Schneider Electric has reached an agreement to acquire the American company PTC, one of the world’s leading developers of software for the design of complex industrial products, engineering processes, and data management. The value of 100% of PTC’s share capital is estimated at approximately $22.6 billion (20.1 billion euros), Schneider Electric announced on October 5.
Under the terms of the deal, Schneider Electric will pay $205 in cash for each share of PTC. The proposed price is 42.3% higher than the company’s share price at the close of trading on the day before the deal was announced. The enterprise value is estimated at $23.7 billion (€21.1 billion).
The deal is expected to be a key milestone in Schneider Electric’s transformation from a manufacturer and supplier of energy and industrial technologies into a global company that integrates energy management, automation, industrial software, and artificial intelligence.
PTC specializes in software solutions for the design, manufacturing, and operation of complex industrial products. The company’s portfolio includes systems for managing product lifecycles, engineering data, and enterprise digital processes.
The integration of PTC’s technologies is intended to supplement Schneider Electric’s existing digital ecosystem with data generated as early as the product design stage. The company plans to combine this data with information from manufacturing processes, equipment, and energy systems.
This will create a unified digital environment covering the entire lifecycle of an industrial facility or product—from design and construction to operation, maintenance, and future upgrades.
Schneider Electric places particular emphasis on using integrated data to advance industrial artificial intelligence. For AI agents to operate effectively, they need not only access to large amounts of information but also an understanding of the context—including equipment design, engineering concepts, the manufacturing process, and actual operating conditions.
Following the merger with PTC and taking into account the planned acquisition of the Cognite industrial AI platform, Schneider Electric’s software division will expand significantly. According to the company’s estimates, Software & Services will account for approximately 24% of the group’s total revenue on a pro forma basis. The software business will employ over 15,000 specialists, and the number of software solution customers will exceed 50,000.
Schneider Electric expects to realize approximately 250 million euros in cost savings within three years of the transaction’s completion and estimates potential revenue synergies at approximately 800 million euros. These are expected to be driven by cross-selling, expansion of the customer base and geographic reach, as well as the joint development of solutions utilizing artificial intelligence.
The transaction is expected to close by the end of the third quarter of 2027. It has already been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of Schneider Electric and PTC, but still requires the approval of a majority of PTC’s shareholders and the necessary regulatory approvals.
What This Deal Could Mean for Ukrainian Industry
For Ukraine, the development of such solutions is particularly relevant in the context of industrial recovery and modernization. The integration of energy technologies, industrial automation, engineering software, and artificial intelligence enables companies to create digital models of production facilities as early as the design stage and then utilize the data throughout their entire operational lifecycle.
This approach can be applied during the modernization of existing enterprises and the construction of new production facilities, energy facilities, logistics, and other critical infrastructure. The digitization of engineering processes enables faster facility design, monitoring of energy consumption and equipment condition, predictive maintenance, and a reduction in the risks of unplanned downtime.
For Ukrainian enterprises, which are simultaneously facing the need to modernize equipment, improve energy efficiency, and address a shortage of qualified engineering personnel, the development of Industrial AI can become one of the tools for increasing productivity and ensuring the sustainability of production.
“It is particularly important for Ukraine that this is not simply about implementing individual digital products or artificial intelligence. We are talking about the ability to integrate the entire life cycle of an industrial facility—from engineering design to production, energy consumption, operation, and maintenance—into a single digital environment. For companies that need to modernize or, in fact, build new production facilities, this is an opportunity to immediately transition to a more modern management model,” said Mykhailo Bubnov, CEO of Schneider Electric Ukraine.
According to him, combining PTC’s engineering data with Schneider Electric’s automation and energy management technologies could be particularly relevant for Ukrainian companies with energy-intensive and complex production processes.
“In Ukraine, we see great potential for such solutions in industry, energy, infrastructure, logistics, and other sectors where the cost of equipment downtime or inefficient energy use is particularly high. Artificial intelligence in industry is meant to solve very practical problems: helping engineers make decisions faster, predict equipment condition, reduce unplanned downtime, and use energy more efficiently. As the economy recovers, it is precisely this practical impact of digitalization that will be of key importance to Ukrainian enterprises,” Bubnov emphasized.
Schneider Electric operates in the fields of energy technologies, electrification, automation, and digitalization of industry, buildings, data centers, infrastructure, and power grids. The company has approximately 160,000 employees and works with a network of about 1 million partners in more than 100 countries worldwide.
AGREEMENT, artificial intelligence, PTC, Schneider Electric, SOFTWARE
The supervisory board of the National Depository of Ukraine (NDU) has approved a Main Delivery Agreement that signed with Britain’s Percival Software Limited to deliver Depend system software to the central depository and to provide its support within three years.
The cost of software delivery and support services is $330,000 with envisaged preliminary payment for each subsequent quarter, the NDU reported that in the information disclosure system of the Ukraine’s National Securities and Stock Market Commission on August 2.
Percival was founded in the UK in 1986.
