Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Dassault Systèmes fourth quarter 2020 full year earning conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session you may need to press star one on your telephone keypad. I must remind that this conference is being recorded today. I would now like to hand the conference over to François Bordonado. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Alicia. Thank you for joining us on the fourth quarter earnings conference call with Bernard Charlès, Vice Chairman and CEO, and Pascal Daloz, Chief Operating Officer and CFO. Dassault Systèmes results are prepared in accordance with IFRS, and most of the financial figures discussed on this conference call are on a non-IFRS basis, with revenue growth rates in constant currencies, unless otherwise noted. Some of our comments on this call contain forward-looking statements that could differ materially from actual results. Please refer to today's press release and the risk factor section of our 2019 Document d'enregistrement universel, our regulatory annual report. All earnings material are available on our website, and these prepared remarks will be available shortly after this call. Please, Bernard, you have the floor.
Thank you, François. Thank you for joining, good morning or good afternoon to all of you. We hope everyone is keeping well. Summarizing our progress during 2020, it was about delivering on our financial and corporate social responsibility objectives. Revenue increased 12% to EUR 4.5 billion, which means by the way, almost $5.5 billion. We break the EUR 5 billion line. We maintain a solid operating profitability at 30.2%, despite the pandemic acquisition dilution, of course, on grew EPS. When the health crisis hit, most of the world went into first lockdown, we committed to retaining our employees, we did. In addition, we increased our research and development account by 10% during 2020. Despite the economic disruption to many industries, we reported software growth in 2020 for aerospace, High-Tech, home and lifestyle, energy and minerals, and construction, cities and territories.
The Life Sciences industry grew significantly, becoming our second-largest industry, representing 21% of our total software in 2020, adding Medidata and our other brands. This past year also demonstrated three key points. The mission-critical nature of Dassault Systèmes to industries within the three major sectors of the economy we address. Our market leadership across our three product lines, leading in industrial innovation, Life Sciences, and healthcare, as well as mainstream innovation. The third point, the sustainability of our organization, and confidence in the future with our next generation executive team transitioned into place in a seamless manner. Finally, looking to the years ahead, we will leverage our purpose focused on sustainable innovation, our large potential addressable market of over EUR 100 billion on our 3DEXPERIENCE platform, where the experience is the relationship we have as consumer, citizen, and passion.
I would like to wind back to one year ago, before the word pandemics would become part of our, unfortunately, daily conversations. On February 6, 2020, we introduced our ambition to extend our focus from things to life. What is the difference between things and life? Life is not made of parts. The human body is one piece of an hyper-connected set. Life does not do standardization. It's personalized design, production, and usage. Life is not used, but lived. Life is an experience. To improve life, we have to invent new ways of representing reality. We have to invent the virtual twin experience of life. We constructed the underlying foundation to begin changing in nature by shifting our thinking, moving from connection to relationship, and from making to growing across all sectors we serve.
Addressing industries within three sectors of the economy, our objective is to be a game changer. It's our DNA. In the life science industry, we are the leader, mission-critical to addressing three key challenges: creating precision medicine platforms, deploying digital and AI in developing therapies, and helping the healthcare industry delivering value-based care. We are extending our portfolio at our customers, both in number of products sold and value delivered, thanks to our data-centric approach. Importantly, we are connecting the dots to enable faster innovation and to improve the patient experience. The health crisis demonstrated the ability of the pharmaceutical companies to reimagine and shorten the timetable of innovation from 15 years to develop a vaccine to 15 months. Medidata was a critical partner with its clinical software solutions, used in an estimated 60% of COVID-19 clinical trial during 2020.
We have a very clear strategy in life science, looking across all of Dassault Systèmes assets, our scientific brands led by Medidata, BIOVIA, and SIMULIA. It does not stop there. We see today that time to innovation in vaccine development is critical, but being able to source materials, maintain batch quality, and manufacture at hyper scale are vitally important also. In addition to our scientific brands, our coverage of pharmaceutical and medical device companies benefits from our manufacturing assets inside DELMIA as well as SOLIDWORKS and ENOVIA portfolios. Underscoring our unique end-to-end platform offer for life science, we signed our first last transaction combining patient engagement using myMedidata as well as Medidata EDC, called Rave, with manufacturing operations and supply chain process optimization provided by other brands within Dassault Systèmes.
