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 design software giant Adobe will spend 20 billion US dollars to acquire the start-up company Figma, thereby greatly improving its online collaboration capabilities. Half of the deal will be paid in cash and the other half in stock.

　　This acquisition price corresponds to Figma's price-to-sales ratio of 50 times. To support such a high valuation, it is obvious that Adobe has some reality-distorting capabilities.

　　It was the largest deal under Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at the helm. The $145 billion company typically makes smaller acquisitions and develops new and improved existing products internally. But the 10-year-old Figma has successfully cracked a new model that allows multiple users to view each other's designs and edit documents in real time, thus attracting heavyweight customers such as Microsoft. Figma has also publicly criticized Adobe: do not use Adobe XD to sync to the cloud.

　　However, the deal may indeed be "revolutionary", as Narayan said in the statement. To achieve this, Adobe had to fully integrate its own software with Figma's technology in order to significantly increase revenue. As things stand, Figma is on track to double its revenue to $400 million this year. Even if it doubles again in 2023, it will only be 4% of the $20 billion purchase price, corresponding to a price-to-sales ratio of 25 times.

　　Such a high price-to-sales ratio can even be called a "market-to-dream ratio", which fully shows that Narayan has overdrawn the imagination of the capital market. Adobe had lost more than a third of its value this year before announcing its acquisition of Figma, amid a sell-off in technology stocks in both public and private markets. Meanwhile, Figma's valuation has doubled from its June 2021 valuation of $10 billion, with an eye-popping price-to-sales ratio. Still, Adobe thinks it's worth betting on it.

　　But Adobe's investors have a hard time sharing such imaginations. On the day the company reported a 13% year-over-year increase in quarterly revenue, its stock price plunged 16%, wiping another $27 billion off its market value.

　　It seems that breaking conventions is the norm for artists, but it is not very suitable for the financial circle.