Adobe’s financials are starting to sound like a Puff Daddy “All About the Benjamins” CD with a skip, playing the same 5 seconds of music over and over. Except for one thing: The numbers keep getting bigger.

Adobe earned record revenues of $429.5 million in 2004’s fourth quarter, compared to $358.6 million reported for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2003 and $403.7 million reported in the third quarter of fiscal 2004.

That would be a new record for a single quarter.

In its 2004 fiscal year, Adobe earned record revenues of $1.667 billion, compared to $1.295 billion in fiscal 2003.

That would be a new record for a single year.

Another item echoed from seemingly every financial report of the last three years: Acrobat’s a major driver of the company’s overall performance.

"Q4 was an outstanding finish to a remarkable year," The continued strength of Acrobat and our Creative Suite platform, combined with strong demand for our hobbyist offerings, resulted in record revenue for the quarter,” said Bruce Chizen, president and chief executive officer, in Adobe’s quarterly teleconference with reporters and financial analysts. "We also achieved more than $100 million in revenue and 50% year-over-year growth in our Intelligent Documents server business during the year.

"Based on the planned release of a succession of new products throughout fiscal 2005, as well as the large market opportunities in front of us, we are reaffirming our double-digit revenue growth target for fiscal 2005,” Chizen concluded.

Several pieces of Acrobat news came up in the call, which included Chizen, Mike Saviage, Vice President, Investor Relations; CFO Murray Demo; and Shantanu Narayan, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Products:

• Adobe remains on target to ship Acrobat 7 by the end of the month.
• In the fourth quarter, Acrobat desktop revenue added up to $110.6 million.
• Acrobat desktop revenue added up to $438.2 million for the year, which Narayan said pointed to the success of Adobe’s efforts to push PDF into enterprise and government worldwide
• Acrobat-related server products revenue added up to 29.3 million in the quarter.
• In the fourth quarter, Adobe inked 44 Acrobat enterprise server deals larger than $50,000, with an average size of $219,000.
• Major government deals for server installations include the Belgian Department of the Environment, adopting forms software; the Brazilian government’s health department, which bought Reader Extensions Servers and 2-D barcode solution to automate forms; two Japanese government agencies, who adopted LiveCycle servers for applications.
• Large corporate deals included Cingular Wireless, which bought LiveCycle software to create customized collateral documents for customers buying cell phones and services at 12,000 locations; Philips in Europe; Toshiba’s finance operation; and Helvetia Insurance in Switzerland.