Along with the mass-market retail group Casino and the retirement home operator Orpea, this is the biggest French collapse of the last five years. The business world is astounded, witnessing the interminable implosion of Atos, Europe's number-two IT services provider. A business separation plan, launched in June 2022 in the hope of breathing new life into a company sorely lacking in it, has only precipitated the inexorable downfall of one of the three musketeers of the IT industry, along with Capgemini and Sopra Steria, the other two major French digital services companies.

If the negotiations that are still underway are successful, the company, whose sales exceeded €11 billion in 2022 and which employs over 100,000 people worldwide, of which around 10,000 are in France, will be dismantled and wiped off the map.

Managed IT services – that is, the management of a company's IT functions – is set to fall into the hands of Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, and cybersecurity and supercomputers into that of European Airbus, leaving the rest, namely digital consulting (automation and the development of business applications), to go to Onepoint, founded by entrepreneur David Layani. If the talks fail, the €5 billion in gross debt accumulated by Atos indicates a financial restructuring probably as painful as that of Casino, which was eventually sold off in separate lots.

To help it in its discussions with banks and bondholders, the IT group announced on Monday, February 5, that it had "requested the appointment of a dedicated agent (...) with a goal of converging on an appropriate financial solution as soon as possible." In other words, this is the last step before financial safeguard.

How did a group worth over €11 billion on the stock market in 2017 come to this? To explain its debacle, Atos can't even, as Casino or Orpea have done, hide behind the excuse of external attacks – hedge funds for the supermarket chain, and the 2022 book Les Fossoyeurs ("The Gravediggers") by journalist Victor Castanet for the French number-one retirement home manager. Nothing of the sort at Atos, which can't point to the consequences of inflation or Covid-19 either: The IT sector is one of the pandemic's big winners.

Chronic instability

The Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 forced companies around the world to digitize their operations (due to working from home) and their business activities. E-commerce paved the way for a new digital golden age after the lavish decades of the 1980s and 1990s. According to research firm Gartner, global spending on IT services will exceed $1,500 billion (€1,385 billion) in 2024 – 48% more than in 2019.

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