing and future debt obligations may adversely affect our financial condition and future financial results.", "prior_title": "We have issued $4.15 billion of notes in debt offerings and may incur other debt in the future, which may adversely affect our financial condition and future financial results.", "similarity_score": 0.714, "confidence": "medium", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"As of December 1, 2023, we had $3.65 billion in senior unsecured notes outstanding and a $3 billion commercial paper program with no amounts outstanding.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"Under certain circumstances, if our credit ratings are downgraded or other negative action is taken, the interest rate payable by us under our revolving credit agreement could increase.\"" ], "current_body": "As of December 1, 2023, we had $3.65 billion in senior unsecured notes outstanding and a $3 billion commercial paper program with no amounts outstanding. We also had a $1.5 billion senior unsecured revolving credit agreement and $3.5 billion delayed draw term loan agreement, both of which were undrawn. Subsequent to December 1, 2023, the delayed draw term loan agreement was terminated. This debt or future additional indebtedness may adversely affect our financial condition and future financial results by, among other things: •requiring the dedication of a portion of our expected cash flows from operations to service our debt, thereby reducing the amount of expected cash flows available for other purposes, including capital expenditures and acquisitions; •increasing our vulnerability to adverse changes in our business and general economic and industry conditions; and •limiting our ability to obtain future financing for working capital, capital expenditures, future acquisitions, general corporate or other purposes, which may also impact our ability to service and repay outstanding indebtedness as it becomes due. Our senior unsecured notes, commercial paper program and revolving credit agreement impose restrictions on us and require us to maintain compliance with specified covenants. Our ability to comply with these covenants may be affected by events beyond our control. If we breach any of the covenants and do not obtain a waiver from the noteholders or lenders, then, subject to applicable cure periods, any outstanding debt may be declared immediately due and payable. In addition, changes by any rating agency to our credit rating may negatively impact the value and liquidity of both our debt and equity securities, as well as the potential costs associated with a refinancing of our debt. Under certain circumstances, if our credit ratings are downgraded or other negative action is taken, the interest rate payable by us under our revolving credit agreement could increase. Downgrades in our credit ratings could also restrict our ability to obtain additional financing in the future and affect the terms of any such financing.", "prior_body": "We have $4.15 billion in senior unsecured notes and a $1.5 billion senior unsecured revolving credit agreement, which is currently undrawn. This debt may adversely affect our financial condition and future financial results by, among other things: •increasing our vulnerability to adverse changes in general economic and industry conditions; •requiring the dedication of a portion of our expected cash flows from operations to service our debt, thereby reducing the amount of expected cash flows available for other purposes, including capital expenditures and acquisitions; and •limiting our flexibility in planning for, or reacting to, changes in our business and our industry. Our senior unsecured notes and senior unsecured credit agreement impose restrictions on us and require us to maintain compliance with specified covenants. Our ability to comply with these covenants may be affected by events beyond our control. If we breach any of the covenants and do not obtain a waiver from the noteholders or lenders, then, subject to applicable cure periods, any outstanding debt may be declared immediately due and payable. In addition, changes by any rating agency to our credit rating may negatively impact the value and liquidity of both our debt and equity securities, as well as the potential costs associated with a refinancing of our debt. Under certain circumstances, if our credit ratings are downgraded or other negative action is taken, the interest rate payable by us under our revolving credit facility could increase. Downgrades in our credit ratings could also restrict our ability to obtain additional financing in the future and affect the terms of any such financing." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "We are subject to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates and may not be able to effectively hedge our exposure.", "prior_title": "We may incur losses associated with currency fluctuations and may not be able to effectively hedge our exposure.", "similarity_score": 0.712, "confidence": "medium", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"Our operating results and performance metrics are subject to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates due to the global scope of our business.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"Our hedging activities have not, and may not in the future, offset more than a portion of the adverse financial impact, including on our actual revenue recognized, resulting from unfavorable movement in foreign currency exchange rates, which could adversely affect our financial condition, business performance or results of operations.\"" ], "current_body": "Our operating results and performance metrics are subject to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates due to the global scope of our business. Geopolitical and economic events, including war, trade disputes, economic sanctions and 31 31 31 Table of Contents Table of Contents emerging market volatility, and associated uncertainty have caused, and may in the future cause, currencies to fluctuate. Accordingly, amounts reported as annualized recurring revenue, a performance metric which we measure at currency rates that are set at the beginning of each fiscal year and held constant throughout the year, may vary from actual revenue recognized in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States. We attempt to mitigate a portion of these foreign currency exchange risks to our operating results through foreign currency hedging based on our judgment of the appropriate trade-offs among risk, opportunity and expense. We regularly review our hedging program and make adjustments that we believe are appropriate. Our hedging activities have not, and may not in the future, offset more than a portion of the adverse financial impact, including on our actual revenue recognized, resulting from unfavorable movement in foreign currency exchange rates, which could adversely affect our financial condition, business performance or results of operations.", "prior_body": "Our operating results are subject to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates due to the global scope of our business. Geopolitical and economic events, including war, trade disputes, economic sanctions and emerging market volatility, and associated uncertainty have caused, and may in the future cause, currencies to fluctuate. We attempt to mitigate a portion of these risks through foreign currency hedging based on our judgment of the appropriate trade-offs among risk, opportunity and expense. We regularly review our hedging program and make adjustments that we believe are appropriate. Our hedging 30 30 30 Table of Contents Table of Contents activities have not and may not in the future offset more than a portion of the adverse financial impact resulting from unfavorable movement in foreign currency exchange rates, which could adversely affect our financial condition or results of operations." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "Security incidents, improper access to or disclosure of our customers’ data or other cyber incidents may harm our reputation and materially and adversely affect our business.", "prior_title": "Security vulnerabilities in our products and systems, or in our supply chain, could lead to reduced revenue or to liability claims.", "similarity_score": 0.676, "confidence": "medium", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"Our products, services and solutions collect, store, manage and otherwise process third-party data, including our customers’ data and our own data.