Schneider Electric raises €6B in France's largest-ever accelerated equity deal
What's the deal? Schneider Electric has raised roughly €6 billion through an accelerated share placement to help fund its planned acquisition of US-listed software firm PTCDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. It issued 25 million new shares at €240 each — about 4.32% of its share capital before the deal — to qualified investors. A&O Shearman advised the banks; Linklaters advised Schneider Electric.
Why now? The raise partially finances Schneider's purchase of PTC, a provider of software for complex industrial product design, engineering, and data management. The PTC deal carries an equity value of about €20 billion and is expected to close by Q3 2027, subject to approvals.
By the numbers: Linklaters calls this the largest accelerated equity offering ever by a French company. At roughly €6 billion, it ranks in the top percentile of all-time post-IPO equity rounds in French hardware across a sample of 206. Shares priced at a roughly 5% discount to the prior close.
What's the endgame? Schneider is a global energy technology group focused on electrification, automation, and digitalisation, with 160,000 employees across more than 100 countries. The PTC deal — alongside its planned Cognite acquisition — pushes it deeper into industrial software and AI.
What could go wrong? The equity raise is just one piece of the financing; Schneider also plans €16–17 billion of debt to fund the purchase. Integrating a major software business at that scale is a far larger undertaking than a routine capital raise.
The signal: Schneider's Q3 2026 revenue rose 17% organically, driven by triple-digit data-centre demand. The size of this placement shows how hard industrial giants are leaning into software and AI to capture that growth — and how far they'll stretch their balance sheets to do it.
Read more: europesays.com
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