Atos Offered Up to €625 Million for Assets in New French Bid

(Bloomberg) — The French government has made an offer to buy parts of Atos SE it considers to be strategic for an enterprise value of €500 million ($524 million) and potentially up to €625 million including earnouts, after an earlier state offer expired.

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The non-binding offer would see the troubled French IT company sell the advanced computing activities of its Big Data and Security unit, the company said in a statement on Monday. This includes high performance and quantum computing as well as business computing and AI activities. The exclusive offer expires in May 2025.

Atos, a key supplier to major French industries including nuclear facilities and last summer’s Olympic Games in Paris, is working to sell some assets and dig its way out of a debt pile that threatened its ability to continue operating. A French commercial court approved Atos’s restructuring plan last month, that will give the company new money to keep operating and give creditors control of the company. The sale of the strategic businesses will be audited as requested by the creditors, although the timeline for the realization of the bailout remains the end of the year.

The French state previously offered to buy the company’s supercomputers in a wider €700 million bid that expired, which also included other businesses. Atos said it will also launch a formal sale process for the remaining parts of the BDS unit, including what it calls mission-critical systems and its cybersecurity offering.

The sale of the remaining BDS assets will be “based on a list of potential buyers approved by the French government,” the French finance ministry said in a separate statement. French defense company Thales previously said it could be interested by some of the assets.