Autodesk Seeing Positive Signs in Infrastructure Spending

Autodesk (ADSK) released their Q1 2010 results yesterday showing revenues of $426 million, down 29 percent from Q1 2009 but meeting guidance. Carl Bass, CEO, in his call with analysts had a few interesting comments that might indicate that the economy is bottoming out. While many areas of the business are still in decline, the rate has somewhat slowed. In addition, with regard to leveraging stimulus money coming from the U.S. as well as other countries around the world, he had this to say:

So our government business has done considerably better than the rest of the business, and specifically as you look at things like stimulus packages, you are seeing all kinds of government agencies spending. You know, we are seeing it on infrastructure projects we’ve heard a lot about. But you know, people forget that extends to lots of buildings, so it’s not just the roads and bridges and damns—it’s also ports and airports and lots of government-owned buildings.

I would say what we are doing is we are trying to put our net in the stream of money coming out of there. It’s coming out of the government at a faster rate than it ever has before.

And as local and state government are considered the traditional geospatial markets, this may portend to be good news for the health of overall location technology industry. Still, Bass was cautious in other statements related to license renewal, another indicator of industry vigor and employment:

I think when you look at renewal, and we never gave specific numbers, but I think you—we are seeing a decline in our renewals. A lot of it is just tied to—unlike other companies whose subscription or maintenance programs are tied to the enterprise, ours is tied to the number of seats and with less engineers, architects, and designers working at certain firms, they are not seeing the need to upgrade 100%, so we have a fair number of renewals in which it looks like it’s less than 100 but that’s just because 100 engineers have become 90 engineers or 80 engineers during the downturn.

On the whole, Bass was less somber than the report he gave during the last quarterly analyst call. His report contained measured optimism but it must have buoyed the analysts as the stock was up 15% in after hours trading yesterday.