Roper Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:ROP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Neil Hunn: Yes. You’re right. We’ve obviously historically sourced all. But in my time here, I think one meaningful deal from private equity. One was from a small founder or founder, and that has been sort of the pod in which we fish. But we’re — that’s not exclusively where we have business development activities going on. We’ve always looked in public markets. We just haven’t found anything that’s been compelling from a value point of view yet. We’ll continue to look there. You could see us get a little bit earlier in the cycle and try to compete a little bit more with private equity sort of half a click earlier in the company’s life cycle. So when we did the Vertafore transaction and the Frontline transaction, many of our investors said, why didn’t you buy it when the first you bought it from a private equity firm, you bought it from bought it.

And so that’s something that you could see us explore in the right situations. But still, all that being said, the predominance of what we’re going to do is what we’ve done for the last 20 years, which is sort of lower risk of highly recurring software — application software businesses from private equity.

Allison Poliniak: Great. Thank you.

Operator: And our next question today comes from Brent Hewitt with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

Brent Hewitt : Hi, thank you. And good morning. You noted that your adjusted EPS calculation will include the fair value accounting and tax impact of Indicor. But why would you not include the minority interest contribution as well? Just wondering what is the logical downside not including that, shouldn’t it be a positive and growing contribution?

Jason Conley: Well, it’s a calculation that’s going to be based on many variables, right? It’s mainly an accounting exercise. We don’t think that it’s going to — we’d rather see the outcome when we do the exit. We think that’s the better reflection of what the economics are going to be. We feel really good about what that’s going to look like. We’ve worked with CD&R on a strategy there. They typically look at several multiples of return on investment, and that’s what we’re playing for upon exit.

Brent Hewitt: Okay. Great. That’s helpful. And then in terms of price contribution in Q4, what did that look like? And then also how much pricing is embedded in your 2023 guidance?

Neil Hunn: So price for us, I mean, it’s an important lever to our growth algorithm, not just for ’22 and ’23, but all prior years and all forward years. Teasing out specifically how much is price is a very, very difficult thing across our 27 companies and rolling it up to a number that is meaningful. And so we’re not going to share a specific number in that regard. I’ll tell you the pricing, the value capture that we have, given what we do, the criticality of what we do, we’ve always had pricing power and pricing value capture and there’s nothing different with that. Do you want to add anything to that, Jason? Perhaps, we go to the next question?

Operator: Our next question today comes from Brendan Luke with Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Brendan Luke: Good morning. Just wanted to take a quick look at macro, question here. I was wondering if you could offer any color on your exposure to construction end markets? And how that’s playing into your growth expectations for FY ’23. And I guess, specifically, I’d be curious around Deltek, ConstructConnect and Neptune as well.