OVH drops IPO target against figure mooted a month ago • The Register

OVHcloud, the French cloud service provider, has cut approximately € 50 million from its IPO target as it seeks capital injection from financial markets.

The company which saw that a fire engulfed its operations in Strasbourg on 10 March, said it plans to raise 350m euros (about $ 406m) in its stock market debut, compared to the 400m-euro figure it released in September.

OVH claims to be the fifth largest cloud provider in Europe and often talks about demand for data sovereignty from European customers, regulatory concerns for many organizations concerned about the impact of data protection laws on dominant US cloud companies.

Last month OVH Groupe SAS said the IPO would value the company at about $ 4.7 billion. The private company, which trades as OVHcloud, said the Euronext Paris offering was planned to “raise up to 400m euros by issuing new shares”.

According to a new company statement seen by Reg, IPO plans now estimate the company at about 3.5 to 3.74 billion euros ($ 4 billion-4.3 billion), with a set price range of 18.50-20 euros per share for flotation.

Jan Leka, CFO, told Reuters this afternoon that the investment will be “more than enough” to finance OVHcloud’s growth plans until 2025.

Documents issued in September confirmed that the company had received a commitment from its insurers of $ 58 million after damage from a fire at a data center in Strasbourg.

In May, OVHcloud outlined a three-point plan designed to avoid a recurrence of data and service loss as a result of the March fire.

The plan, called Hypersustainability, relies on a combination of an updated approach to internal archives, backups of external customers and a new referral policy between three data centers for a region.

The fire started on March 10 and destroyed the SBG2 hall of the Strasbourg data center, severely damaged the SBG1 and led to a huge effort to clean up the rescue kit so that it could be installed in the other three data centers in Strasbourg or moved to other OVH facilities. Fortunately, no one was injured.

Founder and chairman Octave Klaba said two sources of uninterruptible power supply were the probable cause of the fire. Until April 14, OVHcloud was still struggling to get all customers affected by the fire back online again – a situation described by Klaba as a “real nightmare”.

In a May update, CEO Michel Paulin said the operator had restored 118,000 services out of 120,000 services affected by the incident.

Trading in Euronext Paris shares opens on October 15, the company said in a statement. ®