\"" ], "current_body": "Our products, services and solutions collect, store, manage and otherwise process third-party data, including our customers’ data and our own data. Such products, services and solutions as well as our technologies, systems and networks have been subject to, and may in the future be subject to, cyberattacks, computer viruses, ransomware or other malware, fraud, worms, social engineering, denial-of-service attacks, malicious software programs, insider threats and other cybersecurity incidents that have in the past, and may in the future, result in the unauthorized access, disclosure, acquisition, use, loss or destruction of sensitive personal or business data belonging to us and our customers. Cybersecurity incidents can be caused by human error from our workforce or that of our third-party service providers, by malicious third parties, acting alone or in groups, or by more sophisticated organizations, including nation-states and state-sponsored organizations. Such risks may be elevated in connection with geopolitical tensions, including the Russia-Ukraine war. Certain unauthorized parties have in the past managed, and may in the future manage, to overcome our security measures and those of our third-party service providers to access and misuse systems and software by exploiting defects in design or manufacture, including bugs, vulnerabilities and other problems that unexpectedly compromise the security or operation of a product or system. Further, malicious third parties have in the past attempted, and may in the future attempt, to fraudulently induce our employees or users of our products, services or solutions to disclose sensitive, personal or confidential information via illegal electronic spamming, phishing or other tactics, and this risk is heightened in our current hybrid model working environment. Malicious actors may engage in fraudulent or abusive activities through our products, services and solutions, including unauthorized use of accounts through stolen credentials, use of stolen credit cards or other payment vehicles, failure to pay for services accessed, or other activities that violate our terms of service. While we actively combat such fraudulent activities, we have experienced, and may in the future experience, impacts to our revenue from such activities. Further, unauthorized parties may also gain physical access to our facilities and infiltrate our information systems or attempt to gain 25 25 25 Table of Contents Table of Contents logical access to our products, services or information systems to access content and data. The loss of or unauthorized access to data, such as resulting from computer viruses, worms, ransomware or other malware may harm our systems, expose us to litigation or regulatory investigation and subject us to costly and time-intensive notification requirements. We devote significant resources to address security vulnerabilities through engineering more secure products, enhancing security and reliability features in our products and systems, code hardening, conducting rigorous penetration tests, deploying updates to address security vulnerabilities, regularly reviewing our service providers’ security controls, reviewing and auditing our products, services and solutions against information security control frameworks, providing resources, such as security training, to our workforce, and continually assessing and improving, as appropriate, our incident response process. Despite our preventative efforts, there is no assurance that our security measures will provide full effective protection from such events. The costs to prevent, eliminate, mitigate or remediate cybersecurity or other security problems and vulnerabilities are significant and may reduce our operating margins. Further, our efforts to address these problems, including notifying affected third parties when appropriate, have in the past been, and may in the future be, unsuccessful or delayed, which could result in business interruptions, cessation of service and loss of existing or potential customers. Maintaining the security of our products, services and solutions is a critical issue for us and our customers. It is impossible to predict the extent, frequency or impact cybersecurity issues may have on us. Breaches of our security measures and the accidental loss, inadvertent disclosure or unauthorized dissemination of proprietary information or sensitive, personal or confidential data about us, our employees, our customers or their end users, including the potential loss or disclosure of such information or data could expose us, our employees, our customers or other individuals affected to a risk of loss or misuse of this information. Actual or perceived security vulnerabilities or incidents may result in claims or litigation and liability or fines (and have in the past led to such claims), costly and time-intensive notice requirements, governmental inquiry or oversight or a loss of customer confidence, any of which could harm our business and damage our brand and reputation. Our customers may also adopt security measures to protect their computer systems and their instances of our software from attack and may suffer a cybersecurity attack on their own systems, unrelated to our systems. Even if such breach is unrelated to our security systems, solutions or programs, such breach could cause us reputational harm and require us to incur significant economic and operational consequences to adequately assess and respond to their breach, and to implement additional safeguards designed to protect against future breaches. While we maintain insurance to cover operational risks, such as cyber risk and technology outages, our insurance may not be sufficient to cover all liability described herein. These risks will likely increase as we expand our hosted offerings, integrate our products, services and solutions and store and process more data. Moreover, delayed sales, lower margins or lost customers resulting from disruptions caused by cyberattacks, overly burdensome preventative security measures or failure to fully meet information security control certification requirements could materially and adversely affect our financial results, stock price and reputation.", "prior_body": "Maintaining the security of our products and services is a critical issue for us and our customers. Cyberthreats are constantly evolving and becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex, making it increasingly difficult to detect and successfully defend against them. Certain unauthorized parties have in the past managed, and may again in the future manage, to gain access to and misuse some of our systems and software, or that of our third-party service providers, in order to access the authentication, payment and personal information of our end users and employees. In addition, cyber-attackers (which may include individuals or groups, as well as sophisticated groups with significant resources, such as nation-state and state-sponsored attackers) also develop and deploy viruses, worms, credential stuffing attack tools and other malicious software programs, some of which may be specifically designed to attack our products, services, information systems or networks. The frequency and sophistication of such threats continues to increase and often becomes further heightened in connection with geopolitical tensions. Hardware, software and operating system applications that we develop or procure from third parties have contained and may contain defects in design or manufacture, including bugs, vulnerabilities and other problems that could unexpectedly compromise the security of the system or impair a customer’s ability to operate or use our products. Like other global companies, we face an increasingly difficult challenge to attract and retain highly qualified security personnel to assist us in combating these security threats. The costs to prevent, eliminate, mitigate or alleviate cyber or other security problems, bugs, viruses, worms, malicious software programs and security vulnerabilities are significant, and our efforts to address these problems, including notifying affected parties, may not be successful or may be delayed and could result in interruptions, delays, cessation of service and loss of existing or potential customers. It is impossible to predict the extent, frequency or impact these problems may have on us. Outside parties have in the past and may in the future attempt to fraudulently induce our employees or users of our products or services to disclose sensitive, personal or confidential information via illegal electronic spamming, phishing or other tactics. This existing risk is compounded given the current hybrid model work environment, where a large portion of our workforce spends a portion of their time working in our offices and a portion of their time working from home. Unauthorized parties may also attempt to gain physical access to our facilities in order to infiltrate our information systems or attempt to gain logical access to our products, services or information systems for the purpose of exfiltrating content and data. These actual and potential breaches of our security measures and the accidental loss, inadvertent disclosure or unauthorized dissemination of proprietary information or sensitive, personal or confidential data about us, our employees, our customers or their end users, including the potential loss or disclosure of such information or data could expose us, our employees, our customers or other individuals affected to a risk of loss or misuse of this information. This may result in litigation and liability or fines, costly and time-intensive notice requirements, governmental inquiry or oversight or a loss of customer confidence, any of which could harm our business or damage our brand and reputation, thereby requiring time and resources to mitigate these impacts. These risks will likely increase as we expand our hosted offerings, integrate our products and services and store and process more data. These issues affect our products and services in particular because cyber-attackers tend to focus their efforts on popular offerings with