PTC Completes CoCreate Acquisition

By Sara Ferris

PTC (Needham,MA) completed its acquisition of CoCreate Software, a provider of product development solutions, for approximately $250 million. CoCreate, based in Sindelfingen, Germany, has 280 employees and more than 5,000 customers globally, including Agilent, Canon, Molex, Fujitsu, HP, Liebherr, Matsushita Electric, NEC, Olympus, Phoenix Contact, and Seiko Epson.

“The acquisition of CoCreate enables PTC to broaden its customer base, its distribution channel, and its product offering,” said C. Richard Harrison, president and chief executive officer, PTC.

PTC says that it’s committed to maintaining, enhancing, and further developing all CoCreate products indefinitely, including OneSpace Modeling, OneSpace Drafting, OneSpace Model Manager, OneSpace Drawing Manager, OneSpace Live!, and OneSpace.net.

PTC will continue to offer all CoCreate solutions as stand-alone offerings. In addition, PTC plans to integrate CoCreate solutions with existing PTC products to offer CoCreate customers complementary product development capabilities, including engineering calculations, dynamic publishing, visualization, high-speed machining, and enterprise content and process management.

“Intermec has been a long-standing customer of both PTC and CoCreate solutions,” said Ryan White, mechanical engineering manager at Intermec, a supply-chain technology provider. “We believe we will benefit not only by being able to purchase these solutions from one vendor, but also from the planned integration of the solutions, which should enable us to lower our total cost of ownership and ease transfer of files between tools.”

With this acquisition, PTC says it embraces all the accepted approaches to mechanical modeling—parametric, explicit, derived and 2D—and is the only vendor to offer all of them based upon a customer’s specific needs.

“PTC’s acquisition of CoCreate will provide significant value for end users,” said Allan A. Fotinopoulos, senior business product lifecycle development architect at Pitney Bowes, a global provider of mailstream technology. “We look forward to seeing how the tools will complement each other to provide added value to various product development programs at Pitney Bowes, as well as seeing integration plans to assist us in adopting a complete PLM solution in the future.”

PTC financed the acquisition and related expenses with a combination of $50 million in cash and $220 million of debt from its existing revolving credit facility. PTC expects to repay the loan within two years.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.