Bentley Systems, Incorporated (BSY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So good morning or good afternoon, everyone. I hope you can hear us okay. I'd like to first say, welcome to everyone who's dialed in -- dialing in into this webcast presentation. I'm very, very happy that I have the pleasure of introducing Mr. Carey Mann, who's heading the Investor Relationship function at Bentley Systems. Carey, thank you so much that you're with us today.

Yes, thank you.

Awesome. So Carey, just it is your first time, we just talked about the virtual experiences and the fact that the whole experience as a public company for you has been virtually. So you might have had opportunity to meet some of the investors already and hopefully in person very, very soon. But considering we are virtual and officially in Europe, this is our flagship U.K. thematic conference, can you just -- for people that are dialing in today from that part and might not be familiar with Bentley Systems as much as some of the other names who have been public for a longer period of time, just give us a little bit of an introduction into the company and maybe its history and your journey to becoming public entity towards the end of last year?

Yes. First I'll start by just giving you a little bit of background on me, and I think I'm in a good position to answer that question because I've been at Bentley for a long time. I'm not really from the IR world. I was more from the business side. Up until shortly after the IPO, I was actually our Chief Marketing Officer. And I've had other roles, more on the technical solutions side, where for a period of time I drove our acquisition strategy. So Bentley has its genesis back in the early '80s when Keith Bentley realized that he could put what had previously been the workstation-based solution in Unix onto a personal computer to automate engineering modeling. And Bentley started, like Autodesk, as a modeling company. Its applications were used by Intergraph as basically the operating system for all of its applications for engineering and architecture and mapping. And at one point, all of the maps in the world or most of the maps in the world were produced with MicroStation. The company's evolved differently, though. Once Bentley assumed its own distribution of MicroStation, it began to build a portfolio of applications. And it really became a comprehensive provider of all types of applications for every infrastructure discipline that would participate in an infrastructure project. So civil engineering, geotechnical engineering, structural engineering, mapping, you name it. That brought the company into a real heterogeneous kind of environment, and our users started to demand information management so that they could manage the information on the projects as well as the workflows amongst the teams. And in an infrastructure project, they can last many, many years. So it's very typical that a project will last 5 to 8 or -- years or longer. So managing that data is important. It can also be managed across multiple companies that are working in joint ventures and over the life cycle of the assets. So it becomes more of an enterprise, mission-critical offering for these companies. That -- the way our portfolio developed also drove how we focused our business, and we -- our users wanted us to -- wanted a direct relationship. So what initially has started as a channel strategy for us, we very quickly shifted to offering a direct engagement model. And that tended to concentrate our business in the larger projects. And if you look at our S-1 and other materials, our revenues tend to be concentrated at what we would conceptually call the upper part of the pyramid. Unlike our competitor, Autodesk, for example, who relied heavily on the channel and might have been more concentrated in the mid- -- or small to mid- and medium businesses. So Bentley grew over time. And we actually made a couple of attempts to going public earlier, and the markets just weren't right. We seemed to be snakebit on our timing in the first couple of times. We were going public actually to raise money. We've always been very profitable. We've always been growing at a steady clip, and we've had increasing operating margins and great cash flow. Going public is really something that the Bentley family had promised to all of the colleagues who participated in employee-based equity programs. It was a key part of how the company was operated. And it was always contemplated at one point that the company would create liquidity. Since we hadn't gone public a few years ago, we created a Private NASDAQ Market with Siemens, where Siemens would repurchase shares to provide some liquidity for colleagues and retirees. But recently, with the strange market and who could have predicted the world of COVID we would be living in and that it would actually be a good time for tech companies to -- like Bentley to go public. So we took advantage of that, and we went public. We did a follow-on offering. We did a -- we also did a convertible offering. And here we are, a public company. And it's created the liquidity for all of the people that have historically been working at Bentley or retired. And it's created an opportunity for investors to participate in our journey going forward.

That's extremely helpful. And I think it makes a lot of sense from a very pragmatic approach to both the business, the development of this business from one product to becoming a platform and then also expanding the market reach into other areas. And on that note, if you think about your business today, I feel it's one of the better diversified. It does have the common thread of infrastructure. Infrastructure touches many other -- many areas, right? We talk about the public utilities. We talk about roads and bridges and the public works. And we -- on the other side, we talk about the commercial side and the industrial side of the infrastructure. Can you maybe just expand a little bit on that and kind of think about what are the different drivers that you -- the way you have balanced your business so far and the different drivers that are at work at each of those kind of end markets, how you're dealing with, one, public entities; the other one, maybe oil and gas or whatever might be an end customer, and on the other side, you have also some kind of process industries, commercial facilities and stuff?