a large user base, and we expect them to continue to do so. From time to time we have identified, and in the future we may identify other, vulnerabilities in some of our applications and services and those of our third-party service providers. In some cases, such vulnerabilities may not be immediately detected, which may make it difficult to recover critical services and lead to damaged assets. We continuously monitor and develop our information technology networks and infrastructure in an effort to prevent, detect, address and mitigate the risk of threats to our data, systems and networks, including malware and computer virus attacks, ransomware, unauthorized access, business email compromise, misuse, denial-of-service attacks, system failures and disruptions. These continued enhancements and changes, as well as changes designed to update and enhance our protective measures to address new threats, may increase the risk of a system or process failure or the creation of a gap in the associated security measures. Any such failure or gap could materially and adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial results. We devote significant resources to address security vulnerabilities through engineering more secure products, enhancing security and reliability features in our products and systems, code hardening, conducting rigorous penetration tests, deploying updates to address security vulnerabilities, regularly reviewing our service providers’ security controls, reviewing and auditing our hosted services against independent security control frameworks (such as ISO 27001, SOC 2 and PCI), providing resources, such as mandatory security training, for our workforce and improving our incident response time, but security vulnerabilities cannot be totally eliminated. The cost of undertaking these efforts could reduce our operating margins, and we may be unable to implement these measures quickly enough to prevent unauthorized access into our systems and products in all circumstances. Despite our preventative efforts, there is no assurance that our security measures will provide 24 24 24 Table of Contents Table of Contents full effective protection from such events, and actual or perceived security vulnerabilities in our products and systems may harm our reputation or lead to claims against us (and have in the past led to such claims) and could lead some customers to stop using certain products or services or to reduce or delay future purchases. If we do not make the appropriate level of investment in our technology systems and we are not able to deliver the quality of data security and privacy our customers require or that meet our independent security control certification requirements, our business could be adversely affected. Customers may also adopt security measures designed to protect their existing computer systems from attack, which could delay adoption of new technologies. Moreover, delayed sales, lower margins or lost customers resulting from disruptions caused by cyber-attacks, overly burdensome preventative security measures or failure to fully meet independent security control certification requirements could adversely affect our financial results, stock price and reputation." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "Some of our enterprise offerings have extended and complex sales cycles, which may increase our costs and make our sales cycles unpredictable.", "prior_title": "Some of our enterprise offerings have extended and complex sales cycles, which can make our sales cycles unpredictable.", "similarity_score": 0.616, "confidence": "medium", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"As we continue to target large enterprise customers for certain of our offerings, including Adobe Experience Cloud in our Digital Experience business and our Enterprise Term License Agreements in our Digital Media business, we may face increased costs, longer sales cycles, greater competition and less predictability in completing our sales.\"" ], "current_body": "As we continue to target large enterprise customers for certain of our offerings, including Adobe Experience Cloud in our Digital Experience business and our Enterprise Term License Agreements in our Digital Media business, we may face increased costs, longer sales cycles, greater competition and less predictability in completing our sales. For our enterprise customers, the evaluation process may be longer and more involved, and require us to invest more in educating our customers about our products, services and solutions, particularly because the decision to use our products, services and solutions is often an enterprise-wide decision. We may be required to submit more robust proposals, participate in extended proof-of-concept evaluation cycles and engage in more extensive contract negotiations. In addition, our enterprise customers often demand more complex configurations and additional integration services and product features. Adverse macroeconomic conditions have caused, and may cause in the future, delays in our enterprise customers’ purchasing decisions. Due to these factors, we often must devote greater sales support to certain enterprise customers, which increases our costs and time required to complete a sale, without assurance that potential customers will ultimately purchase our solutions. We also may be required to devote more services resources to implementation, which increases our costs, without assurance that customers receiving these services will renew or renew at the same level. Since the sales cycles for our enterprise offerings are multi-phased and complex, it is often unpredictable when a given sales cycle will close. Our revenue from enterprise customers may be affected by longer-than-expected sales and implementation cycles, extended collection cycles, potential deferral of revenue and alternative licensing arrangements. Additionally, our enterprise sales pattern has historically been uneven, where a higher percentage of a quarter’s total sales occur during the final weeks of each quarter, which is common in our industry.", "prior_body": "Sales cycles for some of our enterprise offerings, including our Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform solutions and Enterprise Term License Agreements (“ETLAs”) in our Digital Media business, are multi-phased and complex, which also makes it difficult to predict when a given sales cycle will close. The complexity in these sales cycles is due to several factors, including: •the need for our sales representatives to educate customers about the use and benefit of large-scale deployments of our products and services; •the desire of organizations to undertake significant evaluation processes to determine their technology requirements prior to making information technology expenditures and the need for our representatives to spend a significant amount of time assisting with such evaluations; •intensifying competition within the industry; •the negotiation of large, complex, enterprise-wide contracts; •the need for our customers to obtain requisition approvals from various decision makers within their organizations due to the complexity of our solutions touching multiple departments; and •customer budget constraints, economic conditions and unplanned administrative delays. We spend substantial time and expense on our sales efforts without assurance that potential customers will ultimately purchase our solutions. As we target our sales efforts at larger enterprise customers, these trends are expected to continue and could have a greater impact on our results of operations. Additionally, our enterprise sales pattern has historically been uneven, where a higher percentage of a quarter’s total sales occur during the final weeks of each quarter, which is common in our industry." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "If there is a change in subscriptions or renewals in a reporting period, this could cause our financial results to suffer and may not be immediately reflected in our revenue and financial results for that period because we recognize revenue over the subscription term.", "prior_title": "If our customers fail to renew subscriptions in accordance with our expectations, our future revenue and operating results could suffer, and our subscription offerings may create additional risk related to the timing of revenue recognition.", "similarity_score": 0.614, "confidence": "medium", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"We generally recognize revenue from our subscription offerings ratably over the terms of their subscription agreements, which typically range from 1 to 36 months.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"Further, such impact on our revenue may not be immediately reflected in our financial results in the period in which our renewal rates changed and may adversely affect our financial results in future periods.