AUTODESK, INC. (ADSK): what the price requires
At today's price, AUTODESK, INC. (ADSK) is priced for +29.8% growth. boothcheck doesn't publish a fair value or a price target; it shows what the price assumes, so you can judge whether that bar is too high.
Generated: 2026-07-14 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/ADSK
Headline
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Ticker | ADSK |
| Company | AUTODESK, INC. |
| Current price | $211.03/sh |
What The Price Requires (Inversion)
The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Inversion basis | whole-company |
| Operating margin needed | 7.1% |
| Operating margin today | 23.5% |
| Margin compression implied | -16.4pp |
| Implied growth | 29.8% |
| Multiple paid | 26x operating income |
The operating-margin requirement is derived from the framework's value band at year 9, a separately labeled basis from the headline growth/duration solve.
Solve inputs: computed at a 10.6% cost of capital with 4% terminal growth over a 5-year stage; each 1pp of cost of capital moves the implied operating-profit growth ~5.8pp.
Reconcile: at the x-ray's 9.3% required return this reads ~21.9%/yr; the models below use their own rates.
How unusual the bet is: elevated
| Reference | Value |
|---|---|
| vs own history | +0.67σ |
| cohort percentile (of 177 peers) | 46 |
| sustained it ~5 years at this level | 27% |
| implied end-window share | 0% |
Valuation X-Ray
The price is justified by relative-multiple and growth-DCF; asset-based/earnings-power land below the price.
How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.
| Family | Median price/FV | Models | Reads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asset | 2.83x | 5 | expensive |
| Earnings | 2.06x | 5 | expensive |
| Relative | 0.82x | 5 | justifies |
| Growth | 0.69x | 3 | justifies |
Families that justify the price: Relative, Growth Families that call it expensive: Asset, Earnings
The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 8.8%); the inversion above states its own rate.
Per-Model Detail (n=18)
| Model | Family | FV | Price/FV | Applicable | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DCF Perpetual Growth | Growth | $453.50 | 0.47x | yes | FCF base $3.1B, growth 18% (input: historical growth), terminal g 4.0%, WACC 8.8%, 6yr projection |
| DCF Exit Multiple | Growth | $305.89 | 0.69x | yes | Exit EV/EBITDA: 19.5x / 21.5x / 23.5x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull), 6yr |
| Relative Valuation | Relative | $265.52 | 0.79x | yes | P/E 35x (static sector reference · 2026-04), scenarios: 28.7x / 35.0x / 41.3x (bear / base = reference held flat / bull), EV/EBITDA 25x |
| Simple DDM | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Two-Stage DDM | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Simple Excess Return | Asset | $74.60 | 2.83x | yes | BV/sh $15.04, ROE (TTM) 45.9%, ke 9.3% |
| Two-Stage Excess Return | Asset | $194.70 | 1.08x | yes | 5yr excess ROE then converge to ke=9.3% |
| Discounted Future Market Cap | Growth | $226.74 | 0.93x | yes | Rev $7.5B, growth 18% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 4.9x / 6.0x / 7.0x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 12x) |
| Peter Lynch Fair Value | Relative | $239.75 | 0.88x | yes | EPS $6.85, growth 35% (input: historical EPS growth), PEG=0.87 (Undervalued) |
| Margin Trajectory | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Earnings Power Value | Earnings | $55.72 | 3.79x | yes | Normalized EBIT (5y avg op income, one-time charges added back) $1.27B × (1−18%) / WACC 8.8% → EPV (no growth) |
| Residual Income | Asset | $119.80 | 1.76x | yes | BV $15.04 + 5yr PV of (ROE (TTM) 45.9% − Kₑ 9.3%) × BV; BV grows 8.8%/yr |
| Graham Number | Asset | $48.15 | 4.38x | yes | √(22.5 × EPS $6.85 × BVPS $15.04) — Graham's conservative floor |
| EV/EBITDA Relative | Relative | $245.43 | 0.86x | yes | EBITDA $2.08B × sector EV/EBITDA 25.0x |
| FCF Yield | Earnings | $138.84 | 1.52x | yes | FCF $2729.0M / Kₑ 9.3% — zero-growth perpetuity |
| SBC-Adj FCF Yield | Earnings | $102.48 | 2.06x | yes | SBC-adj FCF $2.02B (FCF $2.73B − SBC $0.71B) capitalized at Kₑ |
| Ben Graham Formula | Earnings | $221.03 | 0.95x | yes | EPS $6.85 × (8.5 + 2×15.0%) × (4.4 / 5.3%) |
| ROIC-Justified P/B | Asset | $23.39 | 9.02x | yes | BV $15.04 × (ROIC 13.6% / WACC 8.8%) |
| P/Sales Sector | Relative | $283.28 | 0.74x | yes | Revenue $7.51B × sector P/S 8.0x |
| PEG Fair Value | Relative | $256.88 | 0.82x | yes | EPS $6.85 × (PEG 1.5 × growth 25.0% (input: historical EPS growth)) → PE 37.5x |
| Earnings Yield | Earnings | $74.05 | 2.85x | yes | EPS $6.85 / required return 9.3% (Rf 4.3% + ERP 5.0%) |
| Funds From Operations Multiple | Relative | — | — | no | — |
| Clinical Phase NPV | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Merton | Asset | — | — | no | — |
| V5 Mechanical | — | — | — | no | — |
Solvency
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Net cash | $424.0m |
| Net debt / NOPAT (after-tax) | -0.31x (net cash) |
| Net debt / operating income (pre-tax) | -0.25x (net cash) |
| Interest coverage | 21.1x |
| Share count CAGR (buyback) | -0.8% |
| Burning cash | no |
Bullet Takeaways
- Autodesk makes the design software that architects, engineers, and manufacturers run on, AutoCAD, Revit, Fusion, a subscription franchise so embedded in professional workflows that it earns a return on equity near 46% on a small capital base.
