The business branch of Orange is reorganizing but no longer wants to list its cyber activities

Four months almost to the day after taking the reins of OBS (Orange Business Services), Aliette Mousnier-Lompré is starting to make her mark on the Orange business subsidiary. All the employees of the group’s B to B activity were gathered in Paris on Tuesday for the first face-to-face annual OBS summit since the pandemic. The opportunity for the new leader to unveil her strategy, while the subsidiary in difficulty faces the decline of certain very profitable traditional activities, in particular fixed telephone lines in companies competing with Zoom or Teams.

The new CEO, appointed in May to replace Helmut Reisinger, has in any case already decided on a major issue: OBS will not list its cyberdefense subsidiary, Orange Cyberdefense, on the stock market. This project had however been studied under the mandate of Stéphane Richard. By isolating this activity in the accounts and considering a listing of this branch in strong growth, Orange hoped to better highlight the value of this business, while the overall valuation of the group barely reaches 25 billion euros. . A “carve-out” had even been carried out. But the track of an IPO is no longer relevant. “For the moment, we are no longer talking about an IPO”, Aliette Mousnier-Lompré decided.