Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Dassault Systèmes 2023 third quarter earnings presentation call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star one one on your telephone keypad. You will then hear an automatic message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to our first speaker today, Béatrix Martinez. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Thank you for joining us on our third quarter 2023 earnings conference call with Bernard Charlès, Chairman and CEO, joining us remotely. Pascal Daloz, Deputy Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer, and Rouven Bergmann, Chief Financial Officer. Dassault Systèmes results are prepared in accordance with IFRS. The financial figures discussed on this conference call are on a non-IFRS basis, with revenue growth rate on a constant currency basis, unless otherwise noted. Some of the comments of this call contain forward-looking statements that could differ materially from actual results. Please refer to today's press release and the risk factors section of our 2022 universal registration documents. All earnings materials are available on our website, and these transcripts will be available shortly after this call. I would now like to hand over to Bernard Charlès. Bernard?
Thank you, Béatrix. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us today. It's always a pleasure to be with you. In the third quarter, we outperformed in both revenue and profitability. We delivered a strong acceleration in growth, driven by large deal momentum, with software revenue up 12% above the high end of our target range. In particular, subscription revenue grew 18%, accelerating sequentially. We also delivered above our profitability objective, objectives with an operating margin of 31%, while continuing to invest in our future growth, increasing headcount by 5%. Our EPS was consistently strong, up 20% at constant currency.
Consequently, this strong result positioned us well to confirm the full-year objective, and by the way, most probably achieve our current 5-year plan that was initiated at the end of 2018. What I would like to convey today is that we find ourselves in a pivotal moment. Profound transformations are currently reshaping every sector of the economy. Our strategic positioning, unique positioning, I should say, with the Virtual Twin on the capacity to experience it for everything, what, how, and who, is really unique. Not only it provides us the opportunity to power our growth for the future, but more importantly, to bring significant value even more to our gigantic customer base. We can assist our client in remaining at the forefront of innovation and progress.
With Rouven, we'll provide more detail, insight into our financial performance, while Pascal will update you on how we have executed our vision and provide a business overview by sector, domains, and geography. So now, Pascal, it's your turn.
So let's start with a few comments following the capital market day. Today, our clients are driven by the ambitions to bring about metamorphosis, which is much more than the transitions, where they not only embrace a sustainable economy, shifting from linear to circular approaches, but also to achieve with fewer resources, their goal. They are also focusing on nurturing the experience economy, transitioning from product to experiences, characterized by personalization, contextualization, and automatic updates. These dual forces of sustainability and experience are essential element to our heritage, but also to our ambitions, the NEXT horizons we just defined for 2040. Within this landscape, the virtual twins are center pillars of the company knowledge and know-how, prove to be essential, not only during the innovation phases, but throughout the entire product life cycle. Over the last 40 years, our primary focus has been on innovations.
Now, we are increasingly expanding our focus from innovations to experiences. And the Virtual Twin comes into play to ensure the delivery of the experience itself, thereby facilitating its continuous improvement. They enable the management of the entire product life cycle, the things, the life of the things, including the experience, as well as promote the concept of the multiple life for the products, thus fostering circularity. The Virtual Twin enable also what we call the human-centered generative experiences. Each world matters, in fact. Human-centered means empowering humans. Generative means automatically creating based on the datasets. And experience refer to the overall interaction and responses from the users. So these human-centered generative experiences are shifting the value from the physical asset to the software, and our clients today rely on them to establish direct connections with their end-user customers, delivering personalized, connected, connected, smarter, and safer experiences.
This is truly the essence of the experience economy. As an example of these rapid adoptions, is the development of the software-defined vehicles by the automotive industry, and this trend may further accelerate the uptake of the Virtual Twins. At this stage, you might be wondering how we are fundamentally different from our competitors. What sets us apart is our capacity to offer a scientific representation of the world's complexity through our science-based virtual twin experiences. When suitable, we combine our modeling and simulations capability with generative artificial intelligence to create human-centered generative experiences. This concept is already implemented in the industry, and on the, you have some examples. For example, engineers can use the generative experience to explore new materials for the next generation of battery, creating a space of possibilities that open up new possibilities.
We empower the shop floor workers to seamlessly bridge the virtual and the physical world to enhance their experience, fostering synthesis that elevate their capabilities. We also assist business people and engineers in making informed business decisions, helping them to navigate the complexity of fluctuating raw material prices. Those are examples. Now, let's turn now to our operational highlight for the third quarter. During the third quarter, we saw a significant number of large commercial agreements, notably in the manufacturing sectors. What is motivating the customer to sign this transaction now is primarily the response to our customers' pressing needs to gain a competitive advantage, maintain profitability, meet regulatory sustainability deadlines, and decouple the economic growth from the resource consumption. Now, let's see what is happening in each sectors.