\"" ], "current_body": "Our offerings are typically subscription-based, pursuant to product and service agreements. We generally recognize revenue from our subscription offerings ratably over the terms of their subscription agreements, which typically range from 1 to 36 months. As a result, most of the subscription revenue we report each quarter is the result of subscription agreements entered into during previous quarters. Lower sales and subscriptions, reduced demand for our products, services and solutions, and increases in our attrition rate in any given period may not be fully reflected in our results of operations until future periods. Our subscription model could also make it difficult for us to rapidly increase our revenue from subscription-based or hosted services through additional sales in any period, as revenue from new customers will be recognized over the applicable subscription term. Our renewal rates may decline or fluctuate as a result of a number of factors, including our customers’ level of satisfaction, our ability to continue enhancing features and functionality, reliability of our offerings, prices of ours and competitors’ offerings, the actual or perceived information security of our systems and services, decreases in the size of our customer base, changes as a result of regulatory or legal requirements, changes in the composition of our customer base and reductions in our customers’ spending levels or declines in customer activity. If our customers do not renew their subscriptions or if they renew on terms less favorable to us, our revenue may decline. Further, such impact on our revenue may not be immediately reflected in our financial results in the period in which our renewal rates changed and may adversely affect our financial results in future periods. If any of our assumptions about revenue from our subscription-based offerings prove incorrect, our actual results may suffer and vary from those anticipated.", "prior_body": "Our offerings are typically subscription-based, pursuant to product and service agreements. Since our customers have no obligation to renew their subscriptions for our services after the expiration of their initial subscription period, which typically ranges from 1 to 36 months, our customers may not renew their subscriptions at the same or a higher level of service, for the same number of seats or for the same duration of time, if at all. Our varied customer base and flexible duration complicates our ability to precisely forecast renewal rates. Our customers’ renewal rates may decline or fluctuate as a result of a number of factors, including their level of satisfaction with our services, our ability to continue enhancing features and functionality, the reliability (including uptime) of our subscription offerings, the prices of offerings and competitors’ offerings, the actual or perceived information security of our systems and services, decreases in the size of our customer base, reductions in our customers’ spending levels or declines in customer activity as a result of general economic conditions or uncertainty in financial markets, including as a result of a global health crisis and geopolitical conflict, which has affected and may continue to affect certain sectors of the economy disproportionately. If our customers do not renew their subscriptions or if they renew on terms less favorable to us, our revenue may decline. We generally recognize revenue from our subscription offerings ratably over the terms of their subscription agreements. As a result, most of the subscription revenue we report in each quarter is the result of subscription agreements entered into during previous quarters. Any reduction in new or renewed subscriptions in a quarter may not be reflected in our revenue results until a later quarter and may decrease our revenue in future quarters. Lower sales, reduced demand for our products and services and increases in our attrition rate may not be fully reflected in our results of operations until future periods. Our subscription model could also make it difficult for us to rapidly increase our revenue from subscription-based or hosted services through additional sales in any period, as revenue from new customers will be recognized over the applicable subscription term. Additionally, in connection with our sales efforts to enterprise customers, a number of factors could affect our revenue, including longer-than-expected sales and implementation cycles, potential deferral of revenue and alternative licensing arrangements. If any of our assumptions about revenue from our subscription-based offerings prove incorrect, our actual results may vary materially from those anticipated." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "Issues relating to the development and use of AI, including generative AI, in our offerings may result in reputational harm, liability and adverse financial results.", "prior_title": "Social and ethical issues relating to the use of new and evolving technologies, such as AI, in our offerings may result in reputational harm and liability.", "similarity_score": 0.605, "confidence": "medium", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"Social and ethical issues relating to the use of AI, including generative AI, in our offerings may result in reputational harm, liability and additional costs.\"" ], "current_body": "Social and ethical issues relating to the use of AI, including generative AI, in our offerings may result in reputational harm, liability and additional costs. We are increasingly incorporating AI technologies into many of our offerings. If our AI development, deployment, content labeling or governance is ineffective or inadequate, it may result in incidents that impair the public acceptance of AI solutions or cause harm to individuals, customers or society, or result in our offerings not working as intended or producing unexpected outcomes. Around the world, AI regulation is in the nascent stages of development. The evolving AI regulatory environment may increase our research and development costs, increase our liability related to the use of AI by our customers or users that are beyond our control and result in inconsistencies in evolving legal frameworks across jurisdictions. While we have taken a responsible approach to the development and use of AI in our offerings, there can be no guarantee that future AI regulations will not adversely impact us or conflict with our approach to AI, including affecting our ability to make our AI offerings available without costly changes, requiring us to change our AI development practices, monetization strategies and/or indemnity protections and subjecting us to additional compliance requirements, regulatory action, competitive harm or legal 22 22 22 Table of Contents Table of Contents liability. In addition, new competition regulation on AI development and deployment could impose new requirements on our markets that could impact our business and financial results. Uncertainty around new and evolving AI use, including generative AI, may require additional investment to develop responsible use frameworks, develop or license proprietary datasets and machine learning models and develop new approaches and processes to attribute or compensate content creators, which could be costly. Developing, testing and deploying AI systems may also increase the cost of our offerings, including due to the nature of the computing costs involved in such systems. These costs could adversely impact our margins as we continue to add AI capabilities to our offerings and scale our AI offerings without assurance that our customers and users will adopt them. Further, as with any new offerings based on new technologies, consumer reception and monetization pathways are uncertain, our strategies may not be successful and our business and financial results could be adversely impacted. New AI offerings and technologies could disrupt workforce needs, result in negative publicity about AI and have the potential to affect demand for our existing products, services and solutions, all of which could adversely impact our business.", "prior_body": "Social and ethical issues relating to the use of new and evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence (“AI”) in our offerings, may result in reputational harm and liability, and may cause us to incur additional research and development costs to resolve such issues. We are increasingly building AI into many of our offerings. As with many innovations, AI presents risks and challenges that could affect its adoption, and therefore our business. If we enable or offer solutions that draw controversy due to their perceived or actual impact on society, we may experience brand or reputational harm, competitive harm or legal liability. Potential government regulation related to AI use and ethics may also increase the burden and cost of research and development in this area, and failure to properly remediate AI usage or ethics issues may cause public confidence in AI to be undermined, which could slow adoption of AI in our products and services. The rapid evolution of AI will require the application of resources to develop, test and maintain our products and services to help ensure that AI is implemented ethically in order to minimize unintended, harmful impact. Uncertainty around new and emerging AI applications such as generative AI content creation may require additional investment in the development of proprietary datasets and machine learning models, 22 22 22 Table of Contents Table of Contents development of new approaches and processes to provide attribution or remuneration to content creators and building systems that enable creatives to have greater control over the use of their work in the development of AI, which may be costly and could impact our profit margin if we decide to expand generative AI into all our product offerings. Developing, testing, and deploying AI systems may also increase the cost profile of our offerings due to the nature of the computing costs involved in such systems." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "Catastrophic events, including events associated with climate change, may disrupt our business and adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations.", "prior_title": "Catastrophic events, including global pandemics such as the COVID-19 pandemic, may disrupt our business and adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations.", "similarity_score": 0.571, "confidence": "low", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"Our business relies on our network infrastructure and enterprise apps, internal technology systems and websites.\"" ], "current_body": "Our business relies on our network infrastructure and enterprise apps, internal technology systems and websites. A disruption, infiltration or failure of our systems, data centers or operations, or those of our third-party service providers due to a major earthquake, other natural disasters, including climate-related events (such as drought, water security, heat waves, cold waves, wildfires and poor air quality), power shutoff or loss, telecommunications failure, epidemic, pandemic, war, terrorist attack or other catastrophic event, could cause interruptions to our systems and business operations, damage to critical infrastructure, loss of intellectual property, data security breaches and data loss. Our corporate headquarters, significant research and development activity, certain of our data centers and other critical business operations are in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Salt Lake Valley Area, both of which are near major earthquake faults. A catastrophic event, particularly one that may 32 32 32 Table of Contents Table of Contents disrupt our data centers or our critical activities, could prevent us from conducting normal business operations and providing our products, services and solutions, which could adversely affect our business. A catastrophic event could negatively impact a country or region in which we sell and, in turn, decrease demand for our products, services and solutions, which could negatively impact our business. Climate-related catastrophic events that may harm our business are also increasing in frequency and severity. We may be subject to additional climate-related regulations and reporting requirements and changing market dynamics and stakeholder expectations regarding climate change and our environmental impacts, all of which may impact our business, financial condition and results of operations. The occurrence of an epidemic or a pandemic, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, has had and may continue to have an adverse effect on our operating results. The extent to which epidemics and pandemics impact our financial condition or results of operations will depend on many factors outside of our control and whether there is a material impact on the businesses or productivity of our customers, employees, suppliers and other partners. A global pandemic may also intensify the other risks described in this Part I, Item 1A of this report.", "prior_body": "We are a highly automated business and rely on our network infrastructure and enterprise applications, internal technology systems and website for our development, marketing, operations, support, hosted services and sales activities. In 31 31 31 Table of Contents Table of Contents addition, some of our businesses rely on third-party hosted services, and we do not control the operation of third-party data center facilities serving our customers from around the world, which increases our vulnerability. A disruption, infiltration or failure of these systems or third-party hosted services in the event of a major earthquake, fire, flood, tsunami or other weather event, power loss, telecommunications failure, software or hardware malfunctions, pandemics (including the COVID-19 pandemic), cyber-attack, war, terrorist attack or other catastrophic event that our disaster recovery plans do not adequately address, could cause system interruptions, reputational harm, loss of intellectual property, delays in our product development, lengthy interruptions in our services, breaches of data security and loss of critical data. Any of these events could prevent us from fulfilling our customers’ orders or could negatively impact a country or region in which we sell our products, which could in turn decrease that country’s or region’s demand for our products. Our corporate headquarters, a significant portion of our research and development activities, certain of our data centers and certain other critical business operations are located in the San Francisco Bay Area, and additional facilities where we conduct significant operations are located in the Salt Lake Valley Area, both of which are near major earthquake faults. A catastrophic event that results in the destruction or disruption of any of our data centers or our critical business or information technology systems could severely affect our ability to conduct normal business operations and, as a result, our future operating results could be adversely affected. The adverse effects of any such catastrophic event would be exacerbated if experienced at the same time as another unexpected and adverse event, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The occurrence of regional epidemics or a global pandemic, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have had and may continue to have an adverse effect on how we and our customers are operating our businesses and our operating results. Our operations have also been and may in the future be negatively affected by a range of external factors related to the pandemic that are not within our control, including the emergence and spread of more transmissible variants. The extent to which global pandemics, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, impact our financial condition or results of operations will depend on factors such as the duration and scope of the pandemic, as well as whether there is a material impact on the businesses or productivity of our customers, partners, employee, suppliers and other partners. To the extent that the pandemic harms our business and results of operations, many of the other risks described in this Part I, Item 1A of this report may be heightened." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "We face various risks associated with our operating as a multinational corporation, and global adverse economic conditions may harm our business and financial condition.", "prior_title": "We face various risks associated with our operating as a multinational corporation.", "similarity_score": 0.564, "confidence": "low", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"We derive a large portion of our total revenue from, and have significant operations, outside of the United States.\"" ], "current_body": "We derive a large portion of our total revenue from, and have significant operations, outside of the United States. As a multinational corporation, we are subject to a number of risks, including from global adverse economic conditions, that are uncertain and beyond our control and that make forecasting operating results and decisions about future investments difficult, such as: •inflation and actions taken by central banks to counter inflation, including increasing interest rates; •international and regional economic, political and labor conditions, including any instability or security concerns abroad, such as uncertainty caused by economic sanctions, downturns and recessions, trade disputes, armed conflicts and wars; •tax laws (including U.S. taxes on foreign subsidiaries); •increased financial accounting and reporting burdens and complexities; •changes in, or impositions of, legislative or regulatory requirements, including antitrust and competition regulations; •changes in laws governing the free flow of data across international borders; •inadequate local infrastructure and difficulties in managing and staffing international operations; •costs, potential liability, delays or loss of sales resulting from trade restrictions imposed by the United States and other countries, as well as trade laws, including but not limited to economic sanctions and export controls; •costs and delays associated with developing products in multiple languages; and •operating in locations with a higher rate of corruption and fraudulent business practices. Additionally, third parties we do business with and our customers have international operations and are also subject to the above risks. Adverse changes in global economic conditions have in the past resulted and may in the future result in our customers’ and business partners’ insolvency, inability to obtain credit to finance or purchase our products, services and solutions, or a delay in paying or an inability to pay their obligations to us. Other third parties, such as our service providers, suppliers and distributors, may be unable to deliver or be delayed in delivering critical services, products or technologies that we rely on, and our business and reputation may be harmed. Our customers’ spending rate and demand for our products, services and solutions may also be adversely affected by the above risks. If our global sales are reduced, delayed or canceled because of any of the above risks, our revenue may decline. Further, a disruption in global financial markets could impair our banking partners, on which we rely for operating cash management, capital market transactions and derivative programs. Such disruption could also negatively impact our customers’ ability to pay us due to delays or inability to access their existing cash. As of December 1, 2023, our investment portfolio consisted of asset-backed securities, corporate debt securities, money market funds, time deposits, U.S. agency securities and U.S. Treasury securities. These investments are subject to credit, liquidity, market, and interest rate risks as well as economic downturns or events that affect global or regional financial markets that may cause the value of our investments to decline, requiring impairment charges, which could adversely affect our financial condition. 