By Mathieu Rosemain
PARIS (Reuters) – The French government has sent a letter of intent to Atos’ board with the aim of acquiring all of its activities that the state deems strategic, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Sunday.
The struggling French IT consulting company, whose shares have slumped in the last three years, secures communications for the French military and secret services and manufactures servers to make supercomputers capable of processing vast amounts of data for research or to develop the nascent artificial intelligence industry.
“This weekend I filed a letter of intent to acquire all the sovereign activities of Atos,” Le Maire said in an interview with French news channel LCI.
Le Maire added that he wished to see other industrial groups join the French state’s potential bid for the activities, without elaborating.
The consortium, led by France’s state shareholding agency APE, would include other “French sovereign players”, Le Maire said, declining to name them.
There has been speculation in the French press that defence groups such as Thales and Dassault Aviation could take part in a plan to safeguard the assets, which include Atos’ supercomputers and some of its most sensitive cybersecurity activities.
(Reporting by Mathieu Rosemain; Editing by Ros Russell and Hugh Lawson)