After weeks of hesitant waltzes, the ax finally fell on Friday. “By a judgment of March 17, 2022, the Lyon commercial court decided to place the company Scopelec SA in safeguard proceedings”, indicated the management of the cooperative specializing in fiber connection in a press release.
After having lost a large part of its contracts with Orange, the company, the historical subcontractor of the operator and its 3,600 employees are accusing the blow. “On April 1, 2022, unless the situation changes in a favorable direction, more than 1,000 employees could find themselves without activity”, is already alerting the staff of the fiber specialist, who intends to give a political turn to the case, just a few weeks before the next presidential elections.
The placement of the company in safeguard procedure – which could constitute a prerequisite for the establishment of a safeguard plan for the company – comes in a particular context for the largest cooperative in France, based in the Tarn. Last November, it had lost 65% of its subcontracting contracts with Orange following a devastating new call for tenders launched by the incumbent operator to put an end to the recurring criticisms aimed at the quality of its final fiber optic connections.
Scopelec bears the brunt of the multiplication of “noodle dishes”
Orange had then justified the partial non-renewal of its partnership with Scopelec by a deterioration in the services provided by the cooperative. “After several warnings in recent years, the quality of the services offered by certain current service providers, including Scopelec, which has received several dozen formal notices due to breaches in certain territories, has led Orange to review the allocation of the areas entrusted to each”, had indicated the direction of the operator
The decision did not fail to alarm the General Confederation of Cooperative and Participatory Societies (CG SCOP), for which the reduction of the airfoil in the partnership linking the company and the operator would have an impact of 150 million euros on Scopelec’s annual turnover, which amounted to 463.9 million euros in 2020. Nearly 1,910 jobs would be threatened, including 580 in New Aquitaine, 500 in Occitanie or 300 in Burgundy France- County, further specified the union at the end of 2021.
The management of Orange then defended itself by asserting that “the questioning of a service provider in a territory has no impact on local employment”, due to “the shortage of labor in the sector , which relies on local and non-relocatable jobs”. And to argue that a “change of service provider therefore in no way affects the number of jobs in the territory concerned”.
No major impact on employment
Will Orange’s decision cause a drain on the fiber connection sector? It would appear that this will not be the case. In its press release published on Friday, Scopelec thus recognizes the existence of “an acceptable contractual framework” for the recovery of some of its employees concerned by the new holders of lost contracts, “with resumption of seniority and maintenance of salary conditions”.
The cooperative further specifies that “negotiations remain in progress” with the incumbent operator concerning “the allocation of temporary additional volumes” at the end of the contracts. However, the cooperative regrets that it is “impossible to raise” the question of “financial support” for the restructuring of the group or “compensation for the damage suffered” by the latter.
Scopelec’s placement in safeguard proceedings should therefore not have any major impact on the level of employment in this very tight fiber connection sector. However, let’s remember that the change in tone made by Orange is explained above all by the persistence of major failures in the final fiber connections, which have become the black spot of the fiber project, yet set up as a model to be followed by the authorities. . At the end of last year, failure rates in final connections were around 17%, compared to 25% a few months earlier. Enough to push the authorities to crack down… And the operators – first concerned by the proliferation of “noodle dishes” – to do the same.