Atos is due to split into two entities next summer. BENOIT TESSIER / REUTERS
The European group Airbus had started discussions in February to take a minority stake in the future company which will be born from the split of Atos.
A real blow for Atos. The scenario he favored for the capital of Evidian has just come to a sudden end. Airbus is giving up on acquiring a 29.9% minority stake in Evidian, the future company that will combine cybersecurity, cloud and big data activities, after the split from Atos, scheduled for the summer.
The two groups had entered into negotiations after the offer presented by the European group on February 16. “Airbus has come to the conclusion that the potential acquisition of a 29.9% minority stake in Evidian does not align with the company’s objectives in the current context and structure”, the company said. The decision had been decided the day before, during an Airbus board of directors, after a process of “due diligence” carried out for six weeks.
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In the meantime, the management of Airbus had also suffered the wrath of the boss of the British investment fund TCI, Christopher Hohn, a 3% shareholder and firmly opposed to this capital operation. For the famous activist, this minority stake mainly exposed the shareholders of Airbus to the debt of Atos, without giving any control to the European aircraft manufacturer.
The fund had planned to publicly challenge the management of Airbus at the next general meeting on April 19. “Some questions raised by Chris Hohn were quite valid,” underlines a source close to the file. Airbus and Atos ensure that they continue to discuss, but simply with a view to “technological cooperation” long-term.
Options that are becoming scarce
Even if Atos had, in February, surrounded the outcome of these negotiations with great caution, their judgment complicates its future and the financing of its restructuring, because options are becoming scarce. The sale of 30% of the capital of the new Evidian company should, in fact, give it the means it absolutely needs to restructure the historic outsourcing activities which will remain housed in the Atos company. The group values Evidian at around 4 billion euros.
“It’s not just the Airbus solution”, we assure at Atos. But Evidian’s cybersecurity activities of the future may arouse a great deal of covetousness – on the part of Thales and Orange in particular – but no one wants or can make an offer on the entire perimeter of Evidian, which also includes the cloud, supercomputers or quantum. Areas in which the stakes of sovereignty are crucial, hence the very careful monitoring of the file by the French State.
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The partial sale to Airbus had the advantage of being a European solution. Any other option must take this dimension into account. Among the possible schemes to resolve this financing issue, Atos could decide to sell the stake in several tranches, in order to broaden the number of possible financeable candidates.
The executive could also consider bringing into play the public bank Bpifrance or the State Participation Agency, to block any possibility of a foreign takeover once Evidian is listed on the stock market.
Selling its outsourcing activities to a third party
Another lever of action for Atos: succeeding in selling its historic outsourcing activities to a third party. At the end of 2022, the Czech businessman Daniel Kretinsky had expressed his interest, provided that Atos finances the restructuring. He asked him to pay several hundred million to ensure the need for working capital, in particular to guarantee the pension commitments of the employees of the German subsidiaries.
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Back to the wall after the withdrawal of Airbus, Atos could be more inclined to continue very difficult discussions to try to find common ground.
Taking the markets by surprise, the announcement of the renunciation of Airbus caused the Atos share price to plunge by more than 17% on the Paris Stock Exchange. “Expectations for Airbus seem high to us and the valuation of the stock expensive compared to the risk linked to the transformation program”, warned analysts at Oddo BHF at the beginning of the month. The fall was equal to the disappointment.
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