Altium sees Artificial Intelligence as a transformational opportunity to disrupt the Electronics Industry

About Altium Limited

Altium Limited (Altium, the Group, ASX: ALU) is a multi-national software corporation headquartered in San Diego, California that focuses on electronics design systems for 3D Printed Circuit Board design and embedded system development. Altium software products and tools enable design engineers to collaborate in the design and customisation of Printed Circuit Boards. The software uses a common digital platform to source the component parts needed for those designs and to prepare the designs for manufacturing. This integrated collaboration process for internal teams and external suppliers drives and maintains productivity and assists design teams to remain on time and on budget by connecting the product design and manufacturing processes in the cloud. Altium’s software products and design tools are found everywhere from world leading electronic design teams to the grassroots electronic design community.

Founded in 1985 and listed on the ASX since August 1999, Altium has offices worldwide including US and Europe, China and Japan. Its software is widely used in industries such as automotive, aerospace, defence and telecommunications.

Artificial Intelligence as a transformational opportunity

Altium believes that it owns several proprietary products that when supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI) can disrupt the Electronics Industry in the same way that Amazon disrupted the E-commerce industry. Altium’s three category leading products in the Electronics Industry are:

• Altium Designer – the world’s most popular Printed Circuit Board design tool with over 100,000 seats and over 60,000 commercial subscribers.
• Altium 365 – the number one cloud platform for electronics hardware development with 43,000 monthly active users.
• Octopart – the most popular search platform for sourcing electronics parts with 7 million searches each month and 55 million electronic components stored.

Manufacturing and designing high-tech products efficiently is dependent on the effective digital connectivity between manufacturing, design processes and the electronics supply chain. Altium considers that an intelligent, AI driven design, manufacturing and electronics supply chain solution that connects stakeholders can positively transform product development in the Electronics Industry.

Altium considers itself to be uniquely positioned to transform and deliver such an integrated environment for high performance electronic hardware development and manufacturing processes by using Artificial Intelligence. For example, Altium has already developed a predictive AI capability for electronic parts availability built on 15 years of historical supply chain data that provides forward looking insights into parts availability. This software tool helps businesses better understand and manage supply chain risk to improve supply chain resilience.

Altium is deeply technology centric and one of the fastest growing engineering software businesses in the world and has the stated aim of potentially becoming the world’s largest platform for creation of electronic hardware without owning neither fab nor factory. It seeks to achieve this by making its software tools synonymous with PCB design, in a similar way that Microsoft Word is synonymous with document creation. In addition, Altium’s cloud-based platform technology creates a strong network effect among engineers within their respective organisations to collaborate efficiently by connecting all engineering processes in the cloud, making it challenging for alternative platforms to develop a similar network effect.

The Future

Altium is at the forefront of electronics design innovation and the demand for more complex and powerful electronics is expanding into areas like autonomous vehicles and trains, miniature nuclear power reactors, and complex medical devices. For example, today, electronics are responsible for 40 percent of the total cost of a new car. Electronics in a modern car include the engine control system, antilock brake system, digital dashboard displays, radar and battery control system.

Printed Circuit Boards are central to the operation of these electronics driven devices and their design requires a high frequency of difficult and complex decisions that ideally lend themselves to the application of AI based solutions. Altium’s AI driven software solutions that operate without human intervention and support complex decision-making at speed, create operational leverage and are a proven valuer multiplier for Altium’s clients.

Altium’s expanding market share that supports future revenue and earnings growth will likely be confirmed with the release of the Group’s half-year results in February 2024.