The Bundeskartellamt has cleared the proposed acquisition of Altair Engineering (Altair) by Siemens. Both companies offer a range of product lifecycle management (PLM) software solutions for product design and verification, including solutions for product simulation and analysis in the context of computer-aided engineering (CAE).

Andreas Mundt, President of the Bundeskartellamt: “In recent years we have seen many acquisitions relating to PLM solutions. The takeover of Altair by Siemens is one of the largest projects in this context. However, other competitors – both large and small – are also active in the market segments affected, which is why the project had to be cleared.”

PLM software helps businesses manage information throughout a product’s lifecycle – from inception to design and development to production, use and eventually disposal. The sales volume of the PLM software market segment in question is estimated to be in the billion-dollar range worldwide and is expected to continue to grow.

Siemens is a global provider of products and services in various areas of industrial and electrical engineering and is one of the largest providers of industrial software, in particular PLM software. However, after the merger it will continue to compete with other, partly similarly large, providers of PLM and CAE solutions.

Altair is an American software company founded in 1985. Its range of activities includes, in particular, physics-based simulation. Siemens is also active in this field, but its activities focus on other areas. Its analysis solutions offered worldwide are used in the automotive and aerospace industries, for example, in the context of computer-aided design. They are used to pre-process, mathematically solve and post-process model simulations which can be used to analyse a product’s physical properties based on design plans. The company is also active in high performance computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence.