Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dassault Systèmes SE
EN DIRECT : Pascal Daloz, directeur général de Dassault Systèmes, depuis Davos
Le business peut-il survivre aux droits de douane ? Suivez l'interview de Pascal Daloz, directeur général de Dassault Systèmes, en direct depuis le Forum de Davos.
About Pascal Daloz
Pascal Daloz, Chairman and CEO of Dassault Systèmes, appeared on BFM Business on July 23, 2026, to discuss the company's second-quarter results and its acquisition of ArisGlobal. He reported total revenue growth of 4% and subscription growth of 8%, attributing the results to the industry shift toward subscription models and continued investment by manufacturing industries. Daloz also highlighted 14% growth in 3DExperience software and cloud revenue. During the interview, Daloz discussed the life sciences sector as a growth area for the company. He stated that the average cost of developing a molecule is $2 billion and that only one in ten molecules reaches the market. He said Dassault Systèmes aims to replace physical testing with virtual testing to shorten development cycles and reduce costs. Daloz also mentioned work with Bel Group on substituting animal protein with plant protein in products like Babybel, using virtual modeling and AI to test combinations.
Transcript (32 segments)
N
Narrator0:00
Revolut Business, the pro bank for accelerating your business. BFM Business also on the radio in major French cities: Marseille 103.1, Lyon 95.3. A Bitcoin is a unit of account divisible into a satoshi; there will be 25 million Bitcoins. Listen to BFM Business everywhere in the world live or on podcast at bfmbusiness.com. My fries? They're still fries. Crazy, huh. A craving for McDonald's can't be controlled, and with the new Maxmart offer, it will be hard to choose. Want a potose? You neither. At PWC, we ensure you are ready for the future with expertise and technology to innovate and excel. We are by your side from start to finish to give you a head start, to protect what you've built, to create new forms of value. We build the future so you can access it now. PWC So you can. There are two types of people: those who look back and those who look forward. Visionaries transform the impossible into a simple formality. They need a finance HR platform that works at their pace. Work reveals the potential of your teams with AI agents and offers all the innovation needed for the future of work. Because visionaries don't wait for tomorrow; they create it.
L
Lore2:11
Special IT day on BFM Business. Good morning Business, the big interview. 7:45 AM, we head straight to the Davos Economic Forum. Lore, we meet you on site. France is gaining momentum this Tuesday. You are with Pascal Daloz, CEO of Dassault Systèmes. Absolutely. Pascal Daloz, good morning. Thank you for being with us from Davos. The day starts very strong this morning. We have Donald Trump publishing this text from Emmanuel Macron, this threat on champagne. How do you navigate when you are a software editor? But you are much more than that as a French company with the French stamp. How do you navigate in the middle of this geopolitics? Hello, Lore.
P
Pascal Daloz2:54
Indeed, this 2026 edition of Davos starts strong, with this deep redefinition of the world, but at its core, it was already underway: fragmentation of the economy, return of great power dynamics, the end of globalization as we knew it. And at its core, that's where Dassault Systèmes is relevant because to navigate this uncertainty and complexity, we need a digital twin, a virtual twin. We can no longer base a strategy on a single scenario. We must be able to consider all scenarios, and that's what technology enables with modeling, simulation, and artificial intelligence.
L
Lore3:32
But to what extent today does this permanent threat of tariffs, seen this morning with champagne, hinder your strategy? How do you integrate it?
P
Pascal Daloz3:41
Again, digital services are not part of tariffs for an obvious reason: the balance is in favor of the United States. Now, again, it's a way for us to reinforce part of the technology and the meaning of the technology we have. When you are an industrial player and you constantly have to rebuild your supply strategies, localization strategies, production, technological dependency, you need tools that allow you to imagine all these scenarios and find optima. I want to say that fundamentally, that helps us in a number of sectors that are in great difficulty today.
L
Lore4:22
You say 'Digital services are not part of tariffs.' Obviously, we know how important the GAFAs are for our functioning in Europe. Could this become a variable of adjustment? Here when we talk to actors at Davos, we say the only area with less pressure is that, the financial sector and the GAFAs. If we start discussing that, what impact does it have on you?
P
Pascal Daloz4:40
We are necessarily affected, but again, sovereignty is not autarky. Yes. Sovereignty is preserving one's choices. Um, Europe has a number of advantages to capitalize on. We cannot capitalize on volumes and speed, but we can capitalize on trust, quality, and mastery of critical technologies. And there are players today, of which we are one, who master a number of critical technologies.
L
Lore5:05
When you discuss today with your clients about sovereignty, about placing their critical interests in Europe rather than the United States, we've had this conversation 20 times with Octave Klaba from OVHcloud who says, 'I was preaching in the desert before. Today, are you heard? Do you see companies thinking differently?'
P
Pascal Daloz5:22
Yes, things have moved, and I want to say we have the same experience; we launched sovereign clouds now more than 15 years ago.
L
Lore5:28
Yeah.