Our solutions are gaining momentum in the manufacturing sector for the reason mentioned, specifically in transportation and mobility, aerospace and defense, home and lifestyles, and consumer packaged goods and retailers. While we are entering in a less favorable investment cycle in life sciences, we firmly believe that the demand for new, efficient, and affordable drugs will necessitate a breakthrough innovations. And regarding infrastructure, I've mentioned on several occasions that our Virtual Twins are relevant for addressing the sector challenges. Our focus now is really on the go-to-market strategy to address the problem of the market's fragmentations. And to tackle this, we plan to establish partnership, and I will say a few words about one of them. Now, let's see, and let's zoom on, some specific example. Starting with manufacturing industry, during the quarter, we reached a significant milestone in our partnership with Jaguar Land Rover.
We renewed and extended our collaboration for the next 5 years, aligning with their reimagined strategy, which centers on their transformation into what they call the digital-first company. This partnership is built on the four key pillars. First, expanding the 3DEXPERIENCE platform usage from a little bit more than 8,000 to a little bit less than 20,000 users. This is also establishing JLR value network to operate globally within a unified environment. We are also providing a hybrid subscription model, cloud and on-premise, to support their flexible cloud migrations. And finally, we are committed to achieving the net zero carbon emission by 2039 with our solutions. The point which is probably new for you is the, this cloud-native model play, which is playing a crucial role in their decisions and underscores our leadership also in the cloud market. Now, turning next to life sciences.
As you know, over the last years, we have strategically directed our investment to support the growth of the therapeutic domain, but also the domain expertise of the clinical trial. This bring us differentiations and position us to anticipate the next transformation in the clinical trial through patient centricity first, and generative AI second. One of those domains is really the decentralized clinical trial, which is primary driver of our growth for Dassault Systèmes Medidata. And here is a customer example that substantiate my point. AbbVie, along probably with Moderna, are strong advocates of the decentralized clinical trial at scale... making them references in the field. And their commitment to decentralized clinical trials come with three key reasons. Firstly, this approach aims to increase the frequency of the data capture in the clinical trials, thereby providing a more substantial amount of data and measurements.
This data richness is really the pivotal for informed decisions making and enhancing the understanding of the trial outcomes. Secondly, decentralized clinical trials offer the opportunity to gather much more comprehensive contextual information and holistic data. This broadens the perspective and helps to better grasp the factor influencing clinical trial outcomes, this obviously improving the data analysis quality. Thirdly, this approach broaden the diversity of patients participating in clinical trial, and it's not limiting to the patient available in a specific hospital or site, thereby promoting a much more accurate representation of the general populations. Now, let's move to infrastructures and cities. Here is the example of the partnership I was mentioning previously, which enable us to start addressing the highly segmented infrastructure market at scale, and this is involved, WSP. WSP, it's an interesting company. It's one of the largest engineering firm in infrastructure.
Their headquarters in Canada, and they are the industry leader in the various sectors such as energy, waste, construction, and transportation infrastructure. WSP is making a significant investment in Virtual Twins to expand its portfolio and introduce new services for efficiently manage infrastructure projects. So with WSP, we are doing two things. First, we advance our infrastructure strategy in order for them to be equipped and to basically use the 3DEXPERIENCE platform for all the major infrastructure projects worldwide. And secondly, they want to use the Virtual Twin as a way to develop new services to operate the infrastructure project when it's done. So to conclude, I think we are confident that this kind of partnership will really enable us to scale our Virtual Twin in this sector and promoting a greater efficiency and sustainability. Now, let's move to our third quarter results across our geographies.
In Europe, we saw an acceleration with a revenue growth of 21%. Yeah, this growth is broad-based, with an increased subscription adoptions, and is driven by large transportation deals and also large deals in home and lifestyles. In the Americas, revenue growth was 9%, benefiting from continued momentum from subscriptions. And by sector, there were strong performances in transportation and mobility, aerospace and defense, infrastructure, energy, and materials. And in Asia, there was an improvement with the revenue growth of 5%, thanks to a double-digit growth in India and a solid performance in Japan. While there was some softness in Korea, China demonstrated resilience with a 6% increase, despite more challenging macroeconomic conditions in this country. Turning now to the product line performance for the third quarter.
Industrial innovation software revenue saw an excellent performance, and rose by 18%, and now represent 54% of the total software revenue. Our brands benefited from the larger 3DEXPERIENCE deal activity with the market share gains, demonstrating the unique positioning of Dassault Systèmes. CATIA, SIMULIA, ENOVIA, DELMIA, and NETVIBES show a double-digit growth during this period. In life sciences, software revenue rose by 3%. Medidata achieved a mid-single digit growth in the cloud subscription revenue, building on a strong comparison base, even stronger this quarter than the last one. As previously mentioned, this performance is affected by an industry-wide reduction in study start following the post-COVID surge. However, we are seeing substantial growth in the areas like decentralized clinical trial with Medidata Patient Cloud, and this transformative approach is shaping the future of the clinical trial and will counterbalance the volume compressions.
I really invite you to learn more about the industry transformation at our upcoming events, next, taking place on November sixth, seventh, and eighth, 2023 in New York City. In the mainstream innovations, SOLIDWORKS, we see an increase by 7%, and SOLIDWORKS transition to subscription is really accelerating at a high double-digit rate. And the two catalysts behind the shift is really the 3DEXPERIENCE cloud-based solutions adoptions. Please note that we are navigating this transition with SOLIDWORKS year-to-date growth in the mid to high single digits. And subscription is now representing a third of the new bookings as well. Additionally, we observe a consistent momentum with Centric PLM, driven by the home and lifestyle and consumer packaged goods and retails. And this momentum is notably reflected in an increasing contribution from the last years.
I think we are well positioned to become a global leader and make this a big impact on the, these three consumer engine-driven industries. So, conclusions. The strength of our performance in the car industry, together with our diversification across sector and domain, position us extremely well to achieve our 2020-2023 objectives of doubling EPS within the five years period, as initially planned. And our plans are always being ambitious, and when we crack them, we are highly motivated to achieve them. While it may be a little bit premature to claim early success, but our performance for this quarter has put us in a very good position to reach our goal. Furthermore, this accomplishment lay a solid foundation for the upcoming financial plan.
Now, I think it's time for Rouven to say a few words about the Q3 performance and the outlook for Q4. Rouven, you have the floor.
Thank you, Pascal. And also thank you for joining our call. Good morning and good afternoon. As you heard, clearly, a Q3 highlights strong performance and the anticipated acceleration in the second half of 2023, with software revenue up 12% year-over-year, above the high end of our objective. This momentum is driven by continued acceleration of subscription revenue growth, up 18% year-over-year, reflecting an increasing share of large 3DEXPERIENCE wins. Continued good momentum with SOLIDWORKS, adopting the subscription model and strong performance from Centric PLM. These subscription growth drivers are broad-based and evidenced across geos and industries, and they give us the confidence that our annual subscription revenue growth will continue to accelerate moving forward, despite the temporary lower contribution of Medidata, as explained during our last earnings call.
For the first 9 months, recurring revenue now accounts for 81% of total software revenue, which is up 80 basis points versus last year. To complement the strong software revenue growth, we also saw a rebound in upfront license revenue, up 20%. All of the above is reflecting the strength in new business growth and the anticipated acceleration versus the first half of the year. Services revenue was up 2% at constant currency, in line with our objective. Following the strong top-line performance, we also advanced towards expanding our profitability, as evidenced by an operating margin at 31%, up 50 basis points year-on-year, and EPS at $0.28, all above the objectives. Consequently, with these strong results in Q3, we confirm our full year objectives.
Before moving to our long-term growth drivers, let me briefly share a few remarks highlighting the impact of the large transactions this quarter. The framework is the following: We are expanding our relationships with existing clients as well as winning new ones, which we refer to as value up and value wide. From a revenue growth perspective, you see a healthy contribution to in-quarter growth in upfront license revenue, but more importantly, we are building the run rate and momentum in our subscription growth. To this end, we signed several multi-year subscription deals, where the customers have the flexibility to adopt our cloud at day one, laying the foundation for long-term, recurring revenue growth. Consequently, the increasing share of predictable revenue provides greater visibility and resiliency. Our strategic growth drivers of 3DEXPERIENCE and Cloud are at the center of the shift to our subscription model.
3DEXPERIENCE, 3DEXPERIENCE revenue rose 46% in Q3 at constant currencies. This reflects a share of 40% of 3DEXPERIENCE addressable software revenue, the highest contribution ever. In the first nine months, 3DEXPERIENCE revenue grew 18% to represent 34% of software revenue. Cloud revenue rose 10% in Q3, representing 25% of software revenue. While Medidata's growth contribution was lower this quarter, as anticipated, due to the strong comparison base, the growth in 3DEXPERIENCE Cloud remains at a very healthy clip. So we are well positioned to continue to capitalize on our leading position in key industries, capturing above market growth with 3DEXPERIENCE and Cloud. Now, let's review how we performed relative to the objectives we set for the third quarter.
To make it simple, we delivered strong results, beating all our key objectives. Total revenue was EUR 24 million above the mid and EUR 13 million above the high end, offsetting a negative currency impact of EUR 12 million. The operating margin was 70 basis points above the midpoint, at 31%, net of negative currency impact of 40 basis points. We continue to invest to support our strategic initiatives with a net headcount growth of over 1,100 for the first 9 months, which is up 5%. Most importantly, this overperformance in Q3 highlights that the impact of the expense carryover, which muted the margin performance in the first 6 months, is now behind us, and we are back to a normal trend with a year-over-year improvement of 50 basis points.
