Bentley held their first annual corporate update call this morning, an unusual move for a privately-held company. The roundup of performance news, coupled with the release of their annual report, is a similar format to publicly traded companies, but without the deep scrutiny of financial performance metrics.
The company had strong performance this past year with $476M in revenue and a 6% growth rate. The global reach of the company includes 3,000 employees in 45 countries, with customers in 150 countries. Revenue from the U.S. is 40% overall, with strong growth in China and India. Growth through acquisition continues to be a strong driver, but the company also reinvests 20% of profits in research and development, incurring no net debt.
The buy-back of the former Intergraph stock holdings was one element of interest in the call, with details that the company had secured a $310M credit line in order to buy back $198 million in shares that the private equity firm still held, having kept this out of the Hexagon purchase of Intergraph. The resulting transaction means that the Bentley family now owns 85% of the company equity. Despite this transaction, the company has liquidity of more than $100M.
In the area of performance metrics, software use logs were highlighted as a means to gauge use and interest in their technology as well as the health of the firms that license their technology. Over the past two years, they have seen a 20% increase in the hours logged with their software, indicating both a greater utilization of their tools and an increased workload from their customers.
The software subscription model was highlighted as a core strength of their performance, because with their enterprise software licenses making up a majority of their software revenue they aren’t as dependent on selling boxes of software to meet revenue targets. A unique new licensing was announced today that provides a means for customers to balance their portfolio of software, and eliminate software depreciation. SELECT subscribers can trade in under-utilized software annually for a new combination of software that meets their needs as their business changes. The software investment protection plan is designed to ensure perpetual value and to see the software used rather than depreciated.
On the interoperability front, the company discussed their commitment to interoperability, and released the iWare Apps Site for Interoperability site that takes a product-by-product approach with free software applications and plug-ins that preserve workflow between competitor products. First out of the gate are connectors to Autodesk’s Revit products that allow for the use of Bentley’s i-model packaged format. Bentley is encouraging their customers to take a close look at the benefits of more interoperable workflows, and to demand this functionality from all software vendors in the space.
Bentley also announced the acquisition of SACS, a leading offshore structural analysis software vendor active in both the oil and gas and wind power generation industries. SACS from Engineering Dynamics has been around for 38 years, uniquely covering the entire lifecycle of these offshore structures, with integrated analysis tools that help designers plan for the yaw and bend of blades and towers in wind towers as well as the force of ocean waves both during engineering and operations.
The conference call provided a roundup and summary of many of the elements that are contained in the annual report, as well as a validation of the strength of the overall worldwide AECO market that is rebounding nicely from the global downturn.