P
Pascal Daloz5:29
Huh? With this concept, we tried several times to do it with groups, we ended up doing it ourselves at Dassault Systèmes. We have a subsidiary called 3DSAL. But there is increased awareness, amplified by geopolitics on specific subjects. Now, sovereignty is not where, it is. We need, again I insist, it's not autarky. We cannot live completely closed off. The world needs to communicate, but there are sensitive elements. Intellectual property, for example, is a sensitive element because in the age of AI, it's continuous learning; if you don't control that intellectual property, if you don't control the sovereignty of those intellectual properties, you expose yourself.
L
Lore6:08
So your message is to say we don't need to put everything in Europe. There are critical data, and others that can be placed on AWS or elsewhere, but you need to think about what is critical and what is not.
P
Pascal Daloz6:19
Exactly. That's an industrial strategy. And more than ever, we need to make them robust in this context of extreme complexity.
L
Lore6:26
Emmanuel Macron's objective today is to come and speak to businesses about businesses. He wanted to do a 'France Innovation' tour with announcements on artificial intelligence. Just before this interview, I told you it will be difficult for him to be heard on this. You told me, 'Yes, but it's important, we absolutely need to talk about it because that is also the definition of the future.'
P
Pascal Daloz6:45
Yes, digital infrastructure is becoming essential for industry, just as energy was in its time, as communication networks or transport routes were. And Europe needs to equip itself with a large digital infrastructure. The second element to consider is that businesses need a slightly different artificial intelligence from what we know today.
L
Lore7:07
Yeah. When you are in the industrial world, you are dealing with life when you fly an airplane, when you put a drug on the market. So you need an AI that does not hallucinate, that is rooted in science, that is explainable and certifiable. And at bottom, there are still many things to invent. But for that, you need this digital infrastructure. You say ChatGPT, Grok, aren't enough. In short,
P
Pascal Daloz7:30
They suffice for a number of things. They are based on language mastery. But you saw me discussing yesterday with Yann LeCun.
L
Lore7:37
Yes, we saw you.
P
Pascal Daloz7:39
That's one of the convictions we share: learning by language is not enough. We also learn by observing the world; we need to represent the physics of the world, and that's where science comes in, and where there are still huge things to invent. And France has a number of assets, and Europe in general has a number of assets. Dassault Systèmes is a good example of that.
L
Lore7:58
That's what it's for here at Davos: to have bilateral meetings between two coffees. Did you convince Yann LeCun to put his startup in Paris or not?
P
Pascal Daloz8:05
Ah, he will—I'll let him answer—but in any case, he will have a very strong center of gravity in Paris.
L
Lore8:09
Well, on AI questions, if we have this data center, again, we are expecting a big announcement from Emmanuel Macron this afternoon. What does it concretely change? Do we catch up, for example, with the United Arab Emirates who already have this type of structure? It's important for us.
P
Pascal Daloz8:23
Again, there is a matter of level and speed, but above all, there is an economy to be built around these large data centers, and that's where I think infrastructure is not enough. We need to build the ecosystem that goes with it. I think Emmanuel Macron and the government in general have been promoting French Tech for years. There will be a number of representatives at Davos, and we hope that this ecosystem will develop value-added uses around these large infrastructures.
L
Lore8:53
About twenty companies accompanying the head of state today. We've had many already since yesterday; we'll be with Inclusive Brain later at 8:35 AM. Criticisms of European regulation saying that in the era of Donald Trump, we can no longer prevent ourselves from having certain technologies, from developing, from being afraid before acting. Fairly strong criticisms even vis-à-vis Thierry Breton. How do you view European regulation today?
P
Pascal Daloz9:14
This regulation is not easy because at the same time, one of the stakes is trust in technology, and AI is scary in a way. So we need to restore that trust, and at the same time, legislating too early before innovation happens essentially sterilizes it. So there are probably paths that allow defining frameworks of trust while leaving a degree of freedom for innovation to emerge, and then regulate ex post. I would say from that point of view, China is ahead.
L
Lore9:47
Yeah.
P
Pascal Daloz9:47
China has provinces where it promotes innovation and then does national regulation.
L
Lore9:53
We have 1 minute 30 left, a word on the budget. Yesterday, we had a vote on 493, well not a vote actually, 493 outright, with this announcement of a surcharge again on businesses. There will be no reduction in the CVE. How do you view the budget? Not at all. You say ultimately it's the price to pay. What emotion does that raise?
P
Pascal Daloz10:08
No, I look at it very closely because it's the competitiveness of businesses that is at stake. It must be said that today if you look at business profitability, there is a clear difference between European and American companies. Among other reasons, not only the dollar effect but also the weight of taxation. So this competitiveness is necessary to encourage reinvestment. We are in a situation—I said it before—Europe must master its critical technologies. To do that, it must invest, and to do that, it must have the means to invest.
L
Lore10:43
Thank you very much, Pascal Daloz, for being with us this morning. I'll let you rejoin the forum. We'll be in a few moments with Sylvain Durant from BCG who will join us. We're going to talk about AI and especially this joke going around in the open corridors that could happen—is it possible or not? What do you think, Pascal?
P
Pascal Daloz10:59
It's not possible, but it should be watched closely.
L
Lore11:02
Ah yes, okay. Well, we'll talk about it in a moment.