OVH Drops IPO Target Against Figure Mooted A Month Ago

OVHcloud, the French cloud services provider, has trimmed roughly €50m off its IPO target as it seeks a capital injection from the financial markets.

The company, which saw fire engulf its Strasbourg operations on 10 March, has said it plans to raise