Yes. I'd like to start by framing your comment where it touches on everything. An ex-colleague, Bentley colleague, Buddy Cleveland, who ran our software group for the longest time, he had a great way of putting it. He said, "Bentley provides software for the human interface to the planet." And if you think of how all of our infrastructure, anything that is built by man, above and below ground that interfaces with the planet, that's really what we're providing software to do. When you boil that down to sectors, our lead sector, of course, is what we call public works and utilities. Bentley Software is ubiquitous in the U.S. DOTs. 46 of them use our software to design the U.S.' roads, bridges and -- as well as to maintain it over their life cycle. We're very active in rail, including in the U.K. We've been involved in most of the major rail projects in the U.K., including now High Speed 2. In the past, Crossrail, Network Rail. And so that's a very important sector to us. And water, as a key component of the utility space, is key. We see a lot of challenges in water that need to be addressed. Most of the water systems in North America are aging well beyond their useful life, right? It's typical -- it's not atypical that they're 40, 50 years past their designed operating life. And that sector represents the majority of our business, over 70%. I would also include electric utilities and communications. And we compete against different people, right? So in that space, we're the predominant player. And to a lesser extent, you'll see people like Autodesk and others. Autodesk's main market would be considered what we call vertical infrastructure, which would be commercial and facilities. Our products are also used there quite extensively. One of our key differentiators is comprehensiveness of our portfolio. So it's -- you have to look beyond maybe the main design product that might be used in the project and look at all the other disciplines that would participate. We have a very strong portfolio within geotechnical and structural engineering, where we basically are the lead vendor. And those tend to be used extensively in those kinds of projects. And then in the industrial space, oil and gas and resources, that are -- there, we would compete against people like AVEVA and Hexagon, although our offerings are really, in many instances, complementary rather than competitive. And we'll be broadening our reach there, hopefully, when we close the Seequent acquisition, which is -- has a heavy history in the mining and many of those sectors as well as applicability across our main markets.

That's extremely helpful. And you touched on a few points again that I'd like to potentially expand on a little bit, especially in light of the increased focus on the ESG investing and the fact that a lot of our investors who are dialing in today are interested in the thematic. On that note, when I look at the -- when I listen to you and the fact that we're talking about the software that helps interact with the planet as you called it or environment and infrastructure being the link between us and the environment and the planet, there is a natural cohesion that you're building in between the 2. I really thought that your CEO, Greg, did a good job on the last quarterly call when he started kind of explaining the ESG angle and especially Bentley's take on that. So maybe for those who haven't had the opportunity to participate in that or aren't as aware of Bentley's ESG efforts, could you just kind of summarize his main points on the fact that he's talking about the environmental and the other aspects of that, but he also kind of tries to expand it and say, "Well, Bentley is a little bit unique." He talks about the ESDG as well. So what -- when investors look at that, what would they think about?

Yes. So we tend to look at what we're doing with ESG as maybe being conceptually organized into 2 areas: One, we would call the footprint, and the other we would call the handprint. And we're working very systematically, as all investors would expect, on ESG. But it's ironic because it's always been part of our DNA. Our original tagline as a company, we updated it 6 or 7 years ago, and maybe we shouldn't have, but we changed it to advancing infrastructure. But our tagline for the longest time was sustaining infrastructure. And what we meant by sustaining was sustaining the economies, sustaining the environment and sustaining the engineering professions. And so we are engaged with -- currently with Solebury Trout, a firm that works closely with us on IR and has an ESG practice, to systematically look at all of these footprint issues as we get ready for initiation of rating agency coverage. And our story, we were quite surprised as we went through and did our inventory of these handprint issues -- footprint issues that we were actually doing a very good job. For us, it's more about organizing and articulating what we're doing, and we think that's important. But I think Greg's fundamental point is that those things, good governance, that's to be expected, and we should do those things, and we should be systematic about looking at them. But where Bentley is really strong is its impact in the world. Greg has always made the point that their -- this infrastructure to the planet is -- this interface to the planet is what is going to determine whether we're good stewards of the environment or not. The human race and economies are going to develop infrastructure. So not a question of whether we develop infrastructure, it's a question of how we do it. How can we do it in the most sustainable way? How can we make it more resilient? How can we make it more sustainable? How can we give better return on the investment to all of the stakeholders who are investing in infrastructure? And we really believe strongly that the engineering community has not just a large role to play, but maybe the most important role. And these are the people that are going to solve that problem. We're in a unique situation as a company because we get to see projects all over the world. We're global. We see the best practices. We see the companies that are really innovating and doing amazing things. And so it's not just about are we building the wind farm? But when we're doing traditional types of infrastructure, are we doing it in the right way? Are we building our roads to make sure we make the best use of materials, that these assets are going to last as long as they possibly can so that we don't have to reconstruct them and have the environmental impact. So telling those stories is really what Greg means by that letter and doing it in the context of the UN goals for sustainability. And so we're excited to share those stories, and we're really -- we think we can share the best practices. And we think we have a role in terms of what we're seeing and where we're placing the community to facilitate that conversation amongst engineering professionals and to share best practices and to elevate what the community collectively can do.