27 27 27 Table of Contents Table of Contents", "prior_body": "As a global business that generates approximately 42% of our total revenue from sales to customers outside of the Americas, we are subject to a number of risks, including: •inflation and actions taken by central banks to counter inflation; •foreign currency fluctuations and controls; •international and regional economic, political and labor conditions, including any instability or security concerns abroad, such as uncertainty caused by economic sanctions, trade disputes, armed conflicts and wars; •tax laws (including U.S. taxes on foreign subsidiaries); •increased financial accounting and reporting burdens and complexities; •changes in, or impositions of, legislative or regulatory requirements; •changes in laws governing the free flow of data across international borders; •failure of laws to protect our intellectual property rights adequately; •inadequate local infrastructure and difficulties in managing and staffing international operations; •delays resulting from difficulty in obtaining export licenses for certain technology, tariffs, quotas and other trade barriers; •the imposition of governmental economic sanctions on countries in which we do business or where we plan to expand our business; •costs and delays associated with developing products in multiple languages; •operating in locations with a higher incidence of corruption and fraudulent business practices; and •other factors beyond our control, such as terrorism, war, natural disasters, climate change and pandemics, including the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting restrictions on business activity, which may vary significantly by region. Some of our third-party business partners have international operations and are also subject to these risks, and our business may be harmed if such partners are unable to appropriately manage these risks. If sales to any of our customers outside of the Americas are reduced, delayed or canceled because of any of the above factors, our revenue may decline." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "If we are unable to develop, manage and maintain critical third-party relationships, such as our sales, partner and distribution channels, suppliers and service providers, our revenue and business may be adversely affected.", "prior_title": "Failure to manage our sales, partner and distribution channels effectively could result in a loss of revenue and harm our business.", "similarity_score": 0.562, "confidence": "low", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"We contract with a number of software distributors and other third parties to distribute our products, services and solutions, none of which are individually responsible for a material amount of our total net revenue in any recent period.\"", "Added sentence: \"26 26 26 Table of Contents Table of Contents We rely on third-party service providers and technologies to deliver our products, services and business operations and to operate critical business systems, such as cloud-based infrastructure, data center facilities, encryption and authentication technology and company email, communications with customers.\"", "Added sentence: \"If such third parties are negatively affected, if we fail to effectively develop, manage and maintain our relationships with such third parties, or if we are unable to renew our agreements with them on favorable terms or at all, our expenses could significantly increase, and we and our customers may experience service interruptions.\"", "Added sentence: \"Any disruption or damage to, or failure of our systems generally, including the systems of our third-party platform providers, could result in interruptions in our services and harm our business.\"", "Added sentence: \"Further, interruptions in our services caused by us or our third-party service providers may cause us to issue credits or pay penalties, cause customers to make warranty or other claims against us or to terminate their subscriptions or contracts, and adversely affect our attrition rates and our ability to attract new customers, all of which may adversely affect our financial results.\"" ], "current_body": "We contract with a number of software distributors and other third parties to distribute our products, services and solutions, none of which are individually responsible for a material amount of our total net revenue in any recent period. Successfully managing our distribution channels and sales partners to reach various customers for our products, services and solutions is a complex and global process. If an agreement with one of our distributors or partners was terminated, any prolonged delay in securing a replacement distributor or partner could have a negative impact on our results of operations. We also face legal risk and potential reputational harm from the activities of these independent third parties including, but not limited to, export control violations, workplace conditions, corruption and anti-competitive behavior. If our partner and distribution channels are not effective or if we stop or change our partner or distribution channels, we may lose sales opportunities, customers and revenue. We rely on third-party distribution platforms and are subject to changes in pricing structure, terms of service, privacy practices and other policies at the discretion of the platform provider. Any adverse changes to the terms with such third-party distribution platforms which we rely on to distribute our products, services and solutions may adversely affect our financial results. Additionally, our distribution channels may not continue to market or sell our products, services and solutions effectively and may favor products, services and solutions of other companies. We sell many products, services and solutions through our direct sales force. Risks associated with this sales channel include challenges related to hiring, retaining and motivating our direct sales force, and substantial amounts of ongoing training for sales representatives. Our business could be harmed if our direct sales expansion efforts do not generate the corresponding efficiencies and revenue we anticipated from such investment. In addition, the loss of key sales employees could impact our customer relationships and future ability to sell to certain accounts covered by such employees. 26 26 26 Table of Contents Table of Contents We rely on third-party service providers and technologies to deliver our products, services and business operations and to operate critical business systems, such as cloud-based infrastructure, data center facilities, encryption and authentication technology and company email, communications with customers. If such third parties are negatively affected, if we fail to effectively develop, manage and maintain our relationships with such third parties, or if we are unable to renew our agreements with them on favorable terms or at all, our expenses could significantly increase, and we and our customers may experience service interruptions. Any disruption or damage to, or failure of our systems generally, including the systems of our third-party platform providers, could result in interruptions in our services and harm our business. Further, interruptions in our services caused by us or our third-party service providers may cause us to issue credits or pay penalties, cause customers to make warranty or other claims against us or to terminate their subscriptions or contracts, and adversely affect our attrition rates and our ability to attract new customers, all of which may adversely affect our financial results. Our business and reputation would also be harmed if our customers and potential customers believe our services are unreliable.", "prior_body": "We contract with a number of software distributors and other strategic partners, none of which are individually responsible for a material amount of our total net revenue in any recent period. Nonetheless, if an agreement with one of our distributors were terminated, any prolonged delay in securing a replacement distributor could have a negative impact on our results of operations. Successfully managing our indirect distribution channel efforts to reach various customer segments for our products and services is a complex process across the broad range of geographies