Altran phases out the Aricent brand

/ April 15, 2019/ Altran, Aricent, M&A (large, with revenues above $50m), News

Altran has phased out the Aricent brand in North America and now trades under the Altran brand. The company highlights it now has three main brands: Aricent for its core ER&D services, Cambridge Consultants for its “innovation consulting” capabilities, and Frog for product design.

The alignment of Altran around three main brands is pleasing. One may argue that the phasing out of Aricent in the US was aggressive and it is not clear if US clients will already be familiar with the “Altran NA” brand.

Also, the reality of these three brands is not as simple as it sounds and Altran has kept quite a number of sub-brands: Tessela, GlobalEdge, Lohika still trade under their pre-acquiition names, sometimes supplemented by the “Altran Group” tagline. Pricol Technologies has become “Altran Engineering Solutions”.

Altran is signaling it has integrated Aricent and this simplifies communication. It also comes at a time when the share of Altran has bounced back, with the company having a market cap of ~EUR 2.8bn. The company also had pleasing results in Q4, with an 11.5% yoy CC/CS growth and its net debt was reduced to EUR 1.3bn, representing a leverage of 3.0, getting closer to its 2.5 target. The $10m fraud at Aricent and investor’s cautiousness about Altran’s net debt are now past.

So all good at Altran? Not yet, Altran will suffer in Q1 2019 from an estimated EUR 20m loss in revenue, resulting from the recent cyber-attack. The company has however highlighted that the impact on full-year 2019 would be immaterial. Let’s now wish for Altran an uneventful year

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