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After narrowly avoiding potential collapse via a €2.9 billion ($3+ billion) debt swap deal with creditors, French IT giant Atos is on its sixth CEO in three years.
CEO Paul Saleh is outbound, to be replaced with company chairman Jean-Pierre Mustier as the individual in charge of navigating the firm through the bailout deal, the firm confirmed to Bloomberg in a statement. A French court has also granted Atos an accelerated safeguard procedure, a recently formed type of restructuring process designed to rescue ailing French firms, the company said in its statement.
“It means that Atos is saved,” Mustier said to Bloomberg. “The financial problems are behind us;, we can now focus on the industrial development.”
The deal that saved the firm involves converting around $3.1 billion of loans and bonds (i.e., debt) into equity; about $1.8 billion in new debt; and around $250 million in new equity, Bloomberg previously reported.
Atos didn’t respond to IT Brew’s request for comment on Mustier’s appointment.
Atos had a market value of $15 billion in 2017; its stock peaked at around $131 a share that year, but has since lost virtually all of its value and now stands at around $1 per share.
The tech firm’s clients include the Paris 2024 Olympics and the French military—Atos’s contracts with the latter include building supercomputers for its nuclear deterrent program and a combat information system named Scorpion. Yet difficulties that hobbled the firm in recent years included failed attempts to buy US firm DXC, Fortune reported, as well as accounting irregularities discovered in 2021.
Then-CEO Rodolphe Belmer resigned in 2022 after a plan by McKinsey consultants to split Atos’s legacy and newer businesses (cloud, data, and cybersecurity) was poorly received by investors. Negotiations with Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EPEI group, and then Onepoint, over restructuring deals fell through, and aeronautics firm Airbus SE announced it had terminated talks to acquire Atos’s big data and cybersecurity assets earlier this year.
Amid all this were regular shuffles in the Atos leadership. Elie Girard handed over the reins to Belmer in January 2022. After Belmer’s resignation several months later, Atos cycled through CEOs Nourdine Bihmane and Yves Bernaert (who each lasted just a few months). Saleh, Bernaert’s successor, has only been CEO since this January.