Bentley Earnings: What To Look For From BSY

Infrastructure design software provider Bentley Systems (NASDAQ:BSY) will be reporting results tomorrow morning. Here’s what to expect.

Bentley missed analysts’ revenue expectations by 1.5% last quarter, reporting revenues of $335.2 million, up 9.3% year on year. It was a slower quarter for the company, with a slight miss of analysts’ billings estimates and EBITDA in line with analysts’ estimates.

Is Bentley a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free.

This quarter, analysts are expecting Bentley’s revenue to grow 12.8% year on year to $350.4 million, improving from the 8.3% increase it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $0.22 per share.

Analysts covering the company have generally reconfirmed their estimates over the last 30 days, suggesting they anticipate the business to stay the course heading into earnings. Bentley has missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates three times over the last two years.

Looking at Bentley’s peers in the software-as-a-service segment, some have already reported their Q4 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Alarm.com delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 7.1%, beating analysts’ expectations by 1.4%, and Manhattan Associates reported revenues up 7.4%, topping estimates by 0.9%. Alarm.com traded down 1.7% following the results while Manhattan Associates was also down 24.5%.

Read our full analysis of Alarm.com’s results here and Manhattan Associates’s results here.

Stocks, especially growth stocks where cash flows further in the future are more important to the story, have had a good 2024. An economic soft landing (so far), the start of the Fed's rate cutting campaign, and the election of Donald Trump were positives for the market, and while some of the software-as-a-service stocks have shown solid performance, the group has generally underpeformed, with share prices down 4.8% on average over the last month. Bentley is down 3% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $56.58 (compared to the current share price of $45.80).

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