In addition, we are pleased to share that Novo Nordisk, focused on effective treatments for chronic diseases such as diabetes, has adopted our 3DEXPERIENCE platform to design insulin syringes. This example reflects the convergence of medical devices and drugs and shows that treatments are becoming patient-centric in nature. Novo Nordisk has been a SIMULIA user a long time. In manufacturing industry, Dassault Systèmes is the software partner for digital transformation, thanks to our enterprise platform at each step of the life cycle. This is not just a PDM system. It's a business system. We help our customer to be resilient in industries with long life cycles, enabling them to reduce cost, and importantly, to rethink their portfolio and make it more sustainable. Our data-centric and online offer leverage direct connections within customers.
In transportation and mobility, Renault has selected us to be the software partner for Software République, as they call it, an ecosystem to strengthen their sovereignty in key technologies for the new mobility and to enable their massive shift to connected vehicles. In aerospace and defense, Spirit AeroSystems, the world's largest tier 1 manufacturer of aerostructure, is expanding its adoption of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to compete for and win contracts on upcoming program by reducing time to market, non-recurring costs, and recurring costs through operation and governance efficiency. In home and lifestyle, we see the illustration of the power of relationships on our brands. Danish shoe manufacturer and retailer, ECCO, is one of the world's leading shoe brand. We are pleased to announce that ECCO is adopting Centric PLM to move to e-commerce, one of the major trends in the industry.
By the way, they were already a CATIA user for parametric design. In infrastructure and cities, we are the challenger of the market, and we provide game-changer solutions, unavailable from any other competitor, by the way. Two example include Lithium Valley, who is adopting the 3DEXPERIENCE platform civil infrastructure engineering solution. This initiative, driven by Western Australia authorities, has the objective to create a manufacturing hub supporting the development and processing of critical minerals and lithium for energy storage, developing batteries with high performance, safety, and long life. We have significant traction in China with the civil infrastructure engineering industry solutions experience for energy, transportation, and health.
With increased expectation on infrastructure, engineering firms need to deliver higher-performing designs with lower lifecycle cost, and at the same time, stakeholders' ecosystem and projects are increasing in complexity and scale. A new approach is needed, which is exactly what we bring to them. As corporations and investors accelerate their focus on ESG, we believe it underscores how important it has been that Dassault Systèmes is a purpose-driven company. A critical ingredient is the world imagine. To create a better world, you need to offer solutions that enable you to explore what might be possible, not just enable the methods of yesterday to be performed or even today's methods. We need to be able to imagine in order to initiate manufacturing of vaccines prior to their emergency regulatory approval.
We need to be able to imagine that pharma companies could share their manufacturing capacities so that the approved vaccines could have expanded manufacturing capabilities that Sanofi has offered on other pharma companies as well. Before passing the call to Pascal, I would like to share some of our perspective on initiatives on ESG. We are active in every challenge the world is facing. At the beginning of 2020, we revealed our 10 Acts campaign. The most recent act unveiled in December last year is Water for Life, to enable industries to consume smarter and protect the world's most precious resource, the water. We are convinced that Dassault Systèmes can be a tremendous lever for sustainable innovation to meet contemporary challenges. We are reducing our footprint with an ambitious CO2 emission reduction target.
We are extending our handprint, which offers an outsized leverage compared to the footprint in a ratio of one to thousands. Handprint is of essence since it has more impact on society, and if we are a digital transformation enabler, we are critical for energy transition, thanks to our ability to manage the end-to-end life cycle of products. With Accenture, we have co-authored a study revealing the critical role of virtual twins in accelerating sustainability. Estimates are that virtual twins can bring $1.3 trillion of economical value on an estimated 7.5 gigaton of CO2 emission reduction between now and 2030.
Looking at social issues, we have been actively working to ensure our goals on women in technology, on the board of directors, where we are 50% representation of women, at the executive level, where women represents 40%, including research and development on industry, as well as platform executives among key managers, where today we are at 30% and pushing higher. Pascal, back to you.
Thank you, Bernard. Good morning, good afternoon to all of you, and thank you for joining us today. Let me begin first with a quick overview of our financial performance in Q4. Our financial result came in at the high end of above our guidance. Total revenue increased 5%, ahead of our 2%-4% range at EUR 1.22 billion. Software revenue came in slightly ahead on the better licenses performance, and recurrent software was well in line. Importantly, on our organic basis, total revenue was stable year-over-year in Q4, with the software revenue up 3%. Our operating margin came in at 36%, 50 basis points above the high end of our guidance range, thanks to the revenue upside first, and also the operating expense tracking to our guidance. EPS was EUR 1.22, ahead of our EUR 1.15-EUR 1.20 guidance, including a negative EUR 0.02 currency impact.