where we do business or plan to do business. Our distributors and other channel partners are independent businesses that we do not control. Notwithstanding the independence of our channel partners, we face legal risk and potential reputational harm from the activities of these third parties including, but not limited to, export control violations, workplace conditions, corruption and anti-competitive behavior. We cannot be certain that our distribution channel will continue to market or sell our products and services effectively. If our partner and distribution channels are not successful, we may lose sales opportunities, customers and revenue. If our distributors favor our competitors’ products or services for any reason, they may fail to market our products or services effectively, which would cause our results to suffer. If our OEMs through which we distribute products and services decide not to bundle our applications on their devices, our results could suffer. Further, the financial health of our distributors and partners and our continuing relationships with them are important to our success. Some of these distributors and partners may be unable to withstand adverse changes in economic conditions, which could result in insolvency, the inability of such distributors and partners to obtain credit to finance access to or purchases of our products and services, or a delay in paying their obligations to us. We also sell some of our products and services through our direct sales force. Risks associated with this sales channel include more extended sales and collection cycles, challenges related to hiring, retaining and motivating our direct sales force, 26 26 26 Table of Contents Table of Contents and substantial amounts of ongoing training for sales representatives. Moreover, recent hires may not be as productive as we would like, as in most cases it takes significant time for them to achieve full productivity. Our business could be seriously harmed if our expansion efforts of our direct sales do not generate a corresponding significant increase in revenue and we are unable to achieve the efficiencies we anticipate. In addition, the loss of key sales employees could impact our customer relationships and future ability to sell to certain accounts covered by such employees." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "If our reputation or our brands are damaged, our business and financial results may be adversely affected.", "prior_title": "If our products or platforms are used to create or disseminate objectionable content, particularly misleading content intended to manipulate public opinion, our brand reputation may be damaged, and our business and financial results may be harmed.", "similarity_score": 0.535, "confidence": "low", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"We believe our reputation and brands have been, and we expect them to continue to be, important to our business and financial results.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"There are numerous ways that our reputation or brands could be damaged, including, among other things, introduction of new products, features or services that do not meet customer expectations, our position on or approach to new and evolving technologies, backlash from customers, government entities or other stakeholders that disagree with our product offering decisions or public policy positions, significant litigation or regulatory actions that negatively reflect on our business practices, our action or inaction or actual or perceived failure to meet our commitments on environmental, social and governance, ethical or political issues, public scrutiny regarding our handling of user privacy, data practices or content, data security breaches or compliance failures, or our approach to AI.\"" ], "current_body": "We believe our reputation and brands have been, and we expect them to continue to be, important to our business and financial results. Maintaining and enhancing our brands may require us to make substantial investments and these investments may not be successful. There are numerous ways that our reputation or brands could be damaged, including, among other things, introduction of new products, features or services that do not meet customer expectations, our position on or approach to new and evolving technologies, backlash from customers, government entities or other stakeholders that disagree with our product offering decisions or public policy positions, significant litigation or regulatory actions that negatively reflect on our business practices, our action or inaction or actual or perceived failure to meet our commitments on environmental, social and governance, ethical or political issues, public scrutiny regarding our handling of user privacy, data practices or content, data security breaches or compliance failures, or our approach to AI. Further, our brands may be negatively affected by uses of our products, services or solutions, particularly our AI offerings, in ways that are out of our control, such as to create or disseminate content that is deemed to be misleading, deceptive or intended to manipulate public opinion, or for illicit, objectionable or illegal ends, or by our failure to respond appropriately and in a timely manner to such uses. Such uses may result in controversy or claims related to defamation, rights of publicity, illegal content, intellectual property infringement, harmful content, misinformation and disinformation, harmful bias, misappropriation, data privacy, derivative uses of third-party AI and personal injury torts. If we fail to appropriately respond to objectionable content created using our products, services or solutions or shared on our platforms, our users may lose confidence in our brands. Entry into markets with weaker protection of brands or changes in the legal systems in countries in which we operate may also impact our ability to protect our brands. If we fail to maintain, enhance or protect our brands, or if we incur excessive expenses in our efforts to do so, our business and financial results may be adversely affected. 24 24 24 Table of Contents Table of Contents", "prior_body": "We believe that our brands have significantly contributed to the success of our business. Maintaining and enhancing the brands within Adobe increases our ability to enter new categories, launch new and innovative products to better serve our customers and expand our customer base. Our brands may be negatively affected by the use of our products or services to create or disseminate newsworthy content that is deemed to be misleading, deceptive or intended to manipulate public opinion (e.g., “DeepFakes”), by the use of our products or services for illicit, objectionable or illegal ends, or by our failure to respond appropriately and expeditiously to such uses of our products and services. Such uses of our products and services may also cause us to face claims related to defamation, rights of publicity and privacy, illegal content, misinformation and personal injury torts. Maintaining and enhancing our brands may require us to make substantial investments and these investments may not be successful. If we fail to appropriately respond to objectionable content created using our products or services or shared on our platforms, our users may lose confidence in our brands and our business and financial results may be adversely affected. In addition, government regulation designed to address DeepFakes could adversely impact our product offerings." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "We are, and may in the future become, subject to litigation, regulatory inquiries and intellectual property infringement claims, which could result in an unfavorable outcome and have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operation and cash flows.", "prior_title": "We may incur substantial costs defending against third parties alleging that we infringe their proprietary rights.", "similarity_score": 0.473, "confidence": "low", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"We are subject to various legal proceedings (including class action lawsuits), claims and regulatory inquiries that are not yet resolved and additional claims, enforcement actions and inquiries may arise in the future.\"", "Reworded sentence: \"Third-party intellectual property disputes, including those initiated by patent assertion entities, could subject us to significant liabilities, require us to enter into royalty and licensing arrangements on unfavorable terms, prevent us from offering certain products, services or solutions, subject us to injunctions restricting our sales, cause severe disruptions to our operations or the markets in which we compete, or require us to satisfy indemnification commitments with our customers, including contractual provisions under various license arrangements and service agreements.\"", "Added sentence: \"We have not prevailed, and may not in the future prevail, in every lawsuit or dispute.\"", "Added sentence: \"For further information about specific litigation and proceedings, see the section titled “Legal Proceedings” contained in Part II, Item 8, Note 16 of our Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements of this report.