UK star shines brightest at Atos

(By Anthony Miller – Wednesday 29th July 2009 7:45am). It looks like Atos UK CEO Keith Wilman has done it again, delivering the best growth in both revenues and margins in the group’s first half. While Atos group revenues declined 2.4% organically yoy to €2.6b, UK grew 6.4% to €446m, 17% of the total. All of Atos’ other country markets were in decline, Benelux by nearly 12%. Group margins were essentially flat yoy at 4.6% whereas UK rose 1.9 pts to 8.2%, again higher than any other country market both in absolute terms and in expansion. Benelux was Atos’ next most profitable region, at 6.7% margin, though down 1.4 pts.

You can probably guess how Atos’ service lines performed – Consulting and SI were down, outsourcing up. To be precise, Consutling revenues crashed 23% to €133m (1.4% margin), SI fell by 9% to €974m (4.5% margin), whereas Managed Services grew 5% to €974m (3.6% margin). Hi-Tech Transactional Services (formerly Online Services – includes the Atos Worldline business) grew 7% to €434m and has the highest margin (14.4%). Medical BPO (UK) grew 2% to €74m but margins expanded nearly 4 pts to 11.4%.

Now for my usual gripe. Nowhere, but nowhere in today’s release is there mention of offshore, or for that matter, nearshore or any other type of shore. They did talk about the 1,400 subcontractors they laid off (down 36% since year-end and 40% higher than originally proposed) and the 1,300 employees they laid off. And remember, all this did is keep group margins flat. Tomorrow we’ll hear from Capgemini and Friday week from Logica. I’m sure you’ll hear them talk about offshore as a fundamental part of their strategy as they usually do. Of course, both also have a high exposure to the Benelux market too, around 15-16%, so it will be interesting to see if they took share from Atos.

Anyway, the concall starts shortly and afterwards I will be speaking to Atos UK CEO, Keith Wilman, so I will bring you more later.