Atos in Debt Talks With Banks and Bondholders, CEO Says

We are actually working with our creditors, both our banks and our bondholders for a solution to our high level of debt and the maturities are coming due in the next 18 months. And the dialogue is very, very positive. It’s we’re operating under the conciliation as you have mentioned. It’s like a mediator is helping through those discussions and I do believe that everybody is aligned. In fact, we recently had secured some liquidity from those same bondholders and banks. Again an an indication that everybody is really aligned to find a solution. You came on board a few months ago, but obviously the situation at Atos has been deteriorating for the past few years. The shares have lost more than 90% of their value over the past seven years, more than 80% over the past year alone. Why would any investor decide to invest more, inject more fresh money in Atos today? Well, Atos is actually a great company. It’s a the company is a leader in the IT market and nothing has changed about it. The company has amazing assets. They start with the people. There are about 95,000 employees of the company and amazingly 80,000 of them are engineers, which is unusual in this industry. The other thing that makes Atlas so special is that the company has also over 2000 patents. So that is something that is really unusual in the IT industry. So the combination of all the things that Atlas can do from IT outsourcing to digital workplace to cybersecurity or even an advanced computing or digital transformation, the company is incredibly well positioned whether it’s clients and that’s what makes fundamentally the company have great, great value. It’s not you know it’s been saddled with a lot of debt, no question about it. But we do have also a solution you know coming up on the on near horizon. So what else could be part of the proposal apart from this group of bondholders? Are we going to see, for example, some asset disposal announced before the end of next week? Is that a possibility or do you totally exclude this? I think what we have presented is a, a comprehensive plan that included all the assets of Atos. Now we’re going to have to see what proposals are going to come through. Some of them will just keep the whole, the whole of the company together. One of those proposals likely to come from 1.1 of our largest shareholders and others will come in from our bondholders who seem to also be interested in keeping the whole company. But we can’t just really forgo any potential proposal that may come in and may entail a different mix of ideas such as asset disposal or not. Does that mean that you’re not excluding anything at this stage? Absolutely not. We’re open to all kind of proposals and actually welcome all kind of proposals including SP. Enough. Well, I think again, we’ll have to just wait. I can’t just really tell you if the spin off will really solve anything and we’ll have to just really evaluate it in the within the comprehensive framework that we put forward. Ideally, again, we want to make sure that we keep all the assets together because they have a compelling value, but we don’t want to preclude anybody for coming up with some, some of their own proposals. Will this whole plan be able to save at us? Actually Atlas is a great company as I mentioned to you. It’s just really is gonna be, we know, I do believe that we’ll come up with a plan and the company will succeed long term. So we’ll be saved. It will be saved.