Thierry Breton continues to grow Atos

This is the latest success for Atos. The French computer group has just offered, for 3.4 billion dollars (3 billion euros), the American software company Syntel and continues its development on the North American market.

Since 2008 Atos has doubled in size to become the European leader in data. In 2017, the company generated 11.7 billion euros in sales, against 5.6 billion euros ten years earlier.

2008, it is also the arrival at the head of the group from Thierry Breton. He now appears as one of the architects of this success. Specialized in takeovers of companies in difficulty (Bull, Thomson Multimedia, France-Telecom) this engineer trained at Supélec has long dragged a reputation of "cost-killer" (cost hunter), prompt to abandon the companies once restructured.

The Failure to Power

Of the twenty or so positions he has held throughout his career, Thierry Breton has alternated between private sector and public responsibilities. He was adviser to the Minister of Education René Monory (1987-88), and vice-president of the Regional Council of Poitou-Charentes.

But his pbadage as Minister of Economy Jacques Chirac, between February 2005 and May 2007, did not leave him a memory as sparkling as his clear round at the head of Atos. "Under the Fifth Republic, there are very few great managers from the corporate world to ministerial posts, badyzes the historian Jean Garrigues, with the exception of Francis Mer and Jean -Pierre Fourcade And none really succeeded in politics ".

Thierry Breton, a patron at Bercy

A peculiarity that can be explained by the recruitment of political personnel among the great bodies of the State, and the inadequacy of the big bosses to the French partisan system. "Technical skills are not enough. The men of the company are not sufficiently equipped to weigh in the life of the political parties " judge the historian.

Close to clan Chirac and François Baroin, Thierry Breton made the expenses of the arrival in power of Nicolas Sarkozy, who dismisses him of the power in 2007.

The obsession of the reduction of the costs

As soon as he takes the reins of Atos in November 2008, Thierry Breton integrates the financial discipline in the strategy of the company. "I like to work without debts," he declared in 2016 in an interview at the Digital Factory . The first thing I did when I arrived in 2008 was to indebt Atos. "

This company " was built by successively acquiring companies, often stagnant, to rectify their accounts explains Matthieu Lavillunière, financial badyst at Invest Securities. But that is exactly what Thierry Breton excels at: the identification of interesting targets in the sector, then their integration into the group, the reduction of their costs and the increase of their margins ". [19659003] In addition to Syntel, Atos has made a number of redemptions since 2008: Siemens' IT subsidiary in 2010; Bull, the champion of supercomputers; Xerox ITO, well established in the United States; or Unify, a company specializing in communications.

On the other hand, Atos failed to buy Gemalto, a French specialist in smart cards, at the end of 2017, in the face of the takeover bid launched by Thales on this company.

Atos will not buy Gemalto

Turn of the "cloud"

We can also recognize the former Minister of Economy to have managed to make the French digital giant "the turn of the cloud ( the "cloud computing", Editor's note), at a time when the management of IT infrastructure decreases in favor of remote data storage " Judge Matthieu Lavillunière. A sagacity which, for example, did not show the American IBM, according to the badyst.

Appointed to be part of the government of Edouard Philippe after his nomination, Thierry Breton did not wish to retry the ministerial adventure. At the age of 63, he even had his board of directors vote to lower the maximum age of the CEO, now set at 75.

Cécile Frangne ​​