Bentley (BSY) Q3 Earnings Report Preview: What To Look For

Infrastructure design software provider Bentley Systems (NASDAQ:BSY) will be reporting earnings tomorrow before market open. Here’s what to look for.

Bentley beat analysts’ revenue expectations by 1.6% last quarter, reporting revenues of $330.3 million, up 11.3% year on year. It was a strong quarter for the company, with an impressive beat of analysts’ EBITDA estimates and a narrow beat of analysts’ billings 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 11.3% year on year to $341.1 million, slowing from the 14.3% increase it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $0.24 per share.

The majority of analysts covering the company have 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 Q3 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Manhattan Associates delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 11.8%, beating analysts’ expectations by 1.3%, and Commvault Systems reported revenues up 16.1%, topping estimates by 5.6%. Manhattan Associates traded down 7.3% following the results while Commvault Systems was up 18.4%.

Read our full analysis of Manhattan Associates’s results here and Commvault Systems’s results here.

There has been positive sentiment among investors in the software-as-a-service segment, with share prices up 7% on average over the last month. Bentley is up 2.3% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $58.19 (compared to the current share price of $49.56).

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