EPS grew 6% at constant currency in Q4. Let's zoom on the revenue by type in Q4. Software revenue increased 8%, slightly ahead of our 6%-7% expectations. Top 3DEXPERIENCE transaction were across multiple industries such as aerospace and defense, energy and materials, transportation and mobility. Also from a large deal perspective, we saw more geos contributing to the top 20 deals than we did in Q3 when they were mostly in North America and China. Large deal activity benefited both on our license and subscription revenue. Let's zoom on the license and other software revenue. It came in better than planned, decreasing 9% versus 12%-15%, or about EUR 10 million higher compared to our guidance. America was the best performing regions with licenses and other software growth positive in Q4.
Our recurrent software revenue grew 16% in total and 9% on an organic basis. Our subscription performance benefited by the addition of Medidata, all subscription SaaS software, with a double-digit subscription growth on a comparable basis. We are observing some acceleration in the adoption of subscriptions on an organic basis, up double digits in Q4. Our support revenue, sorry, was well in line with our expectation as well. We saw a solid performance for the renewal, both regionally and across most of our brand applications. For the full year, the recurring revenue represented 80% of the total software. Services revenue decreased 19% at EUR 114 million, somewhat better than the range of what we had given. We saw an improvement in signings in Q4, helping bring more visibility for 2021.
On the margin side, improvement came from the management of subcontractors. More importantly, all along the year, our focus has been on taking action in services to ensure the go-live for 2020 and to advance our services work benefiting large multi-year deployments on our software. Moving to a regional software review. Let's start with Asia first. Software revenue was up 3% in Q4. China was the best performing geo, up 20% in Q4 and 15% for the full year, with good organic results and in additions of Medidata. Japan was stable in Q4. The softness came from Korea and India in particular, where the environment was difficult in Q4. Support revenue growth was very solid across Asia in Q4. We saw a strong uptick in growth for subscriptions in total and organically. In Europe, our software revenue was flat in Q4.
However, we did see a number of large deals in Northern Europe, France, Germany, and Southern Europe. In the Americas, software revenue increased 23% in total and 13% on an organic basis. From an industry perspective, we had a strong growth in life sciences with Medidata, but also in aerospace on an organic basis. Additionally, we benefited by the breadth of performance across our product lines and brands. Moving to a view of our software revenue by product lines. Let's start with industrial innovations first. Software revenue decreased by 1% in Q4. Within that, 3DEXPERIENCE platform had a better performance with a number of deals in aerospace and defense, transportation and mobility, as well as multiple deals coming from energy and materials and industrial equipments. We also had about 2,700 3DEXPERIENCE go live this year, looking at the year in total.
CATIA grew in Q4 and resisted well in 2020, demonstrating its leadership in key industries such as automotive. It sees also strong traction with its offer in cyber systems. SIMULIA continues to demonstrate good momentum in both structural and electromagnetism, and that remained the case in Q4. As we outlined in the Capital Market Day in Q4 2020, we had made significant investment in developing our cloud portfolio, which cover almost 100% of what we offer on-premise. We see cloud gaining acceleration traction, and a recent example is with Stevanato Group, a provider of packaging machine used in pharmaceutical industry. They have adopted the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and digital continuity industry solution on the cloud.
This industry solution is helping them speed time to market, reduce IT and total cost of ownership through the cloud adoptions, but also more importantly, enable them to create a virtual twin experience on the entire manufacturing line. For the full year, industrial innovation software revenue amount, EUR 2.3 billion and represented 57% of the total revenue. Let's move to life science product lines. Medidata total revenue was up 20% in the quarter on a comparable basis, with a solid operating margin in performance and a strong cash flow from operations. BIOVIA had a double-digit growth both in Americas and Asia, offset in part by a third comp in Europe. Looking at Medidata progress over the last year, Medidata Rave EDC continued to demonstrate its strong market leadership.
In addition, the attach rate of other product solution is very strong, with a number of customers with four or more Medidata products up over 20% during 2020. The run rate for Patient Cloud is also up sharply, representing Medidata's next 100 million product line. In the Americas, Horizon Therapeutics, the pharmaceutical company, extended its multi-year agreement with Medidata using Rave EDC, as well as a number of additional cloud products. Horizon is adding Medidata intelligent trial solutions to give them the flexibility and the agility to scale and grow. This agreement is, I think, an excellent example of how we expand our portfolio at the existing customers, both in number of products and value we delivered, thanks to our data-centric approach.
