That is, with the distributor Casino and retirement home operator Orpea, the biggest French economic crash in the last five years. The business world is watching, stunned, by the endless implosion of Atos, Europe’s number two IT services company. Started in June 2022, in the hope of breathing new life into a company that was sorely lacking it, a plan to separate activities has only precipitated the inexorable fall of one of the three musketeers of IT with Capgemini and Sopra Steria, the two other major French digital services companies.
If the negotiations always in progress, the company, whose turnover exceeded 11 billion euros in 2022 and which employs more than 100,000 people worldwide, including around 10,000 in France, will be dismantled and wiped off the map.
Outsourcing activities, the management of a company’s IT functions, should fall into the hands of Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, and cybersecurity and supercomputers into that of the European Airbus, which will leave the rest, namely digital consulting (application development professionals and automation), at Onepoint, the company of entrepreneur David Layani. If the discussions fail, the 5 billion euros of gross debt accumulated by Atos bodes well of a financial restructuring probably as painful as that of Casino, ultimately sold piecemeal.
How could a group that was worth more than 11 billion euros on the stock market in 2017 get to this point? To explain its debacle, Atos cannot even, as Casino or Orpea did, take refuge behind the excuse of external attacks, speculative funds for the supermarket brand and the book The Gravediggers (Fayard, 2022), by journalist Victor Castanet, for the French number one nursing home. Nothing of the sort at Atos, which cannot cite the consequences of inflation or Covid-19 either: the IT sector is one of the big winners of the pandemic.
Chronic instability
The confinements of 2020 and 2021 have forced companies around the world to digitize their operations, with teleworking, and their activity, with e-commerce paving the way for a new golden age of IT after the ostentatious decades of the 1980s and 1990. According to research firm Gartner, global spending on IT services will exceed $1.5 trillion (€1.385 billion) in 2024, 48% more than in 2019.
You have 80% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.