That makes a lot of sense. And you said, if you look at engineers, they're effectively carving out a new route. They're carving out a new landscape, the way we inherited it. And your -- I guess, from what I've gathered from your kind of important messages, you help to share the best practices in order for that footprint to be done in the best possible way, in the most efficient possible way, that potentially takes all the stakeholders into equation, not just profits effectively, right?

Yes. And it also -- it's both in terms of sharing best practices, but also making sure that the tools support the way the work needs to be done, if they need to be able to measure carbon or do -- look at different scenarios where you're going to optimize for higher consumption versus the design of a roof structure. For example, in an airport, you may be trading off structure versus thermal performance and those kinds of issues. So the...

On that note, we look -- we've seen the -- I think your Year in Infrastructure Conference is a huge event that everyone should kind of try to log in, and I don't know how many people have. But a big deliverable that comes out of it is also your infrastructure kind of yearbook that kind of shows the use cases and the examples. And like, we've had the opportunity to review most of that. And it's quite striking to see the examples of how people use your tools. But maybe, again, for the benefit of people who are not familiar with it, what would be like 1 or 2 of your favorite examples that showcase it, especially in light of the tools that you have in your portfolio. And could be the tool that's been there for decades. Or it could be something that's kind of a little bit more recent, and you're starting to see the uptake more recently.

Yes. One of the strengths of our portfolio is that it's just so comprehensive. One of the recent trends that has happened is the next generation of serving, right? It used to be that when you start a new project, typically, even though you would hope to have the as-built condition meticulously maintained, it's often hasn't been the case. So companies would typically go ahead and resurvey a site to get ready to do a new project. So one of the key technologies that's emerged in the last few years has been what we call reality model. And in reality modeling, you can fly drones and capture photography. And then that photography is, through a photogrammetric process, converted into what's called a mesh. And this mesh is highly, highly accurate. It's not just -- and you can superimpose, of course, the imagery. So it's photorealistic. So it's not just a pretty picture, it's not just a 3D model, it's engineering accurate. And so that's been one of the innovations that has been highly interested. It's a key building block for Digital Twins and for many stages of the life cycle, not just the initial survey. Another exciting new technology is what we call 4D construction, where you model and sequence how the structure is going to be built. So you can imagine looking at a football stadium in Europe that's going to be built. And you're wearing a Hololens, and you're actually seeing the building being built in the front of your eyes and relating that to your schedule. So that's a very important technology that's key to being able to visualize and understand your schedule in a way that's very different than the way people might have looked at that in the past.

That's helpful. And what you described just now is a clear connection between the digital world that you're enabling via your technology set, solutions and the real world, which is done via the Digital Twin. So maybe if we just focus on that for a minute and kind of understand. On the digital twin itself, what are the examples -- how can digital twin help either decrease that footprint that we talked about or improve the efficiencies of the process? I imagine that a lot of it has to do with collaboration, the way people inspect things or the way people make decisions and stuff, so there's less need to rebuild, there's less need to drive around miles and miles to kind of understand that. Is that the right way to think about it?