\"" ], "current_body": "We are subject to various legal proceedings (including class action lawsuits), claims and regulatory inquiries that are not yet resolved and additional claims, enforcement actions and inquiries may arise in the future. Any proceedings, actions, claims or inquiries initiated by or against us, whether successful or not, may be time consuming; result in costly litigation, damage awards, consent decrees, injunctive relief or increased costs of business; require us to change our business practices or products; result in negative publicity; require significant amounts of management time; result in the diversion of significant operational resources, or otherwise harm our business and financial results. Additionally, we are currently, and may in the future be subject to claims, negotiations and complex, protracted litigation relating to disputes regarding the validity or alleged infringement of third-party intellectual property rights, including patent rights. Intellectual property disputes and litigation are typically costly and can be disruptive to our business operations by diverting the attention of management and key personnel. Third-party intellectual property disputes, including those initiated by patent assertion entities, could subject us to significant liabilities, require us to enter into royalty and licensing arrangements on unfavorable terms, prevent us from offering certain products, services or solutions, subject us to injunctions restricting our sales, cause severe disruptions to our operations or the markets in which we compete, or require us to satisfy indemnification commitments with our customers, including contractual provisions under various license arrangements and service agreements. In addition, we have incurred, and may in the future incur, significant costs in acquiring the necessary third-party intellectual property rights for use in our products, in some cases to fulfill contractual obligations with our customers. Any of these occurrences could significantly harm our business. We have not prevailed, and may not in the future prevail, in every lawsuit or dispute. For further information about specific litigation and proceedings, see the section titled “Legal Proceedings” contained in Part II, Item 8, Note 16 of our Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements of this report.", "prior_body": "We have been, are currently and may in the future be subject to claims, negotiations and complex, protracted litigation relating to disputes regarding the validity or alleged infringement of third-party intellectual property rights, including patent rights. Intellectual property disputes and litigation are typically costly and can be disruptive to our business operations by diverting the attention of management and key personnel. We may not prevail in every lawsuit or dispute. Third-party intellectual property disputes, including those initiated by patent assertion entities, could subject us to significant liabilities, require us to enter into royalty and licensing arrangements on unfavorable terms, prevent us from offering certain products or services, subject us to injunctions restricting our sales, cause severe disruptions to our operations or the markets in which we compete, or require us to satisfy indemnification commitments with our customers, including contractual provisions under various license arrangements and service agreements. In addition, we may incur significant costs in acquiring the necessary third-party intellectual property rights for use in our products, in some cases to fulfill contractual obligations with our customers. Any of these occurrences could significantly harm our business." }, { "status": "MODIFIED", "current_title": "We participate in rapidly evolving and intensely competitive markets, and, if we do not compete effectively, our operating results could suffer.", "prior_title": "The markets in which we participate are intensely competitive, and if we cannot continue to develop, acquire, market and offer new products and services or enhancements to existing products and services that meet customer requirements, our operating results could suffer.", "similarity_score": 0.457, "confidence": "low", "key_changes": [ "Reworded sentence: \"The markets for our products, services and solutions are rapidly evolving and intensely competitive.\"" ], "current_body": "The markets for our products, services and solutions are rapidly evolving and intensely competitive. We expect competition to continue to intensify. Our competitors range in size from diversified global companies with significant sales and research and development resources, broad brand awareness, long operating histories or access to large customer bases to small, specialized companies whose narrow focuses may allow them to be more effective in deploying technical, marketing and financial resources. Our competitors may develop products, services or solutions that are similar to ours or that achieve greater acceptance, may undertake more far-reaching and successful product development efforts or marketing campaigns, or may adopt more aggressive pricing policies. As a result, current and potential customers may select the products, services or solutions of our competitors. Further, our future success depends on our continued ability to effectively appeal to businesses and consumers. New industry standards, evolving distribution models, limited barriers to entry, short product life cycles, customer price sensitivity, global market conditions and the frequent entry of new products or competitors may create downward pressure on pricing and gross margins and adversely affect our renewal, upsell and cross-sell rates as well as our ability to attract new customers. In addition, we expect to face more competition as AI continues to be integrated into the markets in which we compete. Our competitors or other third parties may incorporate AI into their offerings more successfully than we do and achieve greater and faster adoption, which could impair our ability to compete effectively and adversely affect our business and financial results. Further, we expect the markets for standalone AI offerings to be highly competitive and rapidly evolving. For example, we face increasing competition from companies offering text-to-image generative AI technology that may compete directly with our own creative offerings. If we are not able to provide products, services and solutions that compete effectively, we could experience reduced sales and our business could be adversely affected. For additional information regarding our competition and the risks arising out of the competitive environment in which we operate, see the section titled “Competition” contained in Part I, Item 1 of this report.", "prior_body": "The markets for our products and services are characterized by intense competition, new industry standards, evolving distribution models, limited barriers to entry, new technology developments, short product life cycles, customer price sensitivity, global market conditions and frequent product introductions (including alternatives with limited functionality available at lower costs or free of charge). Any of these factors could create downward pressure on pricing and gross margins and could adversely affect our renewal and upsell and cross-sell rates, as well as our ability to attract new customers. Our future success will depend on our continued ability to enhance and integrate our existing products and services, introduce new products and services in a timely and cost-effective manner, meet changing customer expectations and needs, extend our core technology into new applications, and anticipate emerging standards, business models, software delivery methods and other technological developments. For example, consumers continue to migrate from personal computers to tablet and mobile devices and from desktop to the web. While we offer our products on a variety of platforms, if we cannot continue adapting our products to tablet and mobile devices or the web, or if our competitors can adapt their products more quickly than us, our business could be harmed. In addition, releases of new devices or operating systems may make it more difficult for our products to perform or may require significant cost to adapt our solutions. The potential costs and delays incurred as a result could harm our business. If we fail to anticipate or misjudge customers’ rapidly changing needs and expectations or adapt to emerging technological trends, our market share and results of operations could suffer. Furthermore, some of our competitors and potential competitors enjoy competitive advantages, such as greater financial, technical, sales, marketing and other resources, broader brand awareness and access to larger customer bases. As a result of these advantages, potential and current customers might select the products and services of our competitors, causing a loss of our market share. Our competitors, including large enterprises, may develop products, features or services that are similar to ours or that achieve greater acceptance, may undertake more far-reaching and successful product development efforts or marketing campaigns, or may adopt more aggressive pricing policies. For additional information regarding our competition and the risks arising out of the competitive environment in which we operate, see the section titled “Competition” contained in Part I, Item 1 of this report." } ] }