Bentley Systems Q4 2024 results and 2025 Outlook webcast. I'm Eric Boyer, Bentley's Investor Relations Officer. On the webcast today, we have Bentley Systems Executive Chair Greg Bentley, Chief Executive Officer Nicholas Cumins, and Chief Financial Officer Werner Andre. This webcast includes forward-looking statements made as of February 26th, 2025, regarding the future results of operations and financial position, business strategy and plans, and objectives for future operations of Bentley Systems Incorporated. All such statements made in or contained during this webcast are other than statements of historical fact or forward-looking statements. This webcast will be available for replay on Bentley Systems Investor Relations website at investors.bentley.com on February 26th, 2025. After our presentation, we will conclude with Q&A. And with that, let me introduce the Executive Chair of Bentley Systems, Greg Bentley.
Good morning, and once again, thanks to each of you for your interest in BSY. Following me, CEO Nicholas and CFO Werner will report on our quite satisfactory conclusion to 2024 and on our characteristically consistent financial outlook for 2025. My own purpose today, as we review our fifth year end as a public company, is more so to benchmark our longer term cumulative progress against the priorities of shareholders. To that end, here's how we present in the opening slide of our introductory investor relations deck the differentiating virtues to which we, with our investors, we think aspire. I believe the year 2024 substantially advanced our track record of achieving these objectives.
Following our long-planned CEO succession that took effect in mid-year, Nicholas will describe further organizational changes to more directly orchestrate product innovation within our overall strategy and to reinforce our hallmark advantage of technically focused leadership as appropriate for our engineering market. And during 2024, subscriptions increased to 90% of total revenues, durably sustaining greater than ever visibility, quality, and consistency. Supporting our ongoing programmatic acquisition priorities and Asset Analytics, our landmark strategic acquisition in 2024 of Cesium has greatly broadened our platform ecosystem of geospatial digital twin developers. 2024's increase in adjusted operating income, inclusive of stock-based compensation, surmounted our established commitment of 100 basis points of margin improvement annually. With, in 2024, a greater preponderance than ever of revenues recognized ratably and paid annually in advance, we directly and efficiently convert adjusted operating income, inclusive of stock-based compensation, into free cash flow net of stock-based compensation.
Notwithstanding the majority of our ARR being consumption-based, in recent years, and especially in 2024, we have increased the sustainability and visibility of double-digit ARR growth through a greater prevalence for our accounts in our principal commercial program, E365, of multi-year floors and ceilings, which graduate annually at a rate on average consistent with our overall NRR, now indeed at 110%. For the full year, organic ARR growth ex-China was comparable to and compounded consecutively from our year 2023. Such compounding would be a powerful investment virtue indeed to the extent achieved reliably over a classic long term. So let's benchmark BSY's performance to date as a public company against the priorities of stockholders. With their per-share orientation, such a priority would be to manage share count to avoid compounding dilution. This shows the progression in shares owned by the Bentley family.
Despite having divested shares at an average annual rate of about 1% of shares outstanding, we continue to hold the economic majority. A major factor in share sales by the Bentley brothers is that distributions from our holdings and the company's deferred compensation plan have been triggered by retirements, requiring the bulk of these shares to be sold to cover ordinary income taxation. Thankfully, by now, most such shares have already been distributed. Shown here are the remaining shares in each year's average fully diluted count, other than those associated with our convertible notes. Finally, added here is the accounting share count associated with our convertible notes, shown every year for which they've been outstanding in order to capture the full expansion of the company's capitalization.
Our non-convertible net debt has been minimal at both the beginning and end of this period, so I think it's fair to use the compounded annual growth rate of 2.8% in this total share count as a proxy for growth in our capitalization. Reducing this by our dividend yield of about 0.5% would provide an appropriate baseline for per-share CAGR comparisons to financial performance metrics, starting with our reported revenues. For better comparability, here's the same revenue history, but at constant currency, having compounded at an annual growth rate of 14.5%. While for tracking business performance, we have excluded growth from onboarding our platform acquisitions, we need not do that here because the foregoing share growth sufficiently accounted for the capitalization increases to finance the platform acquisitions. Professional services revenues highlighted here accumulated with the Cohesive acquisitions.
I am a proponent of the long-term strategic rationale for maximum digital integration, but in the meantime, this revenue source adds volatility and subtracts from profitability, so we're better off to moderate rather than to maximize it. License revenue highlighted here depends on the vicissitudes of China and also perhaps SMB budget flush. Thus, it's notable that constant currency subscription revenues, which we thus regard as our key revenue metric, have grown to constitute 90% of our total, having compounded at an annual growth rate of 16.3%. Hence, to double subscription revenues over the five years from 2020, here's what would be required for 2025. Subscription revenue is, of course, literally led by our key performance metric, ARR, here at each year-end at constant 2024 budget exchange rates, and within which, highlighted here, is the breakout of ARR cumulatively onboarded with the platform acquisitions of Seequent and Power Line Systems.
This overall ARR in constant currency has compounded at an annual growth rate of 16.3%, interestingly indeed the same as for constant currency subscription revenue. Highlighted here is what turns out to have been ever less significant ARR onboarded annually, the darker top slice, and cumulatively with programmatic acquisitions. Our ARR in China, highlighted here, has declined substantially and structurally in recent years. So we can here measure that excluding China, but not Russia, and excluding all onboarded ARR from platform and programmatic acquisitions, we have compounded ARR in constant currency at an annual growth rate of 13.6%. And back to overall ARR, here is the level of ARR at the end of 2025 that would complete doubling over the five years from 2020. To measure the compounding of profits and of free cash flow, we're obliged to do without constant currency accounting. Here is adjusted operating income as reported.