Tag Archives: ECAd

What’s the Deal with the Altium Deal?

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The masses are atwitter over the announced Renesas acquisition of Altium, and for good reason. The $5.9 billion price tag is some real coin.

What’s less clear to almost everyone outside the two companies, however, is the underlying strategy and how the merged entity will look going forward.

In announcing the acquisition, Renesas chief executive Hidetoshi Shibata called it “an important first step into our long-term future.” But what is that future?

Obviously, Renesas is not going to take Altium private, for use for its internal customers only. The two firms do have many overlapping markets: IoT, consumer, automotive, among others. Renesas also plays in higher-end areas such as high-performance computing that Altium has not to our knowledge penetrated. If OEMs want one-stop shopping for a systems program, a combined Renesas-Altium starts to make some sense. But the latter lacks the chip package tool to complete the proverbial – and literal – circuit.  

Less clear, however, is why Altium is worth so much to Renesas. Yes, it likely has as large an installed base as any major PCB CAD company. Its revenue, however, puts it behind Zuken in fourth overall, well behind Cadence and Siemens. Shibata highlighted Altium’s growth rates and profitability. But neither its revenue nor its net income ($43 million in its last fiscal year) will move the needle for Renesas.

As for the price: Renesas will pay $5.9 billion in the all-cash transaction. That’s a healthy premium relative to other significant deals in the industry over the past decade. I’m not of the mindset every deal must pay off in direct financial ways, but given the price tag, on the surface I think this one will be a tough climb.

That said, big deals are nothing new to Renesas. Including the pending Altium check, it has spent some $22 billion on various chip and software companies over the seven years.

How does this one rank with other high-profile M&As? Let’s look at some measures:

CompanyPrior 4Q Revenue at AcquisitionAcquisition PriceStock PremiumRevenue Multiple
Cadence$1.33B   
Sigrity$20M$80Mna4x
Siemens€79.6B (US$88.4B)   
Mentor Graphics$1.18B$4.5B21%3.8x
Synopsys$6B   
Ansys$2.16B$35B29%16x
Renesas$9.94B   
AltiumA$263M (US$171.6M)$5.9B34%  22x

Cadence bought Sigrity in 2012 for what now seems like couch change: $80 million.

The Ansys acquisition announced last month reportedly will increase Synopsys’ total addressable market by a 50% to $28 billion. While Synopsys is strictly EDA, Ansys plays heavily in the automation space, with focus on large end-markets like automotive, aerospace and industrial. Semi makes up less than one-third of Ansys’ revenue. (Asked on a conference call for how the Altium deal would affect Renesas’ TAM, the company demurred.)

This all can be traced back to Siemens’ 2017 acquisition of Mentor Graphics. Under duress after multiple hostile takeover attempts, including one by Cadence, Mentor was acquired by the German conglomerate as less than 4 times annual revenue. Synopsys is paying 16 times revenue for Altium, Renesas is paying more than 22 times revenue for Altium. How the CAD company’s former shareholders must be wishing they were still on the block now!

Renesas hinted that Altium shouldn’t be viewed in a vacuum but as part of a larger strategy. Will Zuken be next? At $250 million in revenues over the past four quarters, and a market cap of $630 million, it would likely be a far cheaper buy. And Zuken could add chip package and high-end PCB tools to the suite, while also bringing several major military and aerospace customers. Zuken has danced with others through the years. Might it someday find a new home with Renesas?

All in on Altium?

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Autodesk’s bid — declined, so far — for Altium took me by surprise. In retrospect, it probably shouldn’t have.

As I’ve noted many times, I fully expect Altium to be acquired. It’s just I was looking more in the direction of Dassault and PTC, the big mechanical CAD (MCAD) players. I should kept Autodesk in my field of view, especially after it acquired Eagle five years ago. I think I was lulled to sleep, as that was a small acquisition and Autodesk hasn’t made much of a push since to burrow into the ECAD space.

The proposal was hefty, valuing Altium at $3.91 billion. That’s not much lower than Siemens paid for the considerably larger and more profitable Mentor Graphics in 2107. Yet Altium thinks it can do better.

It just might. Autodesk’s bid prices each Altium share at AU$38.50, a 41.5% premium over Altium’s closing price on Jun. 4 and a premium of over 47.4% to the one-month volume-weighted average price. Prior to the offering, however, Altium’s stock had peaked at a 52-week high of AU$39.34 in last October. So at $38.50, Autodesk was actually underbidding a bit.

An Autodesk-Altium merger wouldn’t change the face of the ECAD industry immediately. Altium would still run neck-and-neck with Zuken for third place in revenues behind Cadence and Mentor. But it would give Altium the backing of a industry leader in 3-D CAD, and accelerate the inevitable MCAD-ECAD merger.

The Nature of Disruption

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Just finished recording an hour-long (!) podcast with Judy Warner for Altium’s On-Track sessions. And while I don’t want to spoil any surprises, I will briefly touch on one of the topics we covered.

We got on the topic of disruptions. (I know, I know, it’s every keynote speaker’s favorite word. Sorry.)

In my view, ECAD software has to continue to get more intuitive and easier to use, especially for engineers who may only spend 10 or 20% of their time doing layout. If most of your time is spent using other tools, you won’t necessarily develop the hard-coded means to work the layout software. And no one wants to have to relearn the software each time they use it. So the tools must be more intuitive. And along the same lines, they need to be able to perform integrated functions with other platforms in their native environments. Users are most comfortable when operating in the environment they are familiar with.

To that end, I still think the company that breaks the ECAD industry will most likely come from outside the ECAD industry, if for the stunningly simplistic reason that engineers and their marketing colleagues in one industry are always looking for ways to expand into others.

Which is how it came to be that a maker of PCs (Apple) broke the recorded music industry and then broke phones. And a maker of batteries (Tesla) broke the automotive industry.

Going back aways, a software developer (Microsoft) broke computing, which was all mainframes and dummy terminals back in the day. (Now with app-based tablets and Chromebooks tethered to the cloud, we’ve come close to full circle.) And that same software developer broke video gaming, doing $5 billion in revenue from Xbox related sales last quarter alone and helping to spawn and massive market for online gaming.

My advice to Judy and her colleagues at Altium is to keep improving the design to manufacturing handoff — where so many manufacturability and quality defects take form — and to be wary of any company that comes up with a simpler and cheaper way to go from schematic to actual circuits, because while I don’t know who, how or when, I do know it’s inevitable.