PTC's Continued Focus and Commitment in Global Automotive Industry Drives Success

NEEDHAM, Mass., Dec. 15, 2003 -- PTC , the product development company(TM), continues to deliver on its commitment to the global automotive industry, evidenced by a number of significant recent sales. As a result, PTC has increased its installed base in the automotive industry to approximately 3,000 customers.

Of special note is PTC's leadership and focus in Powertrain development between both OEM's and the extended supply chain, where manufacturers continue to standardize on PTC solutions in their Powertrain organizations. Many of the top 40 automakers, tier one suppliers and engineering service companies use PTC solutions for Powertrain development including BMW, Volkswagen, Fiat, Ferrari, Volvo Truck, Daihatsu, Hino Motors, ZF, Siemens VDO Automotive, INA, Bosch Rexroth, Robert Bosch, Eaton, Dana, Federal Mogul, Cummins, AVL, First Auto Works and Tata engineering.

Notable wins during the second half of PTC's fiscal 2003 (ended September 30,2003) include BMW, Chang An Automobile, Dongfeng Automobile, Shaanxi Automobile; Toyota Motor Corporation and Volkswagen.

"We understand the business processes that our automotive customers follow and the issues they face," says Bill Berutti, PTC Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy. "We know many of these companies are striving to improve their competitive position by reducing development times and reliance on physical prototypes as they standardize their engineering processes. This requires tools that provide virtual development and workflow capabilities from concept to production, together with coordination with the extended supply chain. PTC has developed the latest versions of its products to address these industry specific trends and requirements and will continue to address those needs in the future."

Webasto, a supplier of sunroofs, convertible car-top systems, modular roof systems and temperature management, agrees. The company needed to standardize processes such as change management worldwide and needed to integrate heterogeneous CAD-systems and different installations of ERP-systems into a leading product data management (PDM) backbone system. Using PTC Solutions, Webasto accomplished this and also shortened development time by making data easy to find and available worldwide. It also accelerated international coordination from five days to just a few minutes.

Webasto Board Member Dr. Wolfgang Thurow, confirms that point: "PTC's Windchill significantly improves our internal and external collaboration. Since we develop our products in global teams worldwide, the ability to efficiently communicate on a global level gives us a great competitive advantage."

Leading the Way in 3-D Visualization

3-D visualization is currently a pervasive cross-functional requirement in the automotive industry as it adopts product lifecycle management (PLM). PTC is one of the first members of the JT Open initiative along with global automotive leaders such as Ford and General Motors. Members are adopting the JT format as a common data format for visual collaboration and interoperability.

The Volkswagen group's selection of PTC's ProductView software as a group- wide standard for the visualization of 3-D data created in the product development process is a validation of the importance of 3-D visualization. "The fact that we have chosen PTC's ProductView as the corporate visualization solution emphasizes the spread of 3-D-based working processes within the Volkswagen group and its increasing penetration with virtual product development," says Dr. Trac Tang, Director of IS Product Development at the group's headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany.

"The premier task of PTC's ProductView is to provide a uniform tool for the visualization of 3-D data throughout the wide array of corporate processes. As a part of our integrated product data management infrastructure (iPDM), ProductView is also available to users who have no access to a CAD workstation," Dr. Tang continues.

Driving the "Higher Quality at Lower Cost" Imperative

"Today the Automotive industry is faced with providing innovative product concepts at continuously reducing price premiums," says Dhiren Verma, Director of Vertical Market Development at PTC. 'This is further exacerbated by overcapacity and the resulting incentive wars seen recently. Correspondingly, reducing product and manufacturing costs are imperative in this competitive environment. Our Create, Collaborate and Control solutions help clients increase design reuse and develop higher quality, lower cost products." ArvinMeritor Inc., a PTC customer and a premier $7-billion global supplier of a broad range of integrated systems, modules and components to the motor vehicle industry, needed to design a new generation tandem axle with integrated bearing cage, new sets of pinions and gear sets to satisfy various gear ratios. Using PTC's Pro/E solution enabled ArvinMeritor to shorten product development cycle by 45%, accelerate time-to-market by 30% and reduce product development costs by 35%.

"PTC Solutions has helped us by cutting time-to-market and development costs. This leads to a higher market share and increased revenue," says ArvinMeritor Inc. design engineer Kumar Ramaiah.

Relentless Pursuit of Extracting Value from Product Development

To ensure a strong focus on the critical issues in this industry, PTC and RWTH Aachen, a top European center for manufacturing research, have initiated a Global Research Study with leading Automotive OEM's and Suppliers worldwide to better understand their product development strategies and capabilities, and the resulting impact on their financial performance. Senior executives, responsible for leading new product development activities, have been surveyed. Conclusions and findings are being prepared by industry experts and will be available in early 2004. PTC will use these results to further define the critical success factors for its automotive customers.

About PTC

PTC develops, markets, and supports software solutions that help manufacturers win with superior products. PTC is the world's largest software company with a total commitment to product development. The company services more than 35,000 customers worldwide. Further information on PTC is available at http://www.ptc.com/ or call 1-888-782-3776, ext. 901 Except for the historical information contained herein, matters discussed in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These include: the effective coordinate of our joint research and development initiatives; our successful development and integration of the technology necessary to offer an integrated Product Development System for an expanded user base that adequately responds to evolving customer requirements; the success of our partnering initiatives; the success of our cost reduction initiatives; and the effects of a weakening economy which may impact the overall demand for software and related services; as well as other risks and uncertainties detailed from time to time in reports filed by PTC with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Company's most recent reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q. The announcement of any particular order is not necessarily indicative of the timing of recognition of revenue from such order or the level of revenue for any particular period.

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