- The counterintuitive feature is that reported numbers are noisy by design: Autodesk is shifting how it bills and transacts with customers, which scrambles the year-over-year comparisons even as the underlying recurring base keeps compounding.
- The defining catalyst is activist pressure: Starboard Value is pushing for higher margins, lower costs, and leadership change, so the next year is as much about who runs the company and how efficiently as about end-market demand.
Bull Case
The most counterintuitive thing about Autodesk is that its reported financials understate how good the business actually is, because the company is mid-transition in how it bills. Autodesk has been moving customers and channel partners onto a new transaction model and shifting billing terms, which the filing notes drives "a change in accounts receivable due to the growth in billings" and timing shifts between quarters. Those mechanics make the headline growth and cash-flow lines lumpy, but underneath them sits a subscription franchise with a return on equity near 46% and free cash flow of roughly $2.7 billion. The bull case starts with seeing past the accounting noise to the recurring economics it obscures.
The moat is the standard a profession is built on. AutoCAD, Revit, and the broader Autodesk suite are the file formats and tools that architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing run on, and switching away means retraining staff, re-tooling workflows, and risking incompatibility with everyone else in the supply chain who uses the same software. That is why Autodesk converts so much revenue into cash at such high margins: once it is the design layer for a firm, it is extraordinarily sticky. The company is layering AI into that position, committing $350 million to train future designers on its tools, which is as much a moat-deepening move, getting the next generation fluent in Autodesk, as it is goodwill.
The financial profile is a clean compounder's. Autodesk carries net cash, covers interest more than twenty times over, generates abundant free cash flow, and retires stock. With a 46% return on equity and minimal capital needs, almost every dollar of profit is available to return or reinvest. And here the activist is a tailwind, not just a risk: Starboard's pressure to lift margins and cut costs targets the one genuine weakness in an otherwise excellent business, its operating margin running below where best-in-class software peers sit. If that gap closes, the same revenue produces materially more profit. The bull case is a dominant, sticky design-software franchise whose reported margins have room to rise and whose accounting transition is masking, not undermining, the underlying compounding.
Bear Case
The uncomfortable truth a holder has to sit with is the one the activist has made public: Autodesk has been a worse-run business than its franchise deserves, and the price already assumes that gets fixed. Starboard Value is pressuring the company to improve operations, cut costs, lift margins, and replace the CEO, citing past underperformance and what it characterizes as questionable practices. An activist campaign of that intensity is not noise; it is an outside investor asserting that management has left money on the table, and the bull case for margin expansion is, read honestly, a concession that the margins should already be higher. If the board resists or the turnaround stalls, the efficiency gains the price embeds may not arrive.
The demand side is decelerating into the bet. Autodesk's core sells into architecture, engineering, and construction, end markets tied to real-estate and infrastructure activity that softens when financing costs rise, and the company's own commentary acknowledges a decelerating core business even as it leans into AI. The accounting transition compounds the difficulty of reading through: the shift in billing and transaction models, which the filing repeatedly flags as a source of "variability in the comparison," makes it genuinely hard for an outside investor to know whether underlying demand is accelerating or fading beneath the reported numbers. Opacity is its own risk when you are paying a premium price.
