Stunned by the 90% fall in Atos shares since the start of the year, the IT group’s shareholders see the final blow coming. Summoned for a meeting on Friday, September 27, at 2 p.m., they will have to decide on a debt restructuring plan which promises to make them lose what little they have left: once this is implemented, they will only hold 0 .05% of the capital, unless they agree to put back 233 million euros into the pot. In this case, they would retain 25.75% of the shares.
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Shareholders do have the opportunity to vote against the plan. However, bankruptcy law, reformed in 2021, allows “forced application” of the procedure. They therefore lost the game to the benefit of the former creditors, most of them banks and investment funds, expected to become the future owners of the second French IT services group behind Capgemini. They themselves had to decide on the plan before Thursday September 26.
The result of their vote was to be known on Friday at the latest. There is little doubt about approval: it was the creditors who drew up the debt restructuring plan compared to that presented before the summer by Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky.
Deterioration of results
Even if other legal steps must follow, such as the judgment of the commercial court validating the accelerated safeguard procedure (a decision expected towards the end of October), the vote of shareholders and creditors marks the end of two years of turbulence and twists and turns of all kinds: project to split activities, aborted sales discussions with Airbus, unfulfilled interest in takeover by entrepreneur David Layani, abandonment of the split project, changes of general manager (four in total), deterioration of results …To end with an explosion in debt, forcing Atos to enter into conciliation proceedings on March 26.
The successful completion of this restructuring is relieving, but paradoxically opens up other challenges, just as complicated. Financial, first of all. Around 2.8 billion euros of debt, out of the 4.9 billion with which the group was burdened, are erased, converted into shares for the benefit of creditors. However, the approximately 2 billion remaining debt was renegotiated at higher rates than before, between 5% and 9% per year.
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Above all, if the creditors who have become shareholders are ready to provide 1.5 billion euros of new financing, this will contribute to re-increasing the level of debt and will be extremely expensive: between 10% and 13% of the amount made available. Will Atos, whose activity has suffered enormously during these long months of upheaval, have the means to properly repay this debt, even if it should recover at least 700 million euros from the sale currently being negotiated with the State of its most sensitive professions in the military and cybersecurity?
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