A quick reaction to this Industry 4.0 mega merger, late yesterday. Because RCR used to write about this stuff all the time, back when industrial IoT was all the rage – as a way to stitch a digital thread to weave a digital twin, in order to synchronize and automate production environments; before AI got so loudly involved. And also because there’s not much telco news today (at press) – bar another good write up from Intelligent RAN Forum, where 1Finity told telcos to get a wriggle on and rent-out spare RAN capacity for third-party AI compute workloads; plus some telling words from Zayo about the big fiber dig for AI inference, a good Wi-Fi piece from Dean Bubley about rising usage and improving tech in the 6GHz band, and all the telco press releases below the line. But yesterday…
French energy tech firm Schneider Electric agreed to buy US-based industrial design and engineering outfit PTC for a cool $22.6bn (€20.1bn). Which is a lot of money, in case it needs saying: $205 per share, representing a 46% premium to PTC’s average share price over the last month, and an implied enterprise value of $23.7bn – equivalent to 21 times its forecast 2027 operating profit. Olivier Blum, chief exec at Schneider Electric, gushed about the “most complete software and AI powerhouse”, and promised the “highest-quality portfolio bridging the physical and digital worlds”. Neil Barua, his counterpart at PTC, said the same, citing the “most differentiated industrial software and AI portfolios”. The markets were sceptical: Schneider’s market cap fell about $15bn.
But the strategic logic is fairly straightforward. PTC gives Schneider a “shortcut into product engineering”, writes Matthieu Kulezak, senior analyst at Interact Analysis. Schneider has spent years building software for industrial operations, automation, and energy; PTC gives it all the upstream digital twinnings – in product design, engineering, lifecycle management. Roll in its UK-based software division AVEVA, for industrial operations and asset management, plus its pending $3.1bn deal for Norwegian industrial data and AI software company Cognite, and Schneider has most of the Industry 4.0 design game covered: the product itself, the factory making the product, and the system running the factory. Siemens is the closest benchmark – rather than some Silicon Valley AI ‘native’.
Ahh, but we are out of space, again. This article is continued here, including discussion that the whole gamble for Schneider is to raise AI trust and traceability, and maybe to bring industrial networking back up the agenda…
James Blackman
Executive Editor
RCR Wireless News
RCR Top Stories
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What We're Reading
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Brazil IoT deal: Aeris and Telna are partnering to combine IoT management and cloud core systems to offer multinationals zero-touch eSIM, local breakout, and single-interface management in Brazil.
