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Airbus is working on an offer worth up to €1.8bn for Atos’s prized big data and cyber security unit, as the French IT services company seeks to restructure and cut its debt load.
Airbus and Atos are set to announce on Wednesday that the aerospace and defence company will enter due diligence on its planned offer that would place an enterprise value of between €1.5bn and €1.8bn on the French group’s unit called BDS, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Atos’s negotiations to sell BDS mark a change in strategic direction under recently appointed chair Jean Pierre Mustier, as he works to find a solution to how the company deals with €2.25bn in debt that matures in 2025.
Atos’s market value has slumped by more than 90 per cent in the past three years to €782mn, while Standard & Poor’s downgraded the company’s credit rating in November citing increased liquidity risks.
Airbus has made no secret of its ambitions to expand its cyber activities. Guillaume Faury, Airbus chief executive, told the Financial Times in November the Toulouse-based company wanted to “grow in cyber”.
The talks between Atos and Airbus over BDS are not exclusive, so other bidders may still enter the frame, people familiar with the matter said.
French defence electronics group Thales, which has jet-fighter maker Dassault Aviation as its biggest shareholder, has been interested in BDS in the past as part of efforts to expand its cyber security business.
Thales has been considering its options in recent weeks, one person briefed on the situation said.
Airbus declined to comment. Atos and Thales did not respond to a request for comment.
Airbus had been in talks last year to buy a minority stake in the Atos division called Eviden, which contains BDS and the French company’s cloud computing business. However, it pulled out after Chris Hohn, the hedge fund manager and a large shareholder, objected to the plan.
At the time, people close to Airbus said it withdrew because it decided that buying a roughly 30 per cent stake would have been costly while not giving it much say over how Eviden was run.
Mustier’s predecessor as Atos chair, Bertrand Meunier, had resisted selling off parts of Atos to pay down debt, instead prioritising a plan to split the company into two.
He reached an agreement on selling Atos’s lossmaking legacy IT services business Tech Foundations to Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský.
The rest of Atos, using the name Eviden, would remain listed, with Křetínský anchoring a €900mn capital raise that would give him a 7.5 per cent stake.
However, many shareholders opposed the terms of the deal with Křetínský, arguing he was paying too little for Tech Foundations. Some politicians also objected to the idea of having a foreign shareholder own part of Eviden, which has technology that is used for France’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
Under Mustier’s leadership, Atos is now renegotiating the terms of the agreement with Křetínský, with support from the company’s new lead shareholder Onepoint, which has built an 11 per cent stake.
People close to Křetínský have said talks will focus on getting him out of the Eviden leg of the deal.
“This is a discussion we are happy to have and all the players are all more or less aligned on that,” said a person close to the Czech businessman.