BIOVIA saw also a strong traction with BIOVIA Discoverant, supporting the entire manufacturing process life cycle from process development through scale-up and tech transfer to the final production. For 2020, our life sciences products line revenue amount for EUR 797 million, and accounting for 20% of the software revenue of Dassault Systèmes. Moving to the mainstream innovations. Mainstream innovation software revenue increased 10% in Q4, with SOLIDWORKS growing 7%. Few words about Centric PLM. The world leaders' PLM solution for fashions, retail, and consumer goods. The software results were up sharply in Q4 on a strong catch-up from the prior quarter. They also continue to increase its market presence with a customer acquisition at 11%. They are also extending their reach, with diversification into food and beverage. I should add also one comment, we see more and more trends towards the subscriptions globally for Centric PLM.
Illustrating simulation on the cloud in mainstream innovation is [Dentium Co], a SOLIDWORKS customer, a Korean-based company. They're expanding their relationship, adopting the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and simulations capability coming from SIMULIA as part of 3DEXPERIENCE Works on the cloud. The early quarter looks promising for 3DEXPERIENCE platform. We look to see progressing traction with 3DEXPERIENCE Works cloud-based family of solutions. For the full year 2020, mainstream innovation software amount for EUR 938 million and represented 23% of software revenue. Moving to cash flow, we had a solid growth for the year, up 5% to EUR 1.24 billion. We used EUR 382 million of cash to improve our leverage ratio, now 1.8 times from 2.5 times one year ago. Contract liabilities total for EUR 1.170 billion, up about 14% in constant currency. Just a few words on acquisition investment, where we continue to invest in key specific domain in 2020.
With respect to data science, last July, we acquired Proxem, bringing strong artificial intelligence capability, especially in the semantic treatments and the ability to build ontology to complement our capabilities within NETVIBES. In November, we acquired NuoDB, a cloud-native distributed SQL database leader, where we previously had an equity stake. NuoDB technology has been part of our cloud infrastructure and data science strategy for a number of years, they are becoming very critical, and I think they are unique on the market. The key differentiating element of this technology in the cloud is that they ensure the integrity of the database, transactional, because we are still managing some transactions. We can scale like a NoSQL database, it can be distributed around the globe to ensure cybersecurity, I think this is becoming a must for many of our customers.
We have also taken an equity position in AVSimulation in January of this year. This is a provider of ultra-realistic virtual world for virtual driving simulations to enable automatic driving certifications. As you may know, this is becoming critical considering the 2024 regulations constraint, where most of the cars who have an assistance in the driving going to have to be certified. Now, let me share our perspective and financial objective for 2021. There are four takeaways. First, we are initiating a constant currency revenue growth objective of 9%-10% for 2021, and this is essentially all organic because the contribution of the small acquisition we did last year will represent less than EUR 10 million. We anticipated recurring software revenue to increase about 8%-9%, and for the license revenue to grow 13%-15%, and services by 9%-12%.
We are progressively transitioning to a subscription model, as you know, but not at the expense of growth. Cloud represent today about 20% of our revenue and should be one-third of the revenue in 2025, roughly more than EUR 2 billion at that time. Second, we are assuming a gradual recovery in business, as you have seen from our first quarter financial objectives and key revenue lines expectations. Third, with respect to Medidata, strong growth and high visibility are the takeaways. We anticipate total revenue to increase about 14% at constant currency for 2021. Entering the year with a 94% coverage ratio, which is almost three to four points better compared to last year. Fourth, we are targeting an operating margin of about 30.8%. This include continued operating margin growth at Medidata and sticking to the plans which consist to deliver 200 basis point improvement every year.
Finally, our EPS range is EUR 4.10-EUR 4.15, growth of about 8%-10% with several hundred basis points of currency headwind embedded in our currency exchange rate assumptions. We estimate a lower tax rate for 2021, about 23.7% versus 25.1% in 2020, largely reflecting some benefit in our French taxes. For exchange rate assumptions versus the euro, we are using 1.22 for the US dollar and 126 for the yen. We outline in the earning press release and presentation our guidance for Q1. Let me summarize. We opened this past year beginning our new horizons, setting the stage for the coming decades. With the pandemic impact, we had to reset our financial outlook for 2020 and postpone by one year our 2023 five-years EPS objective to EUR 6.
Looking forward, we see a year of solid organic growth in 2020, and we are confident in our midterm growth drivers with industrial innovations, mainstream innovation, and life sciences, thanks to the talented team across the globe and to our partners as well. None of us could have imagined 2020 in advance, but despite the increase of distances, we became closer as a company. I really want to make a special thanks to our employees, partners, customers, and I should not forget you guys for the trust and support. Thank you. Now, I think Bernard and I would like to take and answer your questions. Alicia, could you open the Q&A session, please?