Yes. I mean if you -- if you're going to solve some of the problems that you would want to aspire to solve with an ESG type of initiatives or with things like net zero in the U.K. and Europe, the question then becomes what do you need to do differently to get there, right? Doing the same thing that we've been doing is not going to get us there, right? So as we look at the way that people engineer, the first thing you need to be able to do is you need to be able to have a life cycle view of the asset. You need to understand, you need to be able to simulate how it's going to perform in real-world conditions and know and measure what you expect that impact to be if you're going to realize something like net zero. And this is where the digital twin comes in, it's critical. Up until now, most work in engineering software has been done on file-based systems. And the data live -- and a project can be better -- can involve many different vendors, and that data can be heterogeneous. And it really doesn't give you the ability to manage and understand that asset. And if you think of other industries like the aircraft industry, when Boeing or Airbus are building jets, what are they doing? They're creating a live digital twin of that aircraft. And they're going to know all of the data that's associated with all of the systems that run against that. They're going to be able to simulate how it's going to perform, and they're going to fly it before it's ever built. But with infrastructure, that hasn't been the case. That's starting to change. And there's -- like all things, there's a lot of, what I would call, twin washing going on where a lot of companies are making claims about having digital twins. But for us, we made a fundamental investment in digital twin technology about 5 years ago. And we broke up a team of over 400 engineers, and we have -- because we really needed to create an entirely new platform. And unlike work -- the traditional engineering tools are file-based, and they're -- when people are doing projects, you have document management systems and workflow, and there's maybe metadata associated with this file. With the digital twin, it's very different. It's really database-based, and there's an infrastructure schema that helps you manage the data. And conceptually, you might think of it like you would look at blockchain, where you can really have the providence of the data, understand where it came from, who worked on it and then maintain that infrastructure ledger over time. So that's what the digital twin is for us. It allows you to create that real-life digital model of the asset and associate all of the different information that might be part of building, designing and operating that asset. It's -- and the good news is, is that you don't have to reengineer the entire set of Bentley applications. We're participating in that environment. We have connectors that allow people to bring file-based data, transform it into what the digital twin environment understands. And likewise, they can take data out of it to work in their native environments. But over time, it will become integral to all of what we do. And today, there's services that complement ProjectWise and AssetWise, ProjectWise is in project delivery and AssetWise in asset performance. But it's really a robust environment. We've made it open source and provided tools to third-party developers. We've also invested in an iTwins venture fund to facilitate an ecosystem of third-party developers. It's very much a platform story. Of course, we're going to leverage it. But there are just so many use cases that digital twins can be provided -- that can be applied to that it's really impossible that we could address them all ourselves. So we really do want to encourage third parties to innovate. Just to give you a practical example, imagine a city where you've flown and created that reality model that I talked about earlier. And now you have the foundation of the data for the city and the model for the city. And then think of all the different departments that can then take that data and apply it to specific use cases. Maybe you're planning outdoor entertainment festivals or maybe you're public works and you need to plan a utility or a fiber optic upgrade in the streets, what have you. And there's a lot of great examples of innovation already with digital twins.

You're effectively creating a single source of truth of the real-time environment, right? And as that evolves, environment changes all the time. And the answers to some specific questions, other events, whatever, will depend on what the square looks like at a given point in time it's been populated or whatever, right? Same goes with infrastructure. If you just built a bunch of apartment blocks for me, you might want to have to build a road around it and stuff. Things like that, right?

Yes. I mean...

So what I'm getting is because it's life cycle, it's a never-ending story. It's not like constructing something and leaving at that. It evolves. It grows. It's an organism.

Yes. Let me give you a couple of practical examples of digital twins that will maybe help with that. The Morandi bridge collapsed in 2018. Obviously, it was tragic, and it was very much in the news. But they needed to rebuild it. They need it to be rebuilt quickly. And of course, they never wanted to have the same problems again. So that bridge was rebuilt using our software, and the team there implemented a digital twin. The bridge has sensor, right? So when this bridge collapsed or -- and you've seen other bridges collapse around the world, right, and recently in Mexico, how do you know and how can you make sure that the design that you intended is actually performing the way you expected it to perform? Well, you use sensors to help you with the -- measuring the vibration and the traffic flows and use drones to now do inspections that might have required people to hang off of bridges with ropes before, taking pictures, use machine learning to look at the imagery to detect fatigue and corrosion. So that's a real example of the digital twin. And the interesting thing about the digital twin for engineering companies is it's also creating an opportunity for them to look at new business models. When you -- typically in the engineering world, it's been a time and materials business. You bill for your time rather than value. But we're seeing increasing appetite for engineering firms to actually pursue opportunities to extend their work into the life cycle. And maybe not just design that bridge, but offer a service to the owner-operator of that bridge, leveraging their engineering knowledge because the engineers are the ones that understand the analytics that are going to come from those sensors to provide that service going forward. Another great example is in the telecommunications space, and this is a real example that's happening now. And the adoption of digital twins is going to go at different paces in different markets. But here's one where it's happening at an accelerated space because it really has to. There's real business reasons. So there's a race right now to retrofit all of the towers around the world. But if we focus on the U.S., these towers are being -- that exist already supporting the current standards are being retrofitted to handle the 5G signals. And in order to do that, these towers, which are owned by private companies and spaces leased to telecommunication providers, you need to understand the way the towers are already equipped and in what condition they're in, right? So typically, the workflow up until a year ago, 1.5 years ago was to send people physically out to these towers. They had to climb the towers, take photos of the existing equipment, take pictures of the condition of the towers, take that back, work on that information to see what might be possible to retrofit that tower. Now obviously, when you have thousands and thousands of these towers, the ability to do that scaling quickly is limited. So what's being used now is our open tower digital twin solution, where those inspections are initially done with drones. So the drones go out, they capture the imagery and create a complete 3D model of the bridge and its contextual environment. And that's used to both inventory the equipment as well as to help with the design, evaluation of the structural integrity of the tower and to figure out where the new equipment can be placed and to create those plans so that the contractors can go ahead and get the work done. That's an example where something can be done at scale and where time to market is really critical.

