Adobe Inc.

When John Warnock and Charles Geschke quit their jobs at Xerox in 1982 to perfect their ‘PostScript’ page description language, it's unlikely they realized a descendent of their product would be still used everywhere forty years later. PDF, the eventual successor they released in 1992, is now so widespread as to be an industry standard across many fields. With other major products like Photoshop, Adobe enjoyed revenues of nearly $13 billion in 2020, largely driven by their digital media segment.

Adobe’s PostScript allowed computers to print in different fonts for the first time, and the innovative solution won them a five year contract with Apple. In 1989, Adobe launched its Photoshop picture-editing program, another highly successful product. Building on these early victories in the 1990s, Adobe embarked on a string of acquisitions, including the webpage video player Flash. Their taste for high-profile acquisitions has continued, with 2018 seeing the acquisition of Magento, a well-known eCommerce platform, and 2020 the project management software Workfront.

Since 2010, Adobe has switched from a model of paid, CD-based products to a subscription model which has allowed the company greater flexibility and to see revenues grow significantly, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) products now contributing the larger part of overall revenue. Despite share price wobbles during the dot-com crisis and in 2008, Adobe has consistently retained its stable profitability.

Adobe went public in 1986, listing on the NASDAQ exchange at $11 per share. As a constituent stock of the S&P500 index, Adobe is very popular with institutional investors, the three largest of which are Vanguard, Blackrock, and Fidelity.