PARIS (Reuters) – French IT company Atos spooked investors on Tuesday by announcing a plan to split its business and sell assets which, together with the departure of its chief executive Rodolphe Belmer, sent the stock plummeting by 25%.
The departure of Rodolphe Belmer, who took office in January, follows weeks of reports of divisions over the company’s restructuring on the board.
According to sources familiar with the matter, Rodolphe Belmer and the board of directors disagreed on the fate of the BDS cybersecurity unit, because he wanted to sell this activity while the board of directors wanted to keep it.
The activities of Atos, including the manufacture of supercomputers and software used by the army and the Ministry of Finance, are considered strategic by the French government. Former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe sits on the board.
The departure of Rodolphe Belmer was announced an hour before a long-awaited “capital markets day”, which investors hoped would restore confidence, after a series of setbacks which melted the stock market value of Atos by two third over the past year.
Rodolphe Belmer, former boss of the satellite company Eutelsat, will leave Atos on September 30. Atos shares lost as much as 27% in early trading in Paris, and were down 22% at 1135 GMT.
On Monday, the price fell by more than 10% after the publication in the media of a report on the future strategy of the group.
The weakness of the Atos stock has made the company vulnerable to merger-acquisition rumours. A finance ministry official said the government was closely monitoring developments and noted that strategic assets were protected from hostile takeovers by a foreign investment screening decree.
Atos plans to split into two publicly traded entities and said it has appointed two deputy chief executives, Nourdine Bihmane and Philippe Oliva, to lead each.
The split would “unlock value” as part of a larger plan estimated to cost 1.6 billion euros in 2022-23, the company said.
Atos will sell non-strategic assets worth around 700 million euros, Rodolphe Belmer said on Tuesday in a call with reporters.
The group has already sold its 2.5% stake in the payments company Worldline as part of its disposal plan, raising 220 million euros.
As part of the split, Atos plans to separate and combine BDS with its services operations, including those aimed at helping customers move to the cloud.
Called Evidian, these combined operations generated revenue of 4.9 billion euros in 2021, up 5% compared to the previous year, and an operating margin of 7.8%.
The remaining part will include declining and loss-making IT infrastructure management services, whose turnover amounted to 5.4 billion euros last year.
Atos aims to return to growth and profit for these businesses by 2026.
Asked whether he would benefit from the severance pay approved by the shareholders in the event of the CEO’s sudden departure within two years, Rodolphe Belmer replied that he had offered to leave with 9 months’ salary.
Former boss of Canal +, owned by Vivendi, Rodolphe Belmer had promised a new start for Atos. The company was affected by a loss of investor confidence, auditors having expressed reservations about the accounts of two American entities, while an attempted acquisition of a company in the United States ended in failure.
The review of the two US entities did not reveal any material misstatements, Atos said.
(Writing Myriam Rivet, Mathieu Rosemain, Tassilo Hummel and Nicolas Delame; French version Augustin Turpin, edited by Kate Entringer)