Dassault Systèmes: Revenue Report, New COO, Increase Focus on Virtual Twin

Dassault Systèmes, the 3DEXPERIENCE company, is starting the weekend with a little business, by making several announcements. First, the company revealed its IFRS unaudited financial results for the 4th quarter and year ended December 31st, 2019. The results, reviewed by the Board of Directors earlier this week, show that Dassault’s total revenue went up by 13%, from €3.65 to €4.06 billion, and that it’s expected to keep growing in 2020 by 21-23%. You can read the highlights, and financial summary, for Q4 and Fiscal Year 2019 here.

“All IFRS and non-IFRS figures are presented in compliance with IFRS 15 and IFRS 16, which have been applied since January 1st, 2018 and January 1st, 2019, respectively,” Dassault declared in a news release.

The company also announced that its Chief Financial Officer, Pascal Daloz, has now also been appointed Chief Operating Officer. In this new position, created to help expand Dassault’s strategic direction and empower its “new generation of leadership,” Daloz will lead the new Operations Executive Committee, which will support the company’s goal to drive innovation in the sectors of manufacturing, life sciences and healthcare, and infrastructure and cities.

“Pascal’s strong knowledge of Dassault Systèmes and his skills in a wide range of domains such as science and engineering are major assets that will enable him to accomplish the dual role of Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer.  His appointment also reflects our plan to prepare for the company’s future while maintaining continuity in its leadership and direction,” stated Bernard Charlès, the company’s Vice Chairman and CEO. “In only two years as CFO, Pascal has already defined new strategic and financial ambitions for the company. For these reasons, Pascal is the right person to help me implement Dassault Systèmes’ vision of transforming industries, markets and customer experiences with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, ensure the execution of the company’s holistic, growth-centric strategy, and manage its performance.”

Daloz joined Dassault Systèmes in 2001 as Vice President Research & Development in charge of market development, and has been moving up the ranks ever since, including being named Executive Vice President, Brands and Corporate Development in 2014. He has helped the company enter new sectors and embrace future trends, including acquiring Medidata in October; this decision helped to cement life sciences as Dassault’s second largest core industry. As COO, he will coordinate the company’s operational decision-making processes for strategic functions, including the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and its 11 brands.

Speaking of life sciences, the company has announced its strategic direction for the future, which focuses on solutions for the life science industry through developing the human digital twin – really, a virtual twin.

“In 1989, we created the first virtual twin of a giant airplane, the Boeing 777,” explained Charles. “In 2012, observing that the world was shifting to an experience economy that values usage over product, we dared to imagine a platform that would use comprehensive virtual twins of things as the place to navigate, evaluate, and holistically experiment with an idea to make it reality. We named it the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Our customers, as they adopt it, are making it the catalyst and enabler of the Industry Renaissance. Our ambition to harmonize product, nature and life remains the same, while its scope is broadening. It has led us to develop a new understanding of life and nature.  Today, we’re capable of applying the knowledge and know-how we acquired in the non-organic world to the living world, extending our focus from things to life. The virtual twin experience of the human body will enable us to invent new ways of representing life by understanding and representing the invisible, and make a lasting contribution for the benefit of all.”

You’ve likely heard of the digital twin, which is an idea that in the digital manufacturing world, by combining software with mass customization, every product in a company’s inventory will have a unique file that contains all of its specific settings and production information. But the human body is far more complex, and the healthcare industry needs to refine how therapies for patient care are discovered, developed, produced, used, and commercialized. A virtual twin can change how we cure people, as it enables health-related disciplines to understand, test, model, and treat the human body – just like the digital twin makes this possible for products in industrial sectors.

“Why “virtual” rather than digital? Well, precisely because the value of what we do lies in the potential it offers for imagining the future. “Virtual” is about what’s possible – the potentiality. In that sense, the virtual is the very essence of human nature: we are virtual beings. We are beings of possibility,” Dassault writes on its website.

“So to improve life, we have to invent new ways of representing reality. We have to invent the virtual twin experience of life.”

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform can integrate collaboration, information intelligence, modeling, and simulation to make a virtual twin of the human body possible. By combining material sciences, information sciences, and biosciences, stakeholders will be able to to actually project an object’s data onto a living, virtual model, which can then be configured and simulated for research and testing purposes. For example, before a human patient is treated, researchers could potentially be able to see how a certain drug could affect a disease.

Dassault will be building up its leadership in healthcare and life sciences, along with manufacturing industries and infrastructure and cities, as these all have similar sustainability needs and development processes in the ongoing efforts to improve our overall quality of life.

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