French govt finance panel mulls nationalizing Atos

A French government finance committee is looking at a legal amendment to a 2025 finance bill currently making its way through the country's parliament that would nationalize Atos with €70 million in the pot to explore the deal. The amendment was tacked onto the Finance Bill (PLF) for 2025. It still would need to be confirmed …

[Anonymous Coward]

Atos and the Cloud

"The business has made some bad bets in the past – notably banking too much on cloud growth and breaking further into the US market."

Actually they did the opposite when cloud was accelerating - they doubled down on a complex JV with a full stack EMC on promise model called "Canopy" which promised AWS like pricing but on premise.

It did not go well and eventually it was dismantled, by which point the market had moved on. The also lacked the scale in applications compared to the India Heritage companies, Accenture, etc to access the higher value applications transformation/replatforming work (vs lift and shift)

[excperr]

Amazing isn't it? Too big to fail..? NO.

[tin 2]

Remind me again about the insurmountable inefficiencies of Government running stuff in-house?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's probably not the game.

Get the company, pump it full of money from the taxpayer (it's free!) and as soon as it shows even a shred of evidence that it can now stand up sell it off again. And guess what the person who has been shepherding this back to live is going to be? And no, ye olde taxpayer doesn't get a say, of course.

That's how CEO's are made. With your (well, OK, the French taxpayer's) money.

You see this cycle of nationalising and privatising everywhere. If a government really had the intention to run a nationalised service or company properly they'd pay decent wages, but that would disrupt the actual play.

[Lars]

Smarter perhaps

@tin 2

I have to assume you assume the French are as rubbish as the Brits (sorry the English) at running stuff, or your assumption at how rubbish the home lot are at running stuff.

Perhaps you are wrong and the French are doing the right thing, and not for the first time, After all Airbus is doing well regardless of the fact they are partly owned by the French and the Germans and Spain. And EDF is alive too and doing OK.

Perhaps a different Britain (sorry the English) should have supported more companies at home.

What happened to British IT. Happy with Oracle and all the rest oversea companies now.

What have you actually got left when you have sold your oil, your water, your energy, your harbours and your airports, just to mention some.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Smarter perhaps

I have to assume you assume the French are as rubbish as the Brits (sorry the English) at running stuff

I have to assume you've never lived there. I have, for many years, and believe me the French government (or what passes for one at the moment) is no more competent at running stuff than the Brtitish one.

After all Airbus is doing well regardless of the fact they are partly owned by the French and the Germans and Spain.

These days the French & German Governments only own about 11% each, the Spanish 4%. Most of the remaining 74% or so is owned by American investors, who also own most of Boeing.

[Lars]

Re: Smarter perhaps

It's nothing "these these" days with those shares, it's been like that for a long time. And yes there are big investors from the USA too, and why not as they are doing well. and then there are thousands of small "investors" also.

Some of it here:

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/AIRBUS-SE-4637/company-shareholders/

And it's a long story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Airbus

As for competence I hope your new government is a lot more competent than what you had during the last 14 years or so. And I wish you all the best.

Still it would not surprise me at all if France surpassed Britain economically within a few years once again,

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Smarter perhaps

As for competence I hope your new government is a lot more competent than what you had during the last 14 years or so.

Last 27 years, I think you mean, the last lot just continued Blair & Brown's incompetence. Sadly, although it would seem hard to be less competent, so far they do seem to be well on the way.

Still it would not surprise me at all if France surpassed Britain economically within a few years once again,

It would surprise me a lot, unless France manages to dump Macron and elect a competent government. It's well on the way to civil war and bankruptcy at the moment.

[LybsterRoy]

Re: Smarter perhaps

Glad you altered British to English. After all we wouldn't want anyone to think the Scottish government were incompetent would we?

[collinsl]

Re: Smarter perhaps

> as rubbish as the Brits (sorry the English)

> a different Britain (sorry the English)

You don't have to keep apologising to the English that the Welsh and Scottish are so bad at running stuff, it's not our fault. And don't even get me started on Northern Ireland!

Also, it's "sorry to the English".

(if no one guessed this post is /s)

[Xalran]

Caveat inside

The caveat is that it needs to be approved in the parliament.

It's not becausse it's been approved in a comitee that it's been approved by the parliament. ( it's not been approved by the Finace Ministry BTW... Just the Finance Comitee of the National Assembly )

Seing that it has been stuck bickering for weeks on next year budget... And that the dreaded 49.3 is looming at the horizon to ram the budget "as is" through.... there's about zero chances that Fance will nationalize Atos as a whole.

Now, if the price is correct, France has already shown interest in buying the Mission Critical Systems, Advanced Conputing and Cybersecurity Products branches, and will buy them as they are seen as strategic assets.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Caveat inside

The problem with using a 49.3 is that it will almost automatically trigger a confidence vote, which a minority government like Barnier's might not want to risk, just in case the RN and LFI actually agree to vote together against it.

[Tron]

So the US will be sanctioning them then?

A foreign state involved in the ownership or operation of a tech company. That saw Chinese companies sanctioned.

The US and UK recently bagged an Aussie nuclear sub contract from France. Would they have managed that if the French state owned tech companies whose products were used by government agencies in the US and UK?

According to Google: 'Atos has invoiced the [UK] government for contracts worth about £6bn since 2016 and currently has more than 40 government contracts worth nearly £1bn. The firm is involved in IT systems at the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office.'

Perhaps the US and UK governments trust the French government not to spy on them.

[Lars]

Re: So the US will be sanctioning them then?

@Tron

France did not have any nuclear sub contract with Australia.

The Aussies wanted diesel subs and that is what the French were offering. And then the Aussies decided they want nuclear instead and France lost that project, with, no doubt, no reason to be happy about it.

[Xalran]

Re: So the US will be sanctioning them then?

Don't worry about France loosing the Aussie subs contract, the penalties paid by Oz for breaking the contract were above the several hundred million Euros...

And yes the Shortfin Barracuda was a conventional version of the French Barracudar Nuclear sub

( And Anyway Even if Australia had wanted the Nuclear version, France wouldn't have sold it. As it's been French Doctrine not to sell any nuclear technology for some time now... We lost enough money with Eurodif ( Iran ) and Osirak ( Iraq )...40 to 50ish years ago.

[druck]

Re: So the US will be sanctioning them then?

Perhaps the US and UK governments trust the French government not to spy on them.

You are funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So the US will be sanctioning them then?

Not sure there are any scaled UK owned service providers left? Some in the mid market (e.g. BJSS) but all the rest are French (Atos/Capgemini), US (Accenture, IBM), Indian Heritage (mix of market listings), etc

So yes the govt does trust them, but also requires SC or DV clearance for many roles.