Dassault Buys ICEM, Part 2: Lots of Happy People at ICEM

LAS VEGAS, NV (COE 2007), April 30, 2007 - Being at the annual CATIA user meeting gave me a chance to follow up on "Dassault Systemes Buys ICEM: Ongoing Consolidation," which appeared here yesterday.

ICEM got its start at Volkswagen, where it was developed in house for doing styling. In 1998, PTC bought ICEM for $41 million to "get into Ford." This did not achieve the desired results. PTC unloaded it 4 years later in a management buy out. Though the price was disclosed at the time, PTC tells me they sold it for $10M. PTC may have lost $31M on the deal but it was quite a bargain for as ICEM's management as ICEM's revenue (now) are about $20M annually.

All told, ICEM as it netted a total of over $100M from the deals ($31M profit after PTC plus the $70M Dassault is paying now) -- a very nice turn of events for whoever has equity in ICEM. ICEM has about a hundred people so that's an average of of $1 million per employee -- though I doubt it is distributed that way.