The strong operating performance of Q3 translates to EUR 0.28 in EPS, driving the upside with the higher end of our objectives. In addition, the contribution of higher financial income was neutralized by negative FX impact. In summary, I've been talking with you about our revenue growth acceleration since the beginning of the year. As evidenced by the strong Q3 results, we are delivering against what we said, w hile I will be addressing the full year outlook in a moment, it is important to highlight that we are trending well within our objective ranges for the first nine months. This further strengthens our confidence in our full year financial plan for revenue and profitability. Now, turning to cash flow and balance sheet items.
Cash and cash equivalents totaled EUR 3.368 million, compared to EUR 2.769 million at the end of 2022, which reflects an increase of EUR 599 million. At the end of the quarter, our net cash position totaled EUR 378 million, an increase of EUR 605 million, versus the net financial debt of EUR 227 million at December 31st, 2022. Now, let's look at what's driving our cash position at the end of the third quarter. We generated EUR 1.272 million operating cash flow year to date, in line with last year. Net income, adjusted for non-cash items and the balance of changes in working capital, are almost flat year to date, versus the first nine months of last year.
We expect the operating cash flow to resume to growth in Q4. To sum up, operating cash flow was mainly used for the cash dividend paid in Q2 of EUR 276 million, the net purchase of treasury shares for a total of EUR 240 million, CapEx of EUR 103 million, and repayment of lease liabilities of EUR 63 million. Lastly, the total FX impact is not significant this year as compared to the first three quarters of last year. Now, let's turn to our fiscal year 2023 objectives. There are two key messages that I want to share with you. First, we are confirming our guidance for revenue and operating margin, while increasing the outlook for EPS to EUR 1.20 as a midpoint of our range, which used to be the high end previously.
The second point addresses the notion of risk associated with the back-end loaded year, which some of you expressed. As mentioned before, Q3 highlights the anticipated growth acceleration in the second half, and this puts us in a position of strength to de-risk our Q4 or our Q4 outlook and remove these concerns. As such, we keep the midpoint of our total revenue objectives unchanged, while narrowing the range of total revenue to be now at EUR 5.945 billion-EUR 5.985 billion. For the margin, we apply the same logic, no change to the midpoint of 32.5%. In fact, we are compensating the FX segment with a stronger operating performance. This reflects the positive trend of the margin uplift in the second half of the year, versus the first six months, as mentioned before.
To summarize our full year 2024 objectives, we maintain growth rates at constant currency for software revenue at 8%-9% and total revenue at 8%-9%. This implies upfront license revenue in the range of 3%-4% and recurring revenue to be in the range of 10%-11%, with subscription growth unchanged in the range of 16%-17%. Services revenue is expected at 8%-9% growth. The operating margin remains at 32.3%-32.6%, with no change to the midpoint. Before closing, let me provide you with a few additional data points that will help to shape your models for Q4. Given the strong operating performance of Q3, we now project software revenue to grow 8%-10% in Q4.
This implies recurring revenue growth in the range of 10%-13% of 11%-13%, with subscription revenue increasing in the range of 18%-23%. We slightly adjust upfront license revenue to be now in the range of -1% to +3%, as we remain confident for the full year on the range of 3%-4%, as mentioned before. These objectives reflect continued momentum in subscription revenue growth from new deals and an increasing contribution from our run rate. Now, one additional comment regarding Medidata. We expect growth to re-accelerate in Q4 to achieve double-digit growth for the full year. In terms of profitability, we expect the operating margin in the range of 35.8% to 36.6%, and diluted EPS of EUR 0.35 to EUR 0.37.
This reflects a year-over-year improvement of 190 basis points and 10%-14% growth ex FX, respectively. Of course, for additional information and to review what we've just discussed, please take a look at today's earnings presentation. In conclusion, as evidenced by the strong Q3 results, we are on track to achieve our full year plan for revenue and profitability. Q3 performance is broad-based, driven by growth in 3DEXPERIENCE, closely aligned with the growth strategy as discussed during the Capital Market Day. Our subscription to revenue, our subscription revenue is driving the momentum of the company, while we deliver the productivity gains in the second half as planned. Finally, the confidence in the full year plan is supported by rebalancing our Q4 growth with a strong Q3 upside. And now, Bernard, Pascal, and I will be very happy to take your questions.
Thank you, dear participants. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone keypad and wait for a name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. This will take a few moments. And now we're going to take the first question from Jay Vleeschhouwer from Griffin Securities. Your line is open. Please ask your question.
Hello. Thank you. Hello, Bernard, Pascal, and Rouven. Let me start with you, Rouven, with regard to structural segment profitability. That is to say, the profitability of the segments, not just this quarter, but over time. Once upon a time, you used to disclose the margins for CATIA and SOLIDWORKS as being over 40%, and I assume that given their scale, that remains the case. But there must be other businesses, therefore, that are well below that, or below the corporate average. So perhaps you could discuss those businesses that you think could or should see margin leverage from where they are today. That would be the first question, and then a couple of others.
