Questions from a newcomer

Epicurus

New member
Disclaimer 1: None of the following should be construed as financial advice. The author of this post has virtually no financial experience nor direct links with Atos, nor any actor involved with the company or in recent controversies. All information the author will share has been retrieved through publicly available documents and platforms, all of which are online. Further, such information may simply be wrong or wrongly reported from the author. The author should be thought of as an ignorant, uninformed and very limited teenager.

Disclaimer 2: The author of this post owns Atos shares.

Disclaimer 3: None of the questions posed by the author wants to solicit the sharing of confidential or otherwise non publicly available information.

Is the company not significantly undervalued?

Atos made it to the edges of my watchlist a couple of years ago, but only recently have I started paying attention to the company, which has eventually brought me to buy some shares.

I understand that the past couple of years have been tremendously bad, in terms of uncertainty, lack of clarity and transparency from management and just in terms of the sheer amount of cash that has been burnt.

Nonetheless, I still feel that the current valuation reflects a very pessimistic outlook on the company. Dumbing it down, as of today, assuming net debt to be €3,35B (they recently confirmed guidance of annual Free Cash Flow of about -€1B) the Enterprise Value of the company stands at just above €4B. Compared with a stable revenue of €11B and a track record that shows that the business can be profitable (e.g. avg net income between 2016 and 2020 greater than €550mln), the company appears undervalued, at least in the face of these ratios.

Further (here very much out of my depth y'all can help me out with much more knowledge), if we look at rumoured valuation of specific units... if we account for €1.5B for BDS, would it be that outlandish to state that a valuation on the lower end for Digital might be €2.5B? Don't you have right there already the €4B of EV without even touching TFCo and a number of smaller Eviden units?

Comparatively the valuation also seems attractive e.g. Kyndril (resulting from the recent IBM spinoff).

If we add on top of that the fact that the company is involved in strategic activities that I imagine the French government (yes, granted only limited part of business) would much rather nationalise before seeing it negotiated bankruptcy court. Wasn't the last chunk of EDF nationalised with something like a 50% premium on the stock price?

Question 1: what am I not seeing?

Question 2: what mistakes am I making?

Question 3: does any of you have a clear idea of the units that make up Eviden and what share of turnover, employees and so forth is attributable to them?
 

DiPieggi

Member
1.
The company has just not been able to deliver on their promises and guidance for the last 3 years. Plus, there is no confidence at all in Board and Top Management capacity to make business profitable.

Complete instability and lack of vision and business expertise in Top Management (6 CEOs in 3 years, 5 Board members resignation end of 2023) is another poor record in company governance.

Split of the company announced in 2022 and then decision from Chairman to sell more than half of the Business at negative price. Complete nonsense and lack of respect for shareholders

2.
We have no idea if more restructuring costs were necesary in S2 2023 and even in 2024 (supposedly no, after S1 results presentation by N. Bihmane) and how fast Atos is still burning cash in unproductive units, loss making contracts, consulting fees, etc...

Also, we still don't know if the debt restructuring is on the right track and if this will push Atos to sell more Divisions below their fair value. Not to mention possible bankruptcy.

Since misleading information has been sent to market and shareholders since 2021, I'd rather wait to see Net Results in line with competitors' to invest in the company.
 

Cosmic Gate

Active member
Main issue with the debt level are the non respect of the covenant Ebitda on net debt > 3,7 by memory (on a period over 1 year). The limit is generally 3/3,5. The 3,75 is obtained very artificially. Atos fail to deleverage its balancesheet or improve its cash generation in Two years thanks to the management.
As a consequence nobody wants to issue a new loan, Atos has major loans arriving to maturity end 2024/Beg 2025 so far they go into a major payment issue. Without any solution we will have a judiciary arrangement with main losses laying on shareholders.

Atos is a 0 or double share, whatever the share price is 2/4/6/8€, whatever the reliability of the business behind.
 

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