Siemens-Mentor: How's It Working Out?

Junko Yoshida, EETimes
6/29/2018 02:01 AM EDT

SAN FRANCISCO — Siemens closed the acquisition of Mentor Graphics in March 2017. How’s that working out for the electronics industry?

This marriage — an EDA business bought by a powerhouse of infrastructure solutions — initially inspired skepticism among investors, the EDA community, and media. However, one year later, speaking of Siemens’s “digital factory” strategy in an investors’ conference in New York last month, Siemens AG CEO and President Joe Kaeser laid out facts and made a compelling case for the Mentor acquisition:

For those of you who have been following Siemens for a long time, I know you are questioning time and time again: Is it really worth doing this digital factory thing? Is it really coming? Or is it another overvalued, overrated waste of money by acquiring companies like Unigraphics — last, but not least, even Mentor Graphics?

Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you it’s been the right thing. Actually, it turned out much better than we originally thought: It’s a real thing.

Siemens’s digital factory initiative is paying off nicely, according to Kaeser, particularly after the Mentor deal. Siemens’s 4% share in the digital factory market in the first quarter of fiscal 2017 jumped to 20% in the second quarter of fiscal 2018.

In an interview with EE Times at the Design Automation Conference here this week, Wally Rhines,Mentor’s chairman and CEO, said that Siemens PLM/Mentor had “a new record year this past year.” Tony Hemmelgarn, who became the president and CEO of Siemens PLM Software last October, added, “We’re on track to meet really ambitious financial targets for the next year. We stated that we expect to achieve about 3.4 billion euro in revenue, and we are well on track to outperform the market.”

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