It's interesting. You mentioned the infrastructure and the adoption of digital twins and the technology overall. What do you think is kind of holding back the adoption of why isn't everyone doing it that way today? That's the question. Why didn't -- why wasn't the last bridge in general are being built with the sensors? Is it a fact that technology, hardware, both connectivity and everything just came together more recently at the right time, and the prices are enabling to kind of lower the barrier of adoption? And there's also use cases or there is also a problem, collapsing bridges, things like that, that people then realize that they need to invest in technology in order for that to never happen again. Or is it just we've been doing it for hundreds of years that way. Roads have been built since the empire's days. And because of that, it's very, very hard to penetrate that and change someone's mindset. What's the biggest barrier to adoption?

Yes. I think like all technology adoption, there's a cycle. I think I was one of those people that were still using a pay phone the first few years that the cellphone was out there, right? So it just takes time to get adopted as part of the life cycle of the work that's being done. Obviously, in the case of 5G, there's a forcing function that accelerates it. But we are seeing it being used quite extensively already. And it's early days, of course. Some U.K. examples, High Speed 2, which is the West Coast line between London and the north that I'm sure everybody in the U.K. is quite familiar with. Mott MacDonald and SYSTRA, which are part of the main civil works joint venture, are using a digital twin to unify all the workflows across BIM and GIS. In Heathrow West, Bechtel is using a digital twin to provide data-rich analytics that can help improve asset performance. So they're simulating and testing different scenarios to ensure that they can get the best possible performance out of the asset. And the Thames Highway project, the tunnel that is a massive sewer system that's trying to avoid flood inclusion into the Thames River is also using a digital twin to manage their work streams. It will tend to be these significant projects, on the one hand, that will be the drivers that will provide the learning as well as industries where they're like 5G, whether it's a compelling business proposition that the digital twin will only help them reach. It will become the norm. In earlier cycles, it took them a while to get established, and there was a lot argument about what BIM was and what the processes behind it were and -- but it became ubiquitous in engineering. We're encouraged that we're not alone in evangelizing it anymore. We've been at it for a long time, but it's encouraging to see other vendors also evangelize the benefits of the digital twin. Autodesk has an upcoming product. And we know that in the industrial space, AVEVA, for example, is offering digital twin. So that's a good thing for the industry. I think you'll see it accelerate. Again, you have to peel back and make sure you understand when people talk about digital twin, is it really something fundamentally different? Or is it twin washing and just applying a popular label to what people are already doing with products that have been around for years?

Right, like with every new technology and the cycle, the definitions, especially at the beginning, it takes a little while until it clarifies, right? Just like BIM, you said, there's many definitions of BIM because of that. But the core is well understood now 20 years later.

Yes.

Yes. So that's helpful. You mentioned partners. You mentioned competitors as partners. You mentioned your openness of your platform, which is very interesting and very kind of welcoming to see because what you -- what I understand is, it's very, very hard to answer every question with your own technology all the time. Even if you had the solutions, it's very hard because some people might already have adopted something else. So your openness of the platform is something that you believe also is very, very important, which is nice to see, right? The interoperability and avoiding the double entry of the data and things like that. On the partnership side as well, it's very interesting for me to time and time again hear companies like Microsoft and NVIDIA talking about Bentley and the digital twin. And when they present, I don't know, a good example for me was when Microsoft presented their Mesh technology earlier this year, Bentley's digital bridge effectively was one of the key parts of the presentation. Can I just kind of touch on that and understand like what makes those companies being so kind of closely aligned with Bentley specifically? And most importantly, like what kind of partnership are you expecting? Is it just a very, very synergetic technology partnership, where you have a hardware vendor who's enabling kind of trailblazing for you, and then you are the solution that justifies the investment into their hardware technology? Is that the best way to think about it?

