Paris, 7 June 2006: ESI Group (ISIN FR0004110310), a pioneer and world leading solution provider in virtual prototyping and manufacturing processes, today announced its consolidated sales for the first quarter ended 30 April 2006.

Financial year ended 31 January

Q1-2006 sales came to € 12.8 m, down -5.2% in real terms and -6.3% in volume. Licenses and Services contributed € 9.8 million and € 3 million, respectively, reflecting a stable breakdown of business with Licenses accounting for 77% of sales and Services for 23%.

This small withdrawal from Q1-2005 was due to:

• the expected shift in license renewal dates during the calendar year, reflecting the trend towards larger seasonal fluctuations;

• the slippage of innovative projects during the current financial year owing to investment delays.

The achieved figures show that the license renewal rate was similar to the rate posted in Q1-2005.

The steady decline in contracting sales was offset by the growth of services with high added value.

The available cash position came to € 16.9 million on 30 April 2006.

Alain de Rouvray, Chairman and CEO of ESI Group, concluded: "Q1 results are traditionally unrepresentative of our annual performance due to a business seasonality which tends to become more pronounced."

About ESI Group

ESI Group is a world-leading supplier, and a pioneer of digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes that take into account the physics of materials. ESI Group has developed an extensive suite of coherent, industry oriented applications to realistically simulate a product’s behavior during testing, to fine-tune manufacturing processes in accordance with desired product performance, and evaluate the environment’s impact on product performance. ESI Group’s products, which have a proven track record in manufacturing and have been combined in multi-trade value chains, represent a unique collaborative and open virtual engineering solution known as the Virtual Try-Out Space (VTOS), enabling virtual prototypes to be improved in a continuous and collaborative manner. This integrated protocol allows all the company’s solutions to work with each other and with applications developed by independent software vendors. By significantly reducing costs and development lead times and enabling product/process synergies, VTOS solutions offer major competitive advantage by progressively eliminating the need for physical prototypes during product development. The company generated sales of €62.2m in 2005, employs over 500 high-level specialists worldwide covering more than 30 countries. ESI Group is listed in Eurolist compartment C of Euronext Paris. For further information, visit www.esi-group.com.

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Virtual Try-Out Space® and VTOS® are registered trademarks of ESI Group. All other products, names or companies are the brands or registered trademarks of their respective owners.