Atos - comment

Atos have released a pre-statement with some headline numbers and postponed their FY23 results until 20th March. Headlines will be dominated by the news that EPEI (Kretinski) is no longer buying the TFCo business, however, this was rumored to be the case all month. Bonds are off 3-5pts. The stated reason for the rescheduling is to allow external auditors time to complete the full audit of the Company’s non-cash goodwill impairment result, however, we suspect that the release of qualified results while the Company are in Mandat Ad Hoc would not be helpful at this junction.  

Net Debt at year-end was €2,230, after FCF outflow of €109m in H2 (versus guidance of flat for H2). We will await full numbers but the Group CEO stated that FY23 working capital was €500m less than the prior year, due to reversal of some working capital management actions. Paul Saleh stated the previous guidance of flat was assuming more working capital improvements, implying that FCF was worse than the €109m shortfall stated (i.e. they had planned to reverse more working capital management actions). Without full numbers, it is hard to state that the working capital “actions” have reduced from €1.8bn to c. €1.3bn.