Why OVHCloud is banking on the stock market to become an alternative to Gafam – La Tribune

Will the first French Tech unicorn also be the first to go public? The French champion of cloud computing hosting, OVHCloud, announced Monday, September 20, that it had obtained the green light from the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) for its listing on Euronext, expected in the coming weeks. Twenty-two years after its creation in 1999, the company based in Roubaix (Nord) and managed by the duo Octave Klaba (founder and president) and Michel Paulin (general manager, ex-SFR), believes that “all the lights are green” for “accelerate its growth ” in France, Europe and the rest of the world.

The challenge: to finally become this long-awaited European alternative to the American Gafam. “All sectors of the economy are being rebuilt around data and the cloud is the foundation of this new economy. Europe lacks actors who can deliver a complete, secure and sovereign cloud ecosystem, and c ‘is the place that OVHCloud wants and can occupy “, said Octave Klaba at a press conference.

The Stock Exchange to forge a stature as a European cloud giant

In detail, OVHCloud aims for a capital increase “up to 400 million euros“to finance its acceleration of growth. The Klaba family will sell part of its shares, which should considerably enrich its members including Octave Klava, who is already the 32nd French fortune, but it will remain the majority shareholder of the group. is going well, OVHcloud could be valued up to 4 billion euros at the end of its IPO, estimates the Wall Street Journal, citing internal sources.

With 1.6 million customers (half in France), with a turnover of 632 million euros in 2020 with an adjusted EBITDA of 263 million euros, the company claims “very profitable“, in hyper-growth (+ 20% per year over the last ten years) and has set itself four objectives.

The first is from “strengthen in all segments of the cloud“and in particular that of the public cloud, which is growing very strongly, by relying on the promise of sovereignty.”OVH is not subject to extraterritorial law and complies with local laws, which meets the need for data sovereignty which is a major concern of CIOs “, specifies the general manager, Michel Paulin. Before adding, in a thinly veiled allusion to Amazon and Microsoft, whose cloud is not the only activity: “OVH has no conflict of interest with its customers since we only use the cloud and we do not use our customers’ data“.

The second objective is to finance the transformation of OVHCloud into a player in PaaS (platform as a service), that is to say complete its offer to offer both the hosting of IT infrastructures (IaaS or infrastructure as a service). ) but also the hardware and operating systems needed to enable customers to develop their business software on their own, as do global industry leaders like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. “This new PaaS market weighs 50 billion euros, is growing rapidly and a big opportunity for OVHCloud. We want to offer 40 software suites and 80 services by the end of 2022“, adds Michel Paulin.

Big marketing investment to make oneself known and to forget the “Strasbourg incident”

The third pillar is, of course, international expansion. With only 50 million euros of turnover in 2020 outside France – out of a total of 263 million euros – OVHCloud has a long way to go to become a true world leader. The company is particularly targeting the rest of Europe, but also North America and Asia-Pacific.

For that, it will be necessary to pass a milestone of notoriety and credibility. And this is precisely the stake of the fourth objective of the IPO: to carry out a “big marketing effort“, in France and abroad. In France, it is above all a question of making oneself better known to the directors of IT services (DSI) of companies, who are not necessarily aware of all the offers offered and who keep in the lead “the Strasbourg incident” of last March, where the data centers had perished in a large fire, putting many sites down and damaging the reputation of the company. The episode cost 28 million euros in “vouchers” to the group, attributable to the results of the fiscal year 2020-2021, concluded last August, and which should see an increase of 10% in turnover compared to the previous year.

The marketing challenge is above all to position itself as a “sovereign” company, in order to take advantage of the trend towards hybrid and multicloud clouds and reassure customers with its DNA “open and transparent on prices“.

“The cloud risks becoming a prison for customers because there are technical and commercial mechanisms for locking the customer away,” says Michel Paulin. Conversely, OVH, which is also a founding member of the European cloud Gaia-X, is positioning itself as an open player, easily reversible and completely transparent, also with the legal certainty that characterizes Europe. We are convinced that changes in regulations will create a territory in which players like OVH are relevant “, he adds, targeting in particular the public cloud and the hosting of sensitive data such as health data.

To create this PaaS offer, OVHCloud aims at both “sovereign and transparent” partnerships with international software publishers, but also the development of its own solutions thanks to its internal R&D. This is why the company does not intend to distribute dividends to shareholders “in a visible future“: all profits are reinvested in accelerating growth, a common practice in tech even if less attractive to investors. The IPO is also an opportunity for the company to diversify its governance:” the whole employees “can become investors, and the future board of directors will have two members (out of eleven) from staff representatives.