Certainly. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A queue. This will only take few moments. If you wish to cancel your request, please press the hash key. Once again, it is star one if you wish to ask a question. Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Nicolas David from Oddo BHF. Please ask your question. Your line is open.
Yes. Hi. Good afternoon, Bernard and Pascal.
Hello.
Thank you for taking my question. Actually, I have two. My first concern is mainstream PLM. Could you please share some metrics regarding the adoption of the 3DEXPERIENCE Works platform, maybe the % of new deals that relate to the platform, and maybe also the impact that your offering is having on the average deal size. Maybe more qualitatively, are the VARs already to sell this new solution, or should we expect some improvement, and maybe improvement leading to material impact on growth going forward? My second question concerns your operating margin guidance. You expect a 60 basis points margin improvement this year, while Medidata should provide something like 30- 40 basis points, while you expect maybe license to grow by at least EUR 100 million, boosting the profitability.
I guess my question is, are you cautious given the context, or do you expect to invest significantly, or do you expect some negative impact from this transition towards subscription or something? Any color would be helpful. Thank you.
Thank you, Nicolas. I take the first one, maybe Pascal.
Yeah.
On the mainstream. We have a powerful community of SOLIDWORKS desktop lovers. It's a vibrant community. Each year we notice it. You noticed we could really include more than 20,000 new companies joining the club of SOLIDWORKS community. Fourth quarter, we are at the beginning in that community of revealing the adoption or the value of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. We saw very interesting sign. The portfolio was announced last year at the 3DEXPERIENCE World in Nashville, just before the lockdown, and was available around summer. We saw a very interesting dynamic. First, the desktop user are discovering what's the value of a backbone platform, easy to acquire. It's about less than EUR 40 per user per month. It gives you an idea. Easy, flexible. It's only on cloud to really do collaborative work, to store their data, exchange their data, and manage projects.
We see traction with ENOVIA project management in the SOLIDWORKS community. We also see traction, which was a surprise to us, with data analytics. They use the platform to do data analytics, which we did not expect this to be happening in the mainstream innovation market, and it is happening with a role called Business Analyst on the platform. The third driver is integrated analysis. Of course, SIMULIA on the cloud, because it's easy to provision. It's one click away, basically. This really was visible fourth quarter. We expect to leverage that, and in fact, the 3DEXPERIENCE World 2021 will be online next week. There is a beautiful program, and there will be significant showcases to the wide user community about what's the value of cloud-based collaborative environment for.
SOLIDWORKS desktop lovers. We'll see more this year and of course, we'll communicate. It's important for two reasons. First of all, it helps expand the scope of our product availability to those users. It's a vibrant community, very dynamic one. The second thing is access to new users, especially makers and innovators, because of the affordability and ease of provisioning on the cloud. More to be discussed this year, we expect to leverage that and use this as a significant lever. It's too early to do more assumption, I believe we are going to build great stories this year.
Related to the operating margin, Nicolas, your computation is the right one. You are right. Almost 40 basis point is coming from the improvement of the profitability of Medidata. There is something I want you to keep in mind. In 2020, aside of the research and development where we continue to invest massively, having 10% increase in number of headcount, for all the other functions, we were almost flat compared to last year, 2019. 2021, we need to reenergize the field ops, meaning we need to hire salespeople to reinforce, to continue to accelerate our marketing spending in order to regenerate and to accelerate the pipeline creations, to put the people back on the road, means we're going to spend more on travels. That's the reason why you can consider the guidance being shy. The reality, I'm planning to invest this year.
To give you an order of magnitude, we will hire in net more than 1,000 people for the full year. That's what is in the guidance.
That's helpful. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Celino from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please ask your question. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you. Can you hear me okay?
Yep, we can.
Okay, great. My first question. Q4 is typically when we would expect to see large activity to be more robust. In terms of the large activity that you did see in Q4, how much do you think was catch-up activity versus maybe improved customer budget confidence?
Pascal?
That's a good question. I don't know if I have a good answer for you, but I will give you some data points. We had two moments last year with our customers. The first one was end of Q1, and they were looking a way to reduce their recurring cost, and was asking our helps to do so, and also to connect the people to enable them to work from home.
What's happened at the end of the year, most of them they say, "Okay, now we have to be selective in our investments because anyway, the situation will stay probably more than a year, and we have also to rethink our product portfolio." To a certain extent, I would say for the industry being under tremendous pressure, like the automotive sectors, the aerospace sectors, I will consider that the reason why we have seen those large deals is because they make their mind and they are selective in their investment. And for them, we are the solutions, we are not the problems. Being aside, we still have industry like High-Tech, the consumer home and lifestyles, almost all the consumer-related industry where we have seen some willingness to invest just to relaunch the machine for 2021.
