Bentley Systems Inc., an international purveyor of a broad suite of software for design and management of infrastructure that gets three quarters of its revenue from subscriptions, maintained the same 8% revenue growth rate, in constant currency—an accounting method that filters out exchange rate fluctuation—that it reported the previous two years.
CEO Greg Bentley says the company is budgeting for 6% internal growth this year, and also expects to make acquisitions.
The 2013 performance self-assessment came during an April 16 analysts’ briefing about the Exton-Pa.-based company. During the call CEO Bentley described the 2013 annual report, which has not yet been released.
The company is privately held and is under no regulatory obligation to release annual reports, but for the last four years it has offered its own version of the practice anyway, with accounting based on generally accepted accounting principles.
Bentley reported that in the past five years the company has invested $850 million in R&D and acquisitions. During the same period company “insiders”—family and colleagues—have repurchased outstanding stock and seen their stake grow to 98% from 58%.
With its software-as-a-service model, the company can capture metrics on subscriber log-ins by software title and geographic location, but Bentley says it does not yet track the data with enough granularity to gauge the degree of users’ sophistication in applying the tools or the “organizational learning” that can be inferred.
“We’re beginning to accumulate data in that regard, but not sufficient yet to draw conclusions,” Bentley says.
Geographically, the log-in data shows strong 2013 organic growth in use of Bentley software in the BRICS countries (Brazil, Rusisia, India and China), South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, the Middle East and the UK, with 63% of the company’s revenue now coming from non-US sources, Bentley says.
