“India is increasingly important as a growth engine of the company,” Belmer told ET on his maiden visit to India since taking charge of the €2.9-billion company just about 100 days ago.
Atos has more than 40,000 employees in India. Out of its stated plan to hire 15,000 additional associates in the country as announced in September 2021, the company has already rolled out 6,000 offers.
The company offers critical high performance computing (HPC) and digital solutions to global clients from this India region, comprising one-third of its revenue.
Belmer aims to talk to the company’s Indian talent base about his new strategy.
“In India, our strategy is based on organic growth with training and reskilling of our teams to make sure that they are capable of accompanying digital transformation and the cloud part of the business,” he said. “And we have undertaken substantial retraining programmes to elevate capabilities and certifications of our teams in India.”
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While Atos’ legacy solutions are not growing as rapidly as the digital offerings, Belmer said it will continue to remain a stable part of the business. Within India, the company is increasing focus on HPC solutions for the public sector.
Under the new global strategy, Atos has divided its businesses into three: big data & security (BDS) solutions, covering HPC and cyber security; digital, comprising system integration and cloud solutions; and technology foundations, covering the company’s legacy businesses across data centre and BPO solutions.
Digital and BDS offerings comprised almost 51% of the group revenue as of fiscal 2021, up from about 40% in 2019.
Belmer said digital and BDS are returning higher margins – in low double digits – due to the shorter and specialised nature of deals compared to almost no profits in legacy solutions. “However, we think that even though the legacy part of the business is shrinking today, it will shortly plateau and come back to profitability as we see customer interest in private infrastructure,” he said.
While the company has been making acquisitions to add to its digital capabilities, in India, it expects to remain focused on talent in the long run.
Atos has recorded attrition rates of around 20%, Belmer said. To attract and retain talent the company is evolving its remuneration strategy to be in line with the market average. “And so, we’re going to try to get closer to the larger universities here in India to make sure that we can establish connections,” he added.
Within its India employee base, the company is working on internal-first hiring initiatives and has already covered 75,000 certifications, out of which about 53,000 are in digital areas. Similar certification initiatives are planned for the current fiscal year.
While India itself contributes to a miniscule 1% of the company’s revenue, Belmer sees opportunities in several areas.
“We want to leverage HPC solutions space, especially for the public sector in India. We see a lot of interest around the HPC and around this National Supercomputing Mission (NSM),” he said.
The company has invested in NSM by way of assembly and testing of high-performance computers.
Atos is recovering from a tumultuous year of performance and governance setbacks. Balmer has started a review of its global operations with his India visit.