Well, I'll take a start at this, and, for sure, I think Pascal has a few points to add as well. Jay, good morning to you. Maybe I give you the example of Medidata, where you remember when, at the time of the acquisition, the margin was up 20%, and the growth we've generated since the acquisition, plus the margin and cash flow progression, with about 150-250 basis points, year-over-year improvement. This is typically, you know, what our ambition is. But we've also been, you know, at the right time to take the decision to invest, to ensure that we have the right level of resources and focus. We have done that for Medidata.
We have more than doubled the size of the company in terms of headcount, while at the same point in time, we were able to significantly elevate the profitability and drive the growth and set it up for long-term success. And, you know, the current slower performance is more, that's a temporary situation, which we'll fix. Of course, we have various businesses with different margin profiles. I will not go down the path of going into each segment.
Of course, the more mature businesses have a good profitability, which allows us to invest into the businesses that we are starting new, and that will be the future of Dassault Systèmes, like Centric PLM, where we very focusedly invest to build the muscle and the infrastructure and the expansion with the right level of resources to grow across all segments. You know, we are signing very large deals with Centric today, and we can only do that because we have invested and expanded our reach and our ability to you know to serve these clients. So it is an ongoing portfolio exercise to ensure that we do the right level of investment while ensuring the overall profitability of the company.
Okay. Maybe, Jay, what I could add is none of our brands or product line are loss-making. None of them, right? And if the question is, do we still have a potential to, for improvement? The answer is yes. And Rouven committed to improve on a yearly basis by 40-50 basis points the operating margin organically, right? Which means probably we also have the ability to do a little bit more if we consider that we could do also some acquisition and having a dilutive impact on top of this.
Okay. Pascal, for you, let me ask you about something that we've been talking about since the summer of 2020, namely your vertical strategy for your cloud infrastructure. And then more recently, you'll recall that we spoke briefly at the analyst meeting in June about your product roadmap, and they may be related, but in any case, I'd like to ask about both. So with cloud infrastructure, how do you think about the capacity that you need to have in place to hit your 2025 revenue objective of EUR 2 billion? For example, as of the spring of this year, you had about a dozen data centers, and that number doesn't seem to have changed over the last year or so.
To get to EUR 2 billion or to support EUR 2 billion of cloud revenue, how are you thinking about the expanded capacity in regions or number of data centers to do that? And then with respect to product roadmap, when we think about what some of your competitors are doing in terms of their architecture, and where V6 is going to be by the end of your current forecast period, namely 15 years or so, is it too soon to start talking about what we perhaps could call now V7? In other words, what's your next generation that you think gets you to the end of the forecast period and beyond?
Thank you, Jay, for the question. Let's start with the first-
I knew you'd like them.
Yeah, yeah. And maybe the last part could be also for Bernard, if he wants to add a few things. But anyway, let me start with the first part of the question, which is related to the strategy by verticals. So you're right. I mean, it's, you remember two years ago, almost the new, the diversification industry were the one adopting the cloud first. Now we can see different patterns. We have a decent number of significant deals, having this hybrid model whereby we are giving the ability to ease the transitions to the cloud over the next five years. And JLR, for example, is one of them.
This is also happening for the SOLIDWORKS, because as you know, the move to subscription with, for SOLIDWORKS is linked also to the move to the new generation of SOLIDWORKS, which is the one being connected with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud as well. Having said that, if you look at the capacity we have on the cloud today, there is no need to expand significantly with new data center. I mean, we probably have to open one or two more to cover different region of the world, because you remember, it's the most important is to basically to have the data center being placed, to have a latency, which is roughly occur around 10 milliseconds, right? That's the way to define the, how to basically, to define the territory we could cover with one data center. But in parallel, you remember, it's a hybrid model.
We are also using external capacity because the system is transparent, whatever we use, 3DS Outscale, as an infrastructure, or if we are using, for example, AWS. And by doing so, there is no need for us to invest significantly in order to basically have the full capacity to support this EUR 2 billion revenue you were just mentioning. So I think we are relatively well equipped, and this hybrid model, I think it's really the right way to go, because depending the usages, we have an ability to sub-segment the market in a smart way, if you want. Now, related to the product roadmap, I think, as you say, we have introduced the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the market in 2012.
Now, a little bit more than 10 years after, you know, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is the standard in aerospace and defense, is also the standard in the auto sector. And we see also the adoption in the large verticals, such as industrial equipment, accelerating also. So to a certain extent, I think, you know, it's probably too early to discuss about what's next, especially in the context that the 3DEXPERIENCE platform has been designed to be cloud-based first, to be modeling and simulation on one hand, but also to have the data science capability on the other hand. And we have enough, to a certain extent, to continue to conquest the verticals and the customers we are serving today with it. So that's my answer at this stage. Jay.
