The French IT company Atos continues to struggle with headwinds and only surprises shortly after the new boss Rodolphe Belmer took office with another warning of declining profits. Due to delays in business and lower margins in the resale of hardware and software, the annual targets, which were adjusted downwards seven months ago, could not be met, the company announced. The shares of the IT company then plummeted in Paris by up to 17 percent to their lowest level since mid-2012. Atos had already dropped out of the Paris selection index CAC40 in September, which had led to takeover speculation.
The new chairman of the board, Rodolphe Belmer, was nevertheless confident on Monday. “Most of the items underlying this serious discrepancy are one-off,” said the manager. But Belmer now has to quickly turn the trend, because the situation is tense: In the past year, sales fell by 2.4 percent to 10.8 billion euros. According to the company, the operating margin was only around four percent. In addition, there was a negative cash flow of 420 million euros – previously there had been talk of a positive value: the so-called cash flow is an indicator of a company’s liquidity development.
At the end of February, Belmer would like to present a new strategy to turn things around in the coming quarter. The former head of the satellite operator Eutelsat joined Atos just a week ago. Above all, Belmer should shape the transformation of the group: Similar to the German rival T-Systems, Atos would like to concentrate more on the cloud business.
As part of the renovation, the IT service provider cut its infrastructure branch in 2021 – and cut around 1,300 jobs in Germany alone. However, the business will not remain exclusively cloud-based. Atos wants to use EU funds to develop one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The “Leonardo” project is intended to pave the way to the next level of computing power. For this, the French received money of 120 million euros from the EU Commission.
Atos employs over 100,000 people worldwide. In Germany, after the last round of cuts, a good 9,000 people are still working for the French group. Ten years ago Atos bought the Siemens IT division SIS in this country and in return ceded 15 percent of its shares to the Munich-based company. Siemens also supplied the French with an order worth more than 5.5 billion euros. Siemens is still an Atos customer to this day. It was only at the end of 2020 that the two companies extended their strategic partnership for a further five years.