Bentley Systems, Incorporated

Good morning and thank you for joining Bentley Systems Q3 2024 Results webcast. I'm Eric Boyer, Bentley's Investor Relations Officer. On the webcast today we have Bentley Systems Executive Chair Greg Bentley, Chief Executive Officer Nicholas Cummins, and Chief Financial Officer Verner André. This webcast includes forward-looking statements made as of November 7, 2024, regarding the future results of operations and financial position, business strategy and plans, and objectives for future operations of Bentley Systems, Inc. All such statements made in or contained during this webcast, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. This webcast will be available for replay on Bentley Systems Investor Relations website at .bentley.com on November 7, 2024. After our presentation, we'll conclude with Q&A. And with that, let me introduce the Executive Chair of Bentley Systems, Greg Bentley.

Good morning and thanks to each of you once again for your interest in .S.Y. Compared with the remit of CEO Nicholas and CFO Verner, who will follow today, my perspectives as Executive Chair by rights would tend more toward qualitative and longer-term considerations. The progress we're reporting for this inaugural quarter, after completion of our generational succession, underscores my confidence in raising our sights in these respects. Hopefully, you will have viewed these worthwhile and concise keynotes presented at our annual conference in Vancouver last month. And if not yet, please do follow the links here. In any case, I defer to Nicholas to summarize the directions and developments which he and his team shared, I thought, more effectively than ever. I likewise recommend the supporting Going Digital Award finalist project presentations each a compelling case story describing and quantifying how our digital advancements together are helping to surmount the infrastructure engineering resource capacity gap. My own role this year was in selecting the very deserving founders honorees for this year and recording presentations to explain why, which you can find here. 24Q3's progress toward our targeted ARR growth trajectory for the year goes beyond the commendable quantitative gains which Nicholas and Verner will cover. As we charted in this year's early going, as the proportions under E365 and then subject to annual floors and ceilings deliberately increase, -over-year ARR growth will naturally ramp up somewhat more throughout each calendar year. Usually now for multiple years, we and our enterprise accounts have constructively agreed to contain and exchange the potential extremes of their consumption volatility for a predictable and mutually satisfactory range of visibility. The purposeful advantage of this for us and investors is that in each successive quarter now, we benefit from greater visibility and linearity in ARR growth both within the quarter and over foreseeable future years. In effect, we have traded off some potential for quantitative upside extremes for greater qualitative continuity of our annual ARR growth. Balanced against this risk truncation in our traditional paid per user business is our new and promising but intrinsically lumpy asset analytics business. In asset analytics, we're paid annually per asset, but we've got to secure major enterprise procurements. Adding to asset analytics volatility, this is our priority for ongoing but less predictable programmatic acquisitions. In covering today my executive chair responsibility for capital allocation, I will come back shortly to review our uses of cash for such acquisitions. But to get there, we should start with our sources of cash flow also characterized by rather unique visibility. This shows BSY's operating profit performance over our four-year history as a public company. Because our management is held to improving margins on an annual basis, what's plotted for each quarter is the last 12 months adjusted operating income after stock-based compensation, as our majority share owning board regards SBC as fungible with cash compensation. Over this public lifetime, we have maintained a compounded annual growth rate of 15% in AOI less SBC subject to minor variance primarily early during the pandemic with unanticipated savings in travel and events. Our accounting profit visibility is an outlier compared to the volatility of our software peers and is bound to be ever more so by virtue of our consumption-oriented business model. Our visibility is because essentially we do not book revenues that we haven't billed annually in advance and the great majority of our revenue recognition is strictly on pace with consumption. Thus with subscriptions now 91% of our revenues and over 70% an increasing of our subscriptions revenue booked radically as if pre-606 and virtually multi-year bookings, our annual profit growth rate corresponds straightforwardly to our consistent ARR growth rate plus the proportionate rate of consistent annual expansion in margins. Last quarter I rather offhandedly said what you see is what we get about the direct-ish relationship between our operating profits and cash flows. Here's how this looks quantitatively over our public company history again accumulating the last 12 months through each quarter to abstract from seasonality. While we have experienced some temporary collections timing offsets as in 22Q4, our free cash flow has also tended to compound rather reliably. Of course in conventional terms of conversion rates free cash flow wouldn't be expected to exceed operating profit. That appears to be generally the case here only because for us operating profit is reckoned after the costs of non-cash SPC. For our majority share owning board cash flow could only be regarded as discretionarily free after setting aside an amount equal to stock-based compensation for equity purchases to offset what would otherwise be dilution as is in fact our intended regular practice at .S.Y. Not surprisingly here you see that our truly free cash flow or FCF less SPC tracks rather consistently with our operating profit. And indeed throughout our four years as a public company we have maintained a compounded annual growth rate in FCF less SPC of likewise 15%. This emphasis as much on consistency and sustainability and quality of earnings metrics as we are even further distinguished by visibility over volatility is an enduring objective and capability of .S.Y. And it happens that there is a reason to consider this trajectory of FCS less SPC to be currently relevant for our capital allocation. This metric has been highlighted to us as perhaps the most plausible valuation basis for a predictably growing and compounding company like ours. The immediate implication is for our almost 690 million dollars of convertible debt which will mature and need to be refinanced in January 2026 if not converted into about 11 million newly issued shares which are already included in our diluted share count at just over 64 dollars per share. So now it behooves us to factor into our capital planning the potential path of our stock price. If you research this I think you will find that if for the coming five quarters our FCF less SPC would continue to grow at this established 15% CAGR then our stock would crest the conversion price if its valuation multiple of FCF less SPC would merely be at least at the current median among our design software peers. So while conversion of the 2026 convertibles is legitimately possible of course we have judiciously prepared for potential refinancing by putting in place last month an improved and expanded new five-year syndicated bank credit facility with revolver capacity of 1.3 billion dollars plus further available 500 million dollar accordion. Our predictable and compounding annual cash flows supports debt capacity which enables us to be agile in responding to the rare opportunities for platform acquisitions such as of sequent and power line systems which continue to drive increasing investment returns. As you see our capital allocation since these platform acquisitions has prioritized de-levering to what is probably now near optimum leverage levels given our cash flow consistency. There is no platform acquisition in prospect but we think the headroom in the new facility prepares us amply should an opportunity arise. At all times our capital allocation priorities along with affording our modest dividend and the equity repurchases to offset stock-based compensation contemplate relatively consistent expenditures for smaller programmatic acquisitions. Here you see our public tenure programmatic acquisition expenditures smoothed on a trailing year basis through 24Q2. The pace had trailed off over the last year and a half primarily reflecting a change in our acquisition assessments and priorities coinciding with our generational succession. This is now fully signified by our acquisition during 24Q3 of Cesium which by the way serves to bring last 12 month expenditures back to our established range in very low nine figures annually. I couldn't be more pleased with the acquisition of Cesium. From their start Cesium has been our neighboring company in many respects. I leave to Nicholas and others to articulate as they did at our year and infrastructure 2024 conference the compounding technical and commercial synergies with our i-twin platform around 3D geospatial immersion for