Okay. And maybe to conclude, of course, on SOLIDWORKS, would it be accurate to say, Pascal, that new SOLIDWORKS seats declined sequentially from a very strong Q2 into Q3, and moreover, that perhaps new SOLIDWORKS volume was even lower than in Q1? Perhaps up some still year over year, but was Q3, in fact, the lowest quarter for new SOLIDWORKS units of 2023.
No, Jay, I think it's not true. In fact, knowing that we're gonna speak together, I checked this before the call. So, no, we are, to give you the order of magnitude, we are a mid-single-digit growth in terms of units compared to last year, Q2. And if you look at per quarter, it's almost relatively in the same order of magnitude, is a little bit more than 20,000 units per quarter. What is nevertheless maybe tweaking a little bit your model is the fact that a third of the new booking is subscription-based now. Right. Which is, and it was 15% last year. So that's the reason why maybe when you do your computations, you have a hard time to recover numbers.
But frankly speaking, the, the growth in terms of units is still a good one, solid one. It's growing extremely well in Europe as well as in Asia. And where we see a low single-digit growth is much more in North America, in terms of number of units, right?
Okay. Well, good. Thank you for that clarification, and,
You're welcome.
That's all I have for now. Thank you.
Thank you, Jay.
Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. Just give us a moment. The next question comes through line of Jason Celino from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please ask your question.
Great. Thank you. You know, good quarter. Seems like, the macro environment, the business environment, it seems to be holding in, doing well. When we think about linearity of the strength or linearity of the new business momentum in the quarter, I'm curious how it kind of shaped out, and, if you're able to maybe have some of the early weeks of this quarter, soon be tracking.
Jason, yes, I'll be. In terms of linearity in Q3, I think one of the key characteristics of this quarter is the acceleration in subscription revenue from 13%-18%, plus the strong contribution from large transactions that we were referring to, that Pascal discussed. And there's a part of this, I mentioned in my prepared remarks, that you see visible in the quarter, but the majority of the contracted value is going to come in future periods. So from a linearity standpoint, right, this has improved our visibility into the future periods for the subscription revenue. Which also gives us, I think, a good view on the rest of the year, and helps us then to be prepared for 2024. And in terms of if you mention this linearity, for example, you know, Q3, Q4, pull forward topic.
In Q3, there was no really significant change between what was initially in Q4. So what we reported in Q3 was really part of our Q3 visibility. In Q4 in that regard, we have also a solid pipeline towards the end of the year that's not affected by the Q3 performance. Nevertheless, for the full year, we kept our guidance unchanged for the reasons I mentioned. Now we have improved visibility, and achieving our guidance of 8%-9% in total revenue is now what we are focused on.
Okay, great. No, thanks, Rouven. And then, maybe a follow-up on Jay's question on SOLIDWORKS. So the one-third of new bookings being subscription-based, you know, up from 15% last year, nice momentum. Is there anything on the go-to-market side that you'd say has been a real catalyst that's been driving that? And then of which maybe 3DEXPERIENCE Works, you know, family of the brands, are seeing, you know, the greater strength there?
Jason, there are a few things behind this. One is definitively the maturity of the portfolio of the Works family, which has been, you know, we have enough reference cases to give confidence to the market. But the other part is also, I think our resellers, they prepare themselves. It was, if you remember, we had many times this discussion a few, a few years ago about the ability for our distribution network to adopt the cloud solutions, to adopt the new generation of SOLIDWORKS and the Works family at large, and also to slightly change the business model to foster or to promote in an extensive way, the subscription model. And I think we are at the point where now it's, it's done. I think the resellers, they know how to do this.
They are comfortable with basically the transitions. They have made the adjustment also for their own business model. So that's the reason why you are seeing such an acceleration, between the last year and this year.
Okay, great. And then maybe one quick one, if I can fit it in on, on SIMULIA. It seems like we've seen some good strengths, double-digit growth in multiple quarters. I guess, are you seeing kind of, that being driven from more cross-sell activity and expansions, or have there been some competitive displacements? Thank you.
It's, it's a little bit of both. But I would say the significant things which is really changing, is now simulation is part of the large deals we are signing with key customers. If you remember, for a long time, simulation was almost something aside, a decision done by the specialists. And the integration with the platform of all the simulation suite is really making the difference. And that's the reason why, to a certain extent, we have this ability also to displace the competition in some large accounts. Now, having said that, there are still domain where, you know, the SIMULIA portfolio is really, leading the pack, and we continue to display the competition on the structural analysis, and also, more and more on the fluid part.
Related to the electromagnetics for the high frequency, we are by far the leading solutions on the market, and the 5G is really driving the market momentum on this.
Great. Thank you.
Welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jason.
Dear participants, as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone keypad. Now we're going to take our next question, and it comes from Michael Briest from UBS. Your line is open, please ask your question.