It is a developer and vendor of advanced software solutions for central securities depositories all over the world. Since 2008, the company won nine CSD contracts spanning 21 countries.
Germany’s Robotron Datenbank-Software GmbH and a consortium of developers consisting of Siemens AG (Austria), Siemens Ukraine, Siemens AS (Germany), Omnetric GmbH (Norway) and IP Systems Informatikai Zartkoruen Mukuodo Reszvenytarsasag (Hungary) will take part in a tender to develop DataHub software for the power commercial accounting administrator, the press service of national energy company Ukrenergo has reported.
“Evaluation of the offers will be held in accordance with the principles and rules of procurement of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development [IBRD, which financed the project]. Evaluation results are subject to mandatory coordination with the bank,” the company said in the report.
As reported, a total of 14 companies bought papers for the tender as of middle of March.
Initially the tender to create DataHub was announced on September 19, 2017. The tender failed to take place due to the absence of high-quality bids. The repeated tender was launched on September 18, 2018 after the review of tender documents and their approval by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which finances the project. The date of opening bids was postponed several times under requests of bidders, Ukrenergo said.
According to the power commercial accounting code, Ukrenergo is the power commercial accounting administrator on the retail market, which new model was launched on January 1, 2019.
The DataHub is a centralized platform to ensure the data exchange with a single database of the commercial accounting points. Currently distribution system operators and state-owned enterprise Energomarket fulfill this function without the proper software.
The Ukrainian designer of software Intellias is mulling a possibility of acquiring some companies for further growth, including companies with development centers in Eastern Europe, the co-founder and Board Chairman of Intellias Mykhailo Puzrakov has said in an interview with Die Welt. “So far we have grown organically. I believe, however, that maybe even next year we could start to consider some acquisitions. We are interested in companies that could interact with Intellias: companies with development centers in Eastern Europe, or companies with a client base that could complement ours. In addition, we will consider companies that have some experience or products that will help us gain new customers,” he said.
Puzrakov also announced plans to expand the company’s presence in Berlin next year – now only one employee works in the Berlin office of Intellias.
According to him, today one of the main advantages of Intellias is the ability to quickly scale the team, which is often required by their European customers.
Puzrakov also said that the company has ceased to be a startup, moving into the category of a successful and profitable business, but is still at the beginning of the growth stage.
Intellias was founded in Lviv in 2002. Its offices are located in Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv and Berlin.
A drop in frequency on the synchronously interconnected Continental Europe system was registered on January 10, 2019 at around 21.00 and the causes of this drop are still under investigation by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E). ENTSO-E gave this information on Wednesday, January 16. The frequency drop was sufficient to alert the TSOs but did not at any moment endanger security of supply, the network said.
A mismeasurement on lines between Germany and Austria was identified and corrected by TenneT Germany. However, this mismeasurement cannot explain the frequency drop on January 10. The investigation, which is still on-going, is reviewing the significant variation in European production around 21.00 which coincided with changes in trade between different countries.
“Given the current automation process of Ukraine’s new electricity market, this incident forces us to seriously think about the quality of software and the timing of its testing. The synchronous area of the integrated power grid of Ukraine is much less than ENTSO-E and the consequences of software errors and inconsistencies more serious than just stopping the trade,” Chief Expert on technological systems, Head of the commercial accounting management group of national energy company Ukrenergo Oleksandr Karpenko said on his Facebook page.
As reported, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine at the end of December 2018 approved an action plan for the harmonization of the united power grid of Ukraine with ENTSO-E.
GlobalLogic IT company, the largest software designer in Ukraine, expects that the Ukrainian IT market would grow by 20% in 2018, to over $4 billion, Head of the company’s office in Lviv and Vice-President for Engineering at GlobalLogic Denys Balatsko has told Interfax-Ukraine on the sidelines of Lviv IT Arena 2018. “Assessing the IT market in Ukraine is quite difficult, since most of the companies on it are not public and do not make their financial statements public. We know the number of people working in this industry – according to recent data there are about 120,000. According to statistics released by the state, the amount of funding coming to Ukraine from the sale of IT services abroad is about $3.5 billion, but there is still an internal market, so I think that the figure of $3.5 billion is rather understated,” he said.
According to Balatsko, this year the market is developing very dynamically, and there is very high demand for qualified personnel. “The market growth this year will be about 20%. We are growing faster than the market. I hope we will reach 30% plus by the last year,” he said. The head of the GlobalLogic office in Lviv said that the company estimates that the IT market of Ukraine is experiencing a significant shortage of qualified personnel and engineering talents.
“We are working with universities, helping them to make the program more modern, so that students when graduating higher education institutions could start working right away, and companies do not have to spend half a year on their training,” Balatsko said. He also said that the second significant problem of the Ukrainian IT market is a lack of a mature product industry with a rather strong IT outsourcing market.
GlobalLogic Ukraine is the largest software developer in Ukraine. It has offices in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Mykolaiv.
