This is an outcome which is not really unexpected but which should announce this Monday at the opening of the stock market a strong signal to investors in the company Atos which has been going through serious financial difficulties for a year. The Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire announced on LCI on Sunday that he had sent the French IT giant “a letter of intent with a view to acquiring all of the group’s sovereign activities”. The objective of the boss of Bercy is to prevent strategic activities for France “from passing into the hands of foreign actors”, he declared on LCI.
“I am following the file very closely. For what ? Because there are at Atos a certain number of strategic activities for the French nation, strategic for our sovereignty, strategic for our defense, in terms of cybersecurity, in terms of supercomputers, in terms of nuclear power,” explained Bruno Le Mayor, believing that “these sovereign activities must remain under the exclusive control of France”.
Atos, in the midst of financial turmoil, notably owns supercomputers used for nuclear deterrence and contracts with the French army. The activities concerned by the letter of intent are housed within the BDS subsidiary of Atos and cover in particular these supercomputers, servers participating in artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing or even cybersecurity products, we learned from the minister’s office. This scope generates an annual turnover of around 900 million euros, out of a total of nearly 11 billion euros for the entire Atos group, and brings together 4,000 employees, mainly based in France, specified the same Source. Contacted by AFP, Atos did not wish to react on Sunday evening.
In this eminently political issue, the State has already committed to lending 50 million euros to the company to help it stabilize its financial situation and has acquired a “preferential action” which allows it to veto to certain operations at Bull, a subsidiary of Atos which builds its supercomputers.
For this letter of intent, an action which is not binding, it is the State Participation Agency which is leading the operation under the authority of Bruno Le Maire, the latter underlined. The minister, however, said he hoped that “the State would not be alone” and hoped to rally other French actors for this operation. Without giving their names, he explained that they could be companies operating in the fields of defense or aeronautics. According to his office, “discussions” have been underway “for several weeks” with a certain number of industrialists “which would make sense in terms of the development of these activities”.
Concretely, while the markets doubt Atos’ strategic recovery plan, this State intervention aims to protect the most strategic activities of the IT giant. The letter of intent opens the possibility of a complete nationalization of these activities but does not prohibit the construction of a French solution in which the State would be a minority within BDS, with the support of other large groups in particular Thalès and Dassault. in military activities.
Atos shares fell almost 10% last Thursday after the group indicated that it wanted to readjust its business plan for the period 2024-2027, which could lead to an increased need for liquidity. The IT group’s revenues fell 11% in the first quarter. This situation pushed Atos to postpone to May 3 the deadline set for its creditors to make refinancing proposals.