Yes, good afternoon. A couple from me. Just clarifying on the JLR deal, can you talk about how that works in practice? Does the customer start on premise and then over time, that migrates into the cloud, so we'll see subscription revenues initially on premise, then moving into the cloud? And I think there was a comment this morning, it was as large as the Boeing deal, given that was supposedly $1 billion over 30 years. Is that correct, or did I mishear that? And then I had a question on Medidata.
Okay, cool. Hello, Michael. Thanks for your question. Let me clarify the first point. So, it's a hybrid deal, where the customer has the right to use our software in the cloud and on premise. There are certain parts of the portfolio where they start natively in the cloud and others, they will transition over time to the cloud, but it provides the full flexibility. Of course, we work with the customer on the roadmap. It's a five-year transaction, but there is flexibility to evolve over time, and it's fully committed. So this, from our perspective, makes the cloud transition, really puts it into the hand of the customers as they are expanding through their value network. And that's what's really behind this.
Relating to the second point, Michael, what we said this morning is on a yearly basis, it's the same order of magnitude between the Boeing contracts and the JLR contract.
Right.
Which is EUR 100 million of.
Okay. And actually, going back to the CMD, when we looked at the cloud ambition, Medidata was about two-thirds of it, or life sciences, and then Centric was a good chunk of what was left. It always struck me that the core business wasn't expected to move massively to the cloud. I'm assuming you knew about this transaction in June. Is that right, or is that maybe an area of upside risk to the cloud ambition for 2028, that this core business moves more quickly?
Michael, I apologize, but the line was cut for a moment. If you could please just quickly repeat? I got the last part of the question, but I want to make sure we address it properly. If you could quickly recap, it would be helpful.
Sorry. Yes, I mean, so at the CMD, the EUR 3 billion cloud ambition seemed to rely a lot on life sciences and Centric and not much on the core. Have your views changed, or?
No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. I think we purposely, the chart that we have on the cloud adoption across our portfolio is more conceptually and as a framework. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform, as you know, drives the lion's share of our organic growth in the next plan. And of course, with this, we are building our foundation to the cloud transition of our installed base and our industrial clients through the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, who have. We're starting to, you know, we're selecting paths to start natively in the cloud and others that will transition at a certain point in time based on their priorities. But now for them, it's important. They want to secure, with these transactions, the next 3-5+ or 10 years with us, and therefore, they need to have a stable platform.
They need to build their roadmap, but they want to have a trusted and reliable partner in this. And of course, the cloud transformation is centered to that. This is why this hybrid flexible model is so essential on this transformation, and it gives us the visibility. As it relates to Centric and Medidata, you know, the Medidata performance, this is temporary, and it will accelerate. We will see that already in 2024. And for Centric, we see very strong performance, and increasingly also with the cloud. So from the perspective of the EUR 3 billion, I think we are well on our way, and we are building the foundation for that to continue to grow our cloud subscription revenue. I already expect in Q4 this to shape compared to what we reported in Q3.
Okay. And then just finally on Medidata, the Salesforce, a couple of days ago, announced their clinical cloud, including one on operations, and I'll read it. It says, "Helps life sciences set up and execute efficient trials, both traditional and decentralized, to better support participants, clinical site studies, and sponsors." Obviously, it's very early, but are you concerned about them as a competitor? Do you know the scope of their ambition?
I can take it if you want, Rouven. I spoke with them. What they are proposing is, you know, the infrastructure as a service to give some computing power and storage capacity to host the massive clinical trial. But they are—they have no intentions to move to the clinical trial operations the way we do it, which is, you know, equipping all the patients with the systems to collect the data, to manage the record, to do, you know, to do the certifications, to manage the site, the enrollment of the patients, the report for the FDA, which is a domain of expertise by itself, and they do not have this ability. However, as you may know, many of the large pharma are already using Salesforce for the commercial activities.
You remember, they basically, they terminate the contract with one of our competitors, who have developed a vertical application on this front with them, on their, on their platform. Just because they have the common infrastructure as a service, there is certain time benefit to use AWS as an infrastructure for the commercial activities and the clinical trial. But again, not on the application level, neither on the platform level, much more as a, as an infrastructure.
Okay. That's very clear. Thank you, Pascal.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Now we're going to take our last question for today. Just give us a moment. The last question comes from the line of Laurent Daure from Kepler Cheuvreux. Your line is open. Please ask your question. Excuse me, Laurent, your line is open. Please ask your question.
Yes, thank you. Thanks for taking my question. A few last one, if I may
The first one is on the Medidata business. You are kind enough to share with us the bookings, the retention rate. I was just wondering how much time it takes to go from bookings to sales growth, because between the 120% retention rate, 20% booking growth, and only 5% growth, it would be helpful to understand a bit better the mechanics and how much time it takes to convert. The second question is very clearly on BIOVIA. When do you expect to transition to subscription to not be a drag anymore? And my final question is on the competitive landscape. So basically, you are looking to continue to win market share in clinical trials, but who do you win against, and who are the loser in that market, you think? Thank you.
