Schneider Electric buys PTC for $22.6B
Schneider Electric, the French maker of electrical and automation equipment, has agreed to buy PTC, whose software engineers use to design products and manage their data. Schneider pays $205 a share in cash: $22.6B for PTC’s shares, 42% above their last price, and $23.7B for the whole business once PTC’s debt is counted.
PTC’s value from its founding to Schneider Electric’s offer
Value of PTC’s shares each September from 1992, then monthly from 2022. The sale is agreed, not closed.
Source: Dealroom.co · company filings
PTC started in Boston in 1985 and has been listed on Nasdaq since 1989. Its revenue was $2.74B in the year to September 2025. Schneider is paying 8.7 times that: about what it paid for the rest of AVEVA in 2022, and a little more than half what Siemens paid for Altair and Synopsys for Ansys in 2024.
Revenue multiples on industrial software acquisitions
Source: Dealroom.co
Of 31 listed software companies bought since 2024, seven sold for a higher multiple than PTC, five of them to other companies rather than private equity firms. Twelve got a bigger premium over their share price.
Revenue multiples on recent software take-privates
Premium: the offer price above the share price before the deal became public.
Source: Dealroom.co
Revenue growth alone explains little of the spread in these multiples. For the 20 companies bought by private equity firms, the Rule of 40 explains more: revenue growth plus free cash flow margin. PTC scores 50, from 19% growth and a 31% margin, second only to CyberArk among the 31. At that score the private equity trend puts about 8.5 times revenue, close to Schneider’s 8.7.
Revenue multiple, growth and cash flow on recent software take-privates
Rule of 40: revenue growth plus free cash flow margin. Rule of X counts growth X times. R²: the share of the spread in multiples that the trend line explains.
Source: Dealroom.co
PTC is very profitable: it kept $982M of its $2.74B revenue as operating profit in its last fiscal year, a 36% margin, and buyers pay more per dollar of revenue for a business that keeps more of it. Schneider also expects about €250M a year of cost savings by the third year, and says that with them it is paying 13 times PTC’s expected 2027 operating profit instead of 21 times. Twenty of the other 30 deals in the chart were private equity buyouts, while Schneider already owns the industrial software maker AVEVA and can combine the two businesses.
What this means
PTC’s shares lost more than a third of their value between August 2025 and the day before the offer. The premium wins back most of that fall. Schneider’s offer still values PTC below its August 2025 market value, and at a lower multiple of revenue than Siemens paid for Altair or Synopsys for Ansys.