I would say a way to answer to your question is probably related by industry more than a general comment I could make.
Okay. That's helpful. Maybe said another way. Second half license guidance implies some meaningful acceleration. How would you describe your pipeline visibility today versus maybe last quarter?
Okay.
Is there any KPIs you could provide to how it went into your forecasting process?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was expecting this question, I look at this morning the pipeline. It's relatively well covered compared to the guidance I'm giving to you. We have a single good coverage for the solution sales and also for the roles. Where we have still progress to be made is for the process type of solutions where the pipeline could be a little bit better. Overall, we are relatively well covered. The second takeaway, we are backloaded, this is obvious. The profile of the year is not unfortunately equal every year, every quarter. We see an acceleration, as you notice. Last but not least, I was checking by industry what is visible in the pipelines. We have more contribution of the automotive sector this year compared to last year.
The contribution for the full pipeline is for the automotive and for transportation and mobility at large is around 25% of the pipeline. It was less than 19% last year, if I remember. For Aerospace and Defense, it's almost equal, and it's increasing also significantly for life sciences. Last but not least, the mainstream market, as you notice, is going relatively well. This is true for SOLIDWORKS, but it's also true for the 3DEXPERIENCE Works family. We are counting also on these growth drivers to generate new licenses this year. Just one number. Last year, with SOLIDWORKS itself, we won 20,000 new customers, which means that in a difficult environment, in a way, we continue to capture new customers and continue to expand our footprints. Those are qualitatively some of the KPIs I can share with you to give you some confidence on the license pipeline.
Great. Thank you. That's actually quite helpful.
Thank you, Jason.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Laurent Daure from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I have three questions on my side. The first would be on the Medidata, especially strong performance in the fourth quarter. Could you give us a little bit more granularity between the Rave Core and the other product? There were meaningful differences in the growth trends, especially what was the impact from the good number of trials around the vaccine. Was it a meaningful impact on your performance? That's the first question. Second, still on Medidata, I understand the margins are going up roughly two points per year. What prevents you from improving the margin faster? Is it because you want to reinvest then you just manage the margin in a way that it's a two-point per year and nothing else? My final question is on the Boeing.
I think you had the free services in Q3 and probably again in Q4. What kind of tailwind shall we expect in 2021 on the services revenue from this recovery on the Boeing services? Thank you.
A lot of questions. I will start to answer straightforward. To Medidata, the good performance was really across all the multiple product lines. Obviously, Medidata Rave EDC is performing well, thanks to specifically the COVID-19 trial for sure. We are also seeing a very strong traction from myMedidata and what is under the umbrella of what we call Patient Cloud, because more and more, we are connecting the patient directly. I told you in my speech, it's definitively the next EUR 100 million product line for Medidata. We are also seeing good tractions coming from the analytics and the data intelligence. Those are really the growth drivers. We can also notice that with Medidata Rave, we have this strategy to expand the scope. We call it the attached product.
You have seen that we have seen an increase of 20% of number of customers expanding the scope beyond Rave. I think you can take all the indicators. They are relatively well aligned. Coming back to the second question related to Medidata. Could we ask more in terms of improvement of profitability? Yes and no, because at the end, it's a sector where we are investing a lot. We are far from having developed everything this sector needs from a research and development standpoint. Remember, we are really a scientific company. We are building high barrier to entry, and it will be a mistake to milk these activities. By the way, I'm not sure my friend Tarek and Glen, they will be pleased with this. If they are listening, they will appreciate my comments.
We stick to the synergy plan we have developed at the time of the acquisitions. Frankly speaking, the vast majority of the cost synergy were coming from the G&A. The fact that we are putting additional capacity in research and development in India, leveraging our capacity we already have, and also progressively migrating the cloud to 3DS OUTSCALE. This is where the cost synergy are coming from. The last question, which is related to the free services. I don't know if it's free services or if it is a way to be loyal also with our customers. I think I prefer to look at this way, because we are not only serving the rich people, we are also serving the company facing difficulties. I was stating clearly, we are the solution for them, not the problem.
I think it was also our common interest to secure our deployment and to accelerate it in order to preserve the growth for 2021 and 2022. Nevertheless, to answer your questions. In 2021, you should not expect any more this kind of activities, because we need it at least for two quarters. If you want to calculate the contribution of the services from Boeing, it's probably a midpoint between what they spent with us in 2019 and what they spent with us in 2020. That's probably a good assessment.