And the price is a premium. At today's level the market is paying about 24 times company-wide operating income, which implies roughly 27% annual operating-profit growth for five years, a pace only about 31% of comparable fast-growers sustained even that long. The asset-value and earnings-power methods both call the stock expensive; only the peer-multiple and forward-growth lenses reach it. So the bear case does not need the franchise to break. It needs only the margin expansion to disappoint, or the core to keep decelerating, for a stock priced on a fast-growth, margin-fixing thesis to re-rate toward where the value methods, which credit neither, actually sit.
Valuation
The price asks for a lot, and the inversion makes the demand explicit. At $193.70 (as of June 27, 2026) the market is paying about 24 times company-wide operating income, which implies operating profit compounding at roughly 27% a year for five years. That pace is within what Autodesk has recently delivered, so the stretch is its persistence, and the historical base rate is that only about 31% of comparable fast-growers sustained that level for five years. Notably, the multiple still sits in the lower half of the software peer range, so the premium is high in absolute terms but not extreme relative to other quality software names, which is part of why the activist sees room to close a margin and valuation gap.
The families of methods split the way they do for a high-return software franchise priced on growth. The asset-value methods, anchored on a tiny book value of about $15.04 a share against a 46% return on equity, call the stock expensive, but that lens badly understates a business whose real asset is the installed base, not the balance sheet. The earnings-power method also sits below the price. The peer-multiple and forward-growth lenses reach it, crediting the recurring revenue and the cash flow, roughly $2.7 billion of it, that the static methods discount. So the pattern is the familiar one: only the growth-and-peer methods justify the price, which means the valuation rests on continued mid-teens-plus revenue growth and, crucially, on the margin expansion the activist is demanding actually happening.
Solvency is a non-issue and reinforces the quality read. Autodesk carries net cash, covers interest more than twenty times, is not burning cash, and retires stock steadily. There is no financial fragility to bound against, so the downside is governed entirely by the growth-and-margin question rather than by the balance sheet. The unusual wrinkle here is that part of the bull case, higher margins, is also part of the bear case, that the margins are too low today, so the decisive variable is execution under activist pressure. The price is built on Autodesk both growing and getting more efficient; the value methods say it has little cushion if it does only one, and none if it does neither.
Catalysts
The dominant catalyst is the Starboard Value campaign. The activist is pressuring Autodesk to improve operations, reduce costs, expand margins, and replace the CEO, citing past underperformance. Activist situations move stocks through governance outcomes as much as fundamentals, so board composition, any management change, and a credible margin-improvement plan are the events most likely to re-rate the shares in either direction over the next year.
The operating catalyst is the interaction of AI and a decelerating core. Autodesk is expanding its AI capabilities and committed $350 million to train future designers, a long-term moat-and-demand investment, even as it acknowledges deceleration in the core business. Because the company is mid-transition on its billing and transaction model, the reported growth and cash-flow lines are noisy, so the clearest signals are recurring-revenue trends and any sign that AI features are lifting attach rates or pricing rather than just adding cost.
Sentiment is constructive. The covering analysts lean Buy, with average targets set well above the current price, reflecting confidence that the franchise plus activist-driven efficiency gains justify a higher value. The gap between those targets and the market price is itself the situation: the street sees the same margin-expansion opportunity Starboard does, and the stock's path depends on whether management delivers it, so the catalysts to watch are the activist outcome and the next few prints of recurring-revenue growth as the billing transition normalizes.
Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)
Autodesk (consolidated) (reported)
- PTC (PTC Inc.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- BSY (BENTLEY SYSTEMS, INCORPORATED)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- CDNS (CADENCE DESIGN SYSTEMS, INC.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- SNPS (SYNOPSYS INC)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- VEEV (Veeva Systems Inc.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- GWRE (Guidewire Software, Inc.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- INTU (INTUIT INC.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- NOW (ServiceNow, Inc.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
Methodology Note
- Priced-in inversion: the valuation is inverted on the current price to recover the operating-income growth, duration, and steady-state margin the price embeds (ROE for financials, FFO growth for REITs).
- Valuation x-ray: the valuation models, grouped into four families (asset, earnings, relative, growth). Each model is expressed as a price/FV ratio (distance from price), not a point fair-value estimate. The spread across families is the disagreement.
- Solvency: net cash/debt, net-debt-to-NOPAT, interest coverage, and share-count CAGR from EDGAR financials (net debt / FFO and fixed-charge coverage for REITs; regulatory-capital framing for financials).
- Peer cohorts: per-segment comparables with deep-linkable SEC filing citations.
Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.
Sources
Starboard Value campaign, 2026 · company commentary, 2026 · analyst consensus, 2026