Bentley Systems, Incorporated (NASDAQ:BSY) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 5 of 12

Joe Vruwink: First off, congrats to Keith and David on what have really been great careers and nothing but the best for both of you. India maybe seems like a good analogy or anecdote. This is a market that is spending a lot on infrastructure post stimulus. And you seem to be specifically seeing strength in your associated products in India around transportation. I guess my question would be, can we extend this into the U.S. So have you started to see an acceleration in new business aligned with the sectors farthest along in the IIJA deployment? And if this is so, is your kind of expectation for the upcoming year that new business growth likely broadens out across the portfolio as the scope of IIJA broadens out across different subsectors?

Greg Bentley: Joe, I think that described it pretty well. I don’t think it could be of the scope of increase of India. Remember, India was pretty much affected by the pandemic, but it’s come back way above pre-pandemic levels in India. We did see, we are seeing the increase from the IIJA. We began to see that, of course, during the third quarter. The fourth quarter in North America was not so much yet a further increase, but we are expecting that during 2023, just as you said, because the IIJA spending broadens out to include the other beyond roads and bridges, expanded budgets in infrastructure at large. But I’ll ask Nicholas if you’d like to add more.

Nicholas Cumins: Well, maybe a few words about India. First, it is the country where we see the most direct link between additional investment in infrastructure engineering software and the infrastructure plan. So it is the most advanced, and we can point to a number of projects where our software is being used and is directly funded by the National Infrastructure Pipeline, as it is called over there. India benefits from something else, which is there is a number of global accounts who are moving work to India, right, in order to solve for the capacity issue that they have in the rest of the world, they move work to India as a, let’s say, workbench extension if you want. But the way they move work over there is not just be cost effective, it’s really to tap into additional capacity that they don’t have.

And in that case, they actually gave them full responsibility, including product management. So with respect to the U.S. We have, let’s say, so consensual evidence that the usage pickup that we see in transportation, for example, is indeed related to IIJA, but we also know that it’s going to take time for the funding to flow from the federal to the state level infrastructure owners contractors. So this is going to be a tailwind for multiple years.

Joe Vruwink: Okay. That’s great. And then just to spend a bit of time on the resources side of the portfolio, which I think, you called out Leapfrog was one of the areas of strength. And also, at one point in time, kind of the E365 customers that were energy exposed, your EPC customers, that was a pretty big dilutive factor on net retention and ARR growth. Just wondering, in 2023, do you kind of expect that pent-up CapEx comes back online and so you’re able to gain back a lot of that loss if I can call it that ARR? And then what would kind of be your more specific outlook on resources and the Seequent side of the business?

Page 5 of 12