Well, it's a little different with each of those 2 vendors. With Microsoft, it's more of, we're working very closely together with them, both on the technology side and in terms of market initiatives. The Azure, of course, is a key technology enabler for our digital twin solutions, and we're one of the largest users of Azure in the world actually. And so obviously, that's very key to us. And then there's other technologies that we're leveraging like the Hololens and working closely with Microsoft. And they share a similar vision. They want -- Microsoft wants to enable companies like us to do great things that leverage our platform. With NVIDIA, one of the things that's really not understood is, we've been asked the question, well, are they offering a digital twin? Is that the same as what you're doing? Or is it competitive? And the answer is, no. What Bentley offers is an infrastructure digital twin, and there's a lot of data, what we call the ET, IT, OT that we're bringing together, the engineering, the IT data, the sensor data. We're bringing that all together within an infrastructure digital twin. NVIDIA brings a very high-performance incredible visualization environment. So in the same way that we connect our own applications to our own environment, we can connect our digital twin environment so that our users can leverage NVIDIA to do those kinds of visualization workflows as part of their infrastructure projects. And then we'll continue to look for opportunities like that with other partners.

Helpful. We're running kind of close to the end of our allotted time. So I wanted to just kind of wrap up with a question that we obviously get a lot, and I'm not going to touch on a specific -- people are kind of seeing increased level of investments in infrastructure, which is obviously a great end market to be and a healthy outlook. So Bentley is probably going to stand in good terms with the market considering that you have had healthy demand cycle in your way, be it from the potential U.S. infrastructure bill or potentially from increased spend in Europe, which we're already seeing. My question is more related to kind of, as the spend kind of comes through in whatever way it may, how do we think about the adoption of technology? Do you believe people will adopt more digital twin-like technology because they know that they need to be smarter with the dollar they're getting? Or is there an argument where like, well, if we have enough money to kind of spend, we're just going to be less efficient, and we're going to continue to do what we're doing? Do you have any kind of early proof points that potentially people are going to -- technology will prevail, and that incremental dollar will be spent in a better way than the previous was.

Yes. I mean, when you listen to the Biden administration, they're making it clear that their vision is to build back better. And the better is bold, capital letters, underlined. And as well, it was interesting this weekend to see the G7 talk about a similar initiative to the Belt and Road, they're labeling B3W. And that's also build back better. So what does better mean? We've actually worked with some of the congressional committees to help them understand the importance of how technology can be applied not only to design better assets, but to also get a better return on those assets over their life cycle. The design, build, operate model where you've had one group designing products, handing it off to another that builds it, and sometimes starting over in terms of the information they use and then handing sparse data over to an owner that has to operate it, is not the most efficient model. And it's not going to get us the best operating assets. If we don't want bridges collapsing, if we're going to rebuild a bridge, we should do it like the Morandi bridge is rebuilt and make sure that they have digital twins. So we've been advocating that, that be codified as part of what they do with an infrastructure stimulus bill in the U.S. and that they encourage the organizations that are going to invest in that infrastructure to make the investment in digital twins. There's also been a lot of discussion about, well, they're saying 5 to 8 years, is that an issue? As I described before, projects like the Thames Highway and HS2, they take many years to design, build before they're ready for operation. So that cadence is actually aligned with where most of these projects are going to be anyways. It was interesting to listen to some congress people on the weekend and some of the talk shows in the U.S. talk -- mention that it all wasn't going to be spent in the first year. That just doesn't make sense from an execution standpoint. So -- and I think it's going to be more sustainable and more impactful to be built into the mainstream. So if this is 8 years, it becomes the way we're going to execute over the next decade, which I think is really important. So I think it's going to -- it's clear that infrastructure is not only on the minds of American politicians, but politicians around the world. And if this G7 initiative becomes something concrete, that would be a welcome development for countries that really need that investment in infrastructure. I mean, it's not hard to see that it's sort of needed.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Carey, for your attendance today. I really enjoyed the conversation and our chat. Like always, I'd like to thank you for your support, and I'm looking forward to hosting again soon.

Thank you.

Thank you.