Okay. Thank you. Very clear. Thank you, Pascal.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jay Vleeschhouwer from Griffin Securities. Please ask your question, and your line is open.
Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Hello, Bernard, Pascal, and François. A few questions, of course. Let me start with SOLIDWORKS and returning to the subject of the progression of 3DEXPERIENCE Works. I understand, of course, it's only been half a year since you introduced the products, but my understanding is that you have a considerable ambition to make this a large business, meaning in the several hundreds of millions of revenue over time as you penetrate the SOLIDWORKS space. The question there is what are you thinking in terms of the potential penetration of the SOLIDWORKS space over the next several years? Our arithmetic suggests that every 1 point of penetration of the SOLIDWORKS space would add about EUR 15 million to the mainstream business.
It would seem if you do have considerable upside in penetration, it would add considerably to revenue, perhaps starting as early as this year. Maybe you could talk about that. Separately, how are you thinking about the 2021 objectives for the manufacturing and supply chain businesses, DELMIA Quintiq, and so forth? A couple follow-up questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Jay. On the mainstream innovation, I think it's too early to project. The ambition that we have, as you said, is a very strong ambition. I think it's a realistic ambition. Here are the different drivers. One, expand the portfolio available to the current vibrant, large SOLIDWORKS community. For example, I mentioned three of them just a moment ago. Project management, integrated analysis on the cloud, collaborative innovation on the cloud. There is a strong appetite for that. Our partners, our distribution partners, are discovering the value of that too, so they can articulate it properly to this community. We are confident that this will be strong levers in the years to come. The second, of course, is to provide native browser-based, fully mobile SOLIDWORKS functionalities, which we are making great progress with. This is to reach new type of users.
Those new type of users, they want really browser-based access on mobile and so on. I think this is another dynamic that we are building up. I believe that we will be able to articulate the levers better this year. Next week, as you know, we have the 3DEXPERIENCE World. There will be great stories communicated, which are real stories with clients, showing how they are expanding, what they are used to get on desktop with the cloud roles, we call that cloud roles, within the 3DEXPERIENCE Works family. More to be seen this year to really articulate better on quantify your question. Manufacturing side, I think we are really game changer in this area.
There is a lot of customer now considering that what we do in planning, multiscale planning, what we do to do manufacturing connection to supply chain are very high value for them. That's another area where we are moving out from pure manufacturing engineering to really manufacturing execution, MES and MOM. By the way, not to forget DELMIAWorks for the SOLIDWORKS on the 3DEXPERIENCE Works family, because I think we got also good data point on that aspect, especially with a certain segment of the industry. Yes, but I don't have any more numbers to communicate with you at this point in time, except Pascal, if you want to.
No, you could expect a double-digit growth for this product line. To complement what Bernard said, there is also something you need to take into account. The growth is not only coming from the traditional sectors for us, aerospace and defense and the transportation and mobility, but on manufacturing side, we see more and more also growth coming from the High-Tech sector.
High-Tech, MedTech.
High-Tech, MedT ech, life sciences at large, and also coming from the fashion industry as well.
Yeah.
This is where the new vertical, if you want, we have opened the last few years. They start to basically embrace the solutions we have developed for the other industries.
Okay. A couple last things. Pascal, when we spoke last summer, you agreed with the expectation that in 2021, 3DEXPERIENCE new licenses would account for the majority of your new license business for the year, as you've been defining that percentage. Is that still your expectation? Perhaps, has your ambition for the percentage or the magnitude of 3DEXPERIENCE new business increased from last summer?
Okay. Jay, the reality is the following. It's already the case for the solution sales. If you look at the direct sales for us, more than 50% of the licenses, by far, is coming from 3DEXPERIENCE-related product line. That's not true for the mainstream market, because as you just mentioned before, we just introduced almost half a year ago, this product line. When you see the tractions coming from the mainstream markets, I don't know, I would probably be a little bit short to have half of the license revenue for 2021 coming only from a 3DEXPERIENCE-related product family. We will be close.
Okay. Just to finish up, there was an interesting reference in the press release to some cross-industry or cross-segment initiatives within DS, where your life sciences is working with manufacturing and supply chain. Something that you talked about at the Life Sciences Day in New York over a year ago. That's really interesting, if you could elaborate on that, and if perhaps there might be other similar intra-company initiatives across various segments that you can begin to deploy or leverage.