Okay. Laurent, I start with the first one. So you see the overall fundamentals of the business for Medidata continue to be very healthy. We renew with our existing clients. When we renew, we expand. And, you know, of course, these bookings are carried forward into our backlog that we recognize over time. That's one part of the story. The other part we addressed earlier, today and over the last weeks as well in discussions, and I know you're familiar with this, but I want, and I have to repeat it here, which is the fact that we have some part of our business which is volume dependent, which goes through our CRO partners. And as these volumes are compressing, they are affecting our revenue that we can book.
This is really what, right now, the, the counter effect that we see on, on, converting overall our bookings to revenue. Because, you know, you have, of course, on one side, you have the growth, which is coming from the new bookings that are growing very, very well. But at the same point in time, there are certain studies ending, where we stop the revenue, and this net of it has resulted in Q3 of 5% growth. But keep in mind, the baseline effect of Q3 2022 was very high, the 17% growth, and that will be different in Q4, and then, of course, in 2024.
So as we said, we, you know, Q4, there's a number of significant deals in front of us, and with once, you know, we consolidated our bookings for the full year, then we create the backlog for 2024, and we know the conversion of this into next year and the associate- and the resulting revenue growth. That's the model. I don't know, Pascal, do you want to address the BIOVIA point, or?
Oh, the BIOVIA, I think, we are starting to be close to the end of the transition. So I will, If I have to guess, it's probably, an additional, little bit less than a year before to have almost complete, the transition. And the last point, which is related to the competitive, landscape. As you may know, we are acting in three subsegments in the clinical trial. One is really the traditional EDC markets, where clearly we are gaining market share still against Oracle, which remember, it's, they are not only being the incumbent, but they used to be the one having the largest market share.
In the decentralized clinical trial, I mean, the landscape is much more occupied by startups, and one of them, is so-called Medable, and we are gaining, against them significantly, at a point whereby we are rescuing some of their, trial right now, being in danger because they have our time to deliver. And in the AI space, it's much more, I would say, embryonic, the competitions, because you remember, you need to have the data set for this, and we are one of the few company having the large data set. And the, the key competitors, even if we cannot call them competitors, are much more co-competitors, are the CROs, because they are the one also making some analytics using more and more AI in order to leverage the data they have collected also.
But we are partnering with them to empower them to do it. So that's how we are continuing to gain market share along the three subsegments of the market.
Do you have a? My very last point. Do you have, in this market, a lot of clients that are using not just one supplier, or is it really concentrated?
No, no, many of them. I mean, it's, you know, life sciences is not like aerospace or the transportation and mobility sectors. Many of life sciences company, they have a highly fragmented information systems and they are using different point solutions. The platform concept, which is really the one we are pushing in this industry, is pretty new.
So, but what we can say is on all the three pillars I just mentioned, you'll always have one providers, one software providers, which is leading the pack. But it's very rare when everything is standardized on this. So you have a coexistence on many things. And there is a reason for that, because the trial is nothing more than the project base, if you want. You have a starting point and an end point, and you can use a system, the type of the trial, and use another one for another trial.
So the way we do it, at least for the larger enterprise, we have enterprise agreement, giving them the ability to do most of their trial with our systems. With the CRO, it's much more a consumption model, it's study by studies, right? And for the mid-market, more and more, they are moving from study by studies to enterprise agreement as well.
Okay, that's very clear. Thank you so much for that, Pascal.
Thank you, Laurent. I think it's time to conclude. Bernard, if you want to say a few words
Yes.
to conclude.
Yes, thank you very much all of you for participating. Just for, I would like to add two remarks. One, the key strategy for Outscale, which is the abstraction of the cloud architecture, is really serving, as Pascal said, specific client needs, sovereignty, extreme secret environment, or highly specific computing environment. When it comes to basic services, where we don't need to have our own data centers. But a lot of customers that we have want highly sensitive, sovereign, insured on extreme secret environment, and that's why the architecture is powerful. On the architecture, it's intriguing, and I will talk to you more about that, because as Pascal asked me, as chairman, not being now in charge of operation at all, and will be the CEO, January first.
He is already acting as the CEO. I will have time to spend on architecture, on research, and it's going to be a fun time for me. Back to my foundations before I joined Dassault Systèmes. So, back to square one, and thank you, Pascal, for asking this. Add this on top of my chairman function, which we started first of this year. Thank you very much, all of you. It's always a pleasure to have to talk to you on... I know that Pascal has invited me to for my last call in February for the full year 2023, under five years plan. So it will be a great pleasure to see many of you.
After that, I will only act for governance, but nothing related to quarterly reports. All the best to all of you, and enjoy your day, and enjoy the end of the year.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect. Have a nice day.