Schneider Electric Buys PTC for $23 Billion, Plus 9 More M&A Deals
Trending Topics Ben Boissevain
Schneider Electric is buying PTC for about $22.6 billion in cash. It’s the French group’s biggest deal ever, and it sent Schneider shares down and PTC up.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Ben Boissevain — read the original for the full story.
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Schneider Electric has agreed to buy PTC for about $22.6 billion in cash, a deal that becomes the French company’s largest acquisition ever. PTC, based in Boston, sells industrial design, engineering and product lifecycle software used by manufacturers in automotive, aerospace and medtech. That fills what Jefferies called one of the last holes in Schneider’s software lineup.
The numbers are big even by M&A standards. The price works out to about 8.8 times revenue and 22 times EBITA, with analysts also pointing to roughly 8.5 times estimated 2027 ARR and 22 times estimated 2027 free cash flow. Schneider shares dropped as much as 9.4% in Paris after the announcement. PTC moved the other way.
And this is not happening in a vacuum. Industrial companies keep pushing deeper into AI and data-center demand, and Schneider has been on that road before with its $3.1 billion Cognite purchase. ABB’s $5.5 billion purchase of Rotork in July sits in the same pattern. Autodesk also tried to buy PTC last year, then walked away.
The rest of the list shows the same impulse playing out in different corners of software and services. Thoma Bravo-backed BlueMatrix is buying Aiera to bolt AI research access onto its compliance and distribution stack. Automation Anywhere is taking out Norway’s Boost.ai. Harness is pulling in Augment Code assets to connect coding with deployment. It is a very familiar message: the buyers want the infrastructure around AI, not just the model.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Corporate buyers are getting very good at using AI as a justification for buying the plumbing around it. That’s usually less sexy than the pitch deck, and usually more durable than the pitch deck too. The only real surprise is how many CEOs still act like paying 22 times something counts as prudence if the word “AI” is close enough.
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