“It’s very important that it stays in Europe,” says his former boss Thierry Breton

“It’s very important that it stays in Europe”, supports Monday April 29 on France Inter Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for the Internal Market and former boss of Atos, while the government wishes to acquire the sovereign activities of the IT giant. On Sunday, the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire announced on LCI that he had sent a letter of intent to the French IT giant to acquire its sovereign activities.

Thierry Breton says that when he was at the head of Atos he did not want “that some of its assets go into hands that were not European”. He considers this all the more important since these “assets are very strategic for Europe”, “very important for having sovereignty in the processing of information in Europe”.

Strategic divergences

Thierry Breton recalls that he directed “for eleven years” the French IT group, now in financial difficulty. He prides himself in particular on having made one “leading company in the most critical areas for data processing”. He assures that when he left the head of Atos, “more than five years ago”the former flagship of French Tech was “become number one in cybersecurity services in Europe and number three worldwide”. He also insists on the fact that the group then had “zero net debt”.

“It had become number one in terms of super computers, particularly for modeling the French nuclear weapon and number 3 in the world (…), it was number one in terms of secure data processing.”

Thierry Breton, former boss of Atos

on France Inter

The former boss of Atos certainly highlights the fact that the company “continued for two years [après son départ] to be one of those who performed best at European level”. But Thierry Breton then draws a more gloomy assessment of Atos. He thus evokess “strategic divergences, orthogonal orientations” or the lack of stability at the head of the group. “Five general directors followed one another”he regrets.