Our intent in life science is to do what we did in other sectors, which is not only connected functionalities for design, simulation, production, but industry solutions. We said that clearly when we strengthen our position in the, for example, with the biotech, because when you look at the bioreactors, as Pascal said this morning, the product is the process. If you don't master the process, you cannot make the product. When in a chemical-based pharma, it's relatively easy to produce. As you can see in the vaccine ramp-up production, it's far more complex with bioreactors. This is where I think we have something significant to bring to those companies who have not been using many of the things we do for years now in the manufacturing sectors like virtual commissioning, which is very critical.
Like doing the digital virtual twin experience of a line, so you can find agile way to do real-world evidence statistics on the line and improve it. We have done it with many showcases last year with big players, which were reveals for them. That's where we think the industry solution for life science is going to be game changer, as opposed to just collection of functionalities. Connecting research, development, lab, clinical trial, on the way you do ramp-up with bioreactors. Yes, it's part of the core strategy of Dassault Systèmes.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
We will take one last question.
Thank you. Our last question comes from the line of Michael Briest from UBS. Please ask your question. Your line is now open.
Thank you. Good afternoon. Nice to sort of start the question session and end it in the same day. To Pascal, just looking at the 20% growth in Medidata, that's a real acceleration from 13% in Q3. As a subscription business, why wouldn't that just continue sort of consistently? I don't understand why it would decelerate or were there some one-time fees within that? Then I've got a question on NuoDB.
Okay. You remember the growth for Medidata is driven by two things, the new contracts and the renewal of existing contracts. What's happened in Q4, we renew significant contracts, and when we renew it, we did not renew it at parity. We renew it with an increase. That's the reason why you have such an effect in Q4. Having said that, as I stated this morning, the backlogs grew significantly last year. Clearly, I'm relatively confident on the 14% growth for 2021. This is the reason why you have this phenomenon in the last quarter of 2020.
Okay. It's just that if I look at the revenues in November and December last year, it was EUR 123 million, and this year in October, it's EUR 50 million. I appreciate the dollars weakened in that period. If I adjusted, it still looks like it's making about $2 million and it suggests a very back-end loaded quarter. I'm surprised that's not sustaining itself into 2021.
Michael, this morning I have been relatively explicit. I was expecting you or others telling me maybe too conservative with Medidata, and I've been transparent. It's a way also for me, given the profile of the year, to potentially de-risk the license growth. Could we do better? Probably.
Will we try to do better? Probably.
For sure. Let me at least deliver the first quarter before to answer to your questions.
Yeah.
Okay. Just a small one then.
Yeah.
On the NuoDB, with that all of the acquisition spend in Q4, I think it was EUR 69 million. I'm just curious, you owned 16% of it since 2013. Why is it so important to buy it now, and how did you get to that valuation?
Well, there are two questions. Valuation is one aspect I will let Pascal answer. First of all, we are building, and we want total independency for our cloud stack. We are going to provide three types of cloud solution for our customers. We are not in consumer business. We are in real, as highly sensitive business. We are doing shared cloud, private cloud, sovereign cloud. We are going to do the three, and I think the issue of cybersecurity calls for the control of the entire stack. That is what we are going to do for the future. On the NuoDB characteristics, which are very unique, and Pascal commented that this morning, very unique from an elasticity standpoint, from a key characterization of what we need. And we are in the sector, in our sector of virtual twin, we are the only one to be object-based as opposed to file-based.
All the others are doing file management. We are not, and we are a major differentiation here in terms of security for the customer, segregation of data for multidiscipline collaboration, very deep characterization that no one else can offer. That's part of the differentiation on why we think customers are now understanding the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as a business platform. We've been using this technology, NuoDB, for now three years, four years on the inside our clouds with tremendous success in terms of cost of operating it, on reliability, on elasticity. We think it's a competitive advantage. It was a smart position when we did it seven years ago.
Yeah, seven, eight years ago.
Now valuation.
No. I will also add one comment to what you say. We are not the only one thinking this, because you remember when we announced the acquisitions of NuoDB, we communicated also on the fact that we are partnering with Temenos.
Yeah.
Temenos, you know them.
Financial service company.
Yeah. The database is really super critical for them.
Yeah
For the same reason than us. We are partnering with them, and they're going to use this technology in their cloud also. Related to the valuation, it's a little bit more than EUR 100 million EV.
That was the only acquisition. There's nothing else in the 69.
69, yeah. For fourth quarter, yes.
Yeah. It was.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you everyone for participating to this call. We always appreciate your question. We will continue, of course, to address them on the go. I wish you all a good year, and I hope the situation will improve. Let's make sure the plants can work better to produce the vaccine. We have a lot of work to do. Thank you very much and talk to you soon.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude your conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect. Thank you.