Normally, the news would have been celebrated. On October 4, the IT group Atos won Jupiter, a 500 million euro contract for the manufacture, with the German ParTec, of a supercomputer, the most powerful ever delivered to Europe, for the research center Jülich in Germany. But the heart is not in it. Atos is brooding: management waltz – a new general director, the third since 2021, Yves Bernaert, was appointed Thursday October 5 –, dismantling plan, political pressure, shareholder protests, collapse of the stock price… Nothing go.
“Not many people were interested in us in the past. There, we have almost become a subject of entertainment, we are the Paris Match of the business world », sighs an executive, who, like most of our interlocutors, will request anonymity. Not a day goes by without the group’s 10,000 employees in France – 90,000 worldwide – discovering a new article in the press. Customers also read them, competitors delight in them, which does not help the work of the teams. “With all this noise, it’s becoming complicated to win new contracts”worries the leader of one of the group’s divisions who, like many people, wonders about the reasons for this descent into hell.
How was a company with a turnover of 11 billion euros able to reduce its value, in just two years, from 5 billion euros to 588 million euros? And why did a group whose activities – supercomputers in fact – are essential to French nuclear deterrence end up falling into the hands of Daniel Kretinsky? 1er August, in addition to being ready to sell it the outsourcing activities (Tech Foundations), at financial conditions considered too favorable according to several dissatisfied shareholders, the board of directors of Atos agreed to enter into exclusive negotiations with the Czech businessman to reserve a place for him in the capital of the division bringing together cybersecurity and supercomputers (Eviden).
Unbridled acquisition policy
To understand this drift, we must go back to the roots of evil. We are at the end of 2008. A new CEO arrives: Thierry Breton, the current European Commissioner for the Internal Market. After two years in the Raffarin and Villepin governments, as Minister of the Economy, the former CEO of France Telecom wants to taste the thrill of business again. He has big ambitions for Atos: to make this small IT service provider a world leader. “The group did not have access to major markets. For that, he absolutely had to gain weight”justifies an administrator of the time.
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