PTC ceo James Heppelmann explains how his company came to have a lowered profile in China. He was responding to a question during PTC's quarterly conference call with financial analysts. I’ve edited the text slightly for clarity. The original transcript can be read at Seeking Alpha: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4526704-ptc-inc-ptc-ceo-jim-heppelmann-on-q3-2022-results-earnings-call-transcript.
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James Heppelmann: I think the key thing in China to know, if you don’t know this now, is it’s now 5% of our business. So we have very little exposure. It had previously been as high as 7% or 8%.
But when President Trump was in the office, he went to war, as you know, with our largest customer, which was Huawei. By the time the dust settled on that, Huawei was Dassault’s customer. [Dassault Systemes is headquartered in France.] [Chinese firms] pretty much got the message not to do business with American companies. That hurt us in China, generally. A large amount of the Chinese manufacturing market is state-owned. And having watched what Trump was doing with Huawei, [working with] an American supplier like us that was not helpful.
But you know good news is, we’re down to 5% exposure. And China’s not that material to PTC, which I actually feel kind of good about right now, given the scariness and the outlook of what might happen there in the coming years.
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