Dassault Systèmes

History

Dassault Systèmes (NYSE Euronext:DSY) is a subsidiary of the Dassault Group created in 1981 by Avions Marcel Dassault to develop a new generation of computer-aided design (CAD) software called CATIA. The French government, a shareholder since 2001, sold a 15.74% stake in the company for 601 million in 2003. The Dassault Group in 2011 held 42.2% shares. Dassault Systèmes moved its corporate headquarters from Suresnes to Velizy-Villacoublay in November 2008. This new European headquarters, located in the south-western suburbs of Paris, is commonly called 3DS Paris Campus. Another campus was established in 2011 in Waltham, Massachusetts, west of Boston (United States) and is called 3DS Boston Campus.

Dassault Systèmes develops and markets PLM software and services that support industrial processes by providing a 3D vision of the entire lifecycle of products from conception to maintenance. Dassault Systèmes customers are companies in the following industries: Aerospace & Defense, Architecture, Engineering and Construction, Consumer goods - distribution, FMCG - Distribution, Energy, and processes, Finance and Corporate Services, High Technology, Industrial Equipment, Life Sciences, Marine & Offshore, Natural Resources, and Transport & mobility.

Dassault Systèmes was a signatory to the French Small-Medium Enterprise business development Pact (SME Pact) in May 2008.

CAD/CAM period

Dassault Systèmes was incorporated in 1981 but in fact started in 1977 with 15 engineers from Avions Marcel Dassault - led by Francis Bernard, aircraft design engineer - who were in charge of providing support for the aircraft building process. While they were initially supposed to develop a 3D Computer-aided Design software (CATIA, then called CATI) just to help create designs, the engineers broadened the mission's scope to providing help to other industrial sectors.

At the end of 1980, the rumours surrounding CATIA reached the very top of the company and Marcel Dassault, then aged 88, asked for a demonstration of the software capabilities. The company management understood the engineers' vision and started to discuss how to leverage their innovation. They quickly realised they could not afford to keep and develop this invention internally and decided to create a new company - led by Francis Bernard - to explore the Computer-aided Design and Computer-aided Manufacturing market (CAD/CAM).

Dassault Systèmes thus got started in 1981 with only one customer (Avions Marcel Dassault) and 25 engineers who didn't know how to sell or commercialize their product. Since Dassault was one of the major clients of IBM in France, an agreement was negotiated for IBM to sell CATIA. It was a non-exclusive licence with 50/50 revenue sharing where CATIA would be sold by IBM as an IBM product. This agreement was extremely successful for both companies and it is considered "one of the fundamental success factors in the history of Dassault Systèmes".

CATIA started getting noticed in other sectors outside of aeronautical design, notably in the automotive industry (BMW, Mercedes and Honda). The company used a step-by-step approach to get a start in other industries such as consumer goods, machinery, and shipbuilding. IBM itself became a customer in the mid 1980s and deployed CATIA in its engineering and manufacturing plants.

Over the years, Dassault Systèmes improved its software and expanded to the US, Japan and Germany. This rapid growth triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core 3D CAD/CAM software and led to what is known today as Dassault Systèmes.

PLM Period

By the end of the 20th century, CAD/CAM had become too restrictive to be identified with Dassault Systèmes products. Then, in the early 2000s, it was replaced by PLM, the acronym for Product Lifecycle Management. New brand names were added to address the full PLM spectrum: DELMIA to support manufacturing, ENOVIA to support internal and external collaboration, SIMULIA for Analysis and Simulation, SolidWorks for 3D modeling and 3DVIA for 3D visualization.

In 2007, along with the creation of the new brand 3DVIA, Dassault Systèmes started to get into online applications. PLM 2.0 was released, linked to the Web 2.0 "network as a platform" concept. The company used the advantages of the Internet and introduced online PLM with its Version 6 platform. This strategy was also followed by many other acquisitions such as: the 2010 Exalead purchase to plunge deeper into Internet search technologies, the 2012 Netvibes purchase to monitor social media through dashboards, the 2012 Gemcom purchase to model and simulate the planet, and the 2013 SIMPOE for plastic injection simulation. In the same year Dassault Systèmes announced its first employment safeguard plan under the Law of Social Modernisation of 17 January 2002 as a result of its closure of its research laboratory in Grenoble.

Key dates

Brands

Products

Passion for Innovation Program

Passion for Innovation is a corporate initiative which aims at harnessing Dassault Systèmes' technology for developing research, education, culture and arts.

The program started with a disabled employee who couldn't drive a sports car because of his physical issue. He developed a new clutch system that would allow him to drive, but needed to test it virtually beforehand, as road testing of such a vital modification would be very dangerous. He was granted free access to CATIA to design his idea, which allowed him to eventually drive a sports car.

This has led to the creation of Passion for Innovation with the development of about 20 projects such as "Xplorair", "Khufu", "Ice Dream", and "Paris 3D Saga".

Dassault Systèmes Campus

Dassault Systèmes has three sites as headquarters: one based in Europe (Vélizy-Villacoublay, France), one based in North America (Waltham, Massachusetts), and one based in Asia (Shanghai, China).

European headquarters

Dassault Systèmes headquarters are in Vélizy-Villacoublay, located in the south-western suburbs of Paris, France. Most of the employees who work there are under 40 years old. The campus is actually made up of four environmentally-certified HQE buildings with 45,000 square metres of land within the complex, and is often referred to as the Dassault Systèmes Campus. This campus is commonly called the 3DS Paris Campus. Each building is named after one of the four main elements (water, earth, air and fire), which together total 57,000 square metres of office space. One of the buildings has an area called "LIVES" (Lifelike Immersive Virtual Experience Space) which is a demonstration centre equipped with virtual reality technology. A fifth bulding has been added to the campus: it is called "metal" and will be operational starting May 2017.

American Headquarters

Dassault Systèmes headquarters in North America is located in Waltham, Massachusetts, to the west of Boston, United States of America. 800 employees plus contractors and interns work in a building designed as an arc and where overall energy use is reduced by 29 percent. This campus has a green area (27-acres (~110,000 m2)) and is called 3DS Boston Campus.

Asian Headquarters

Dassault Systèmes headquarters in Asia is located in Tokyo, Japan.

Holdings

The list below sets forth the Company's main subsidiaries and also indicates the percentage equity interest and voting rights directly or indirectly held by Dassault Systèmes SA.

Company management

Financial data

Dassault Systèmes is the largest French software publisher in terms of revenue: it is five times greater than that of the second largest.

Market data

Share of Dassault Systemes S.A., ADS, OTC, (Symbol: DASTY) Shares of Dassault Systemes S.A., OTC, (Symbol: DASTF)

Shares listed on the NYSE Euronext exchange (Symbol: DSY is for Destiny Media Technologies Inc.) Member index CAC Next 20 ISIN Code Value = FR000130650 Nominal value = euro Main shareholders: ( 2014 ): Floating 51.7%, GIMD (Groupe Industriel Marcel Dassault) 41.1%, Charles Edelstenne 6.1%, Bernard Charlès 1.1%.