The price marks a 42.3 percent premium to PTC’s last closing share price. The companies unveiled the deal Monday, October 5. This move comes as software companies are racing to secure revenue streams amid fears artificial intelligence advances will increasingly compete against their services at lower costs.
Schneider makes energy and automation hardware and already runs industrial software unit AVEVA. PTC builds software for complex industrial product design, engineering, and data management.
PTC President and Chief Executive Neil Barua said the sale can gain “substantial scale and resources to accelerate innovation.” It will also allow them to expand into more geographies and markets as the industry shifts toward AI-driven product data.
The deal is one of the largest industrial software acquisitions to date and underlines how hardware giants are buying their way into recurring-revenue software and industrial AI.
For Schneider, adding PTC to AVEVA and Cognite builds a scaled franchise aimed at owning the data layer between factory floors and energy systems.
Previous Rockwell Partnership
In June 2018, Rockwell Automation and PTC signed a $1 billion strategic partnership. The goal was to accelerate growth for both companies and enable them to be the partner of choice for customers around the world. They said it would enable customers to transform their physical operations with digital technology.
As part of the partnership, Rockwell made a $1 billion equity investment in PTC.
However, in August 2023 Rockwell completed its final exit from those stock holdings through a secondary offering . At the time it enabled Rockwell to generate proceeds estimated at $822 million. As part of this final stock transaction, Rockwell Chairman and Chief Executive Blake Moret resigned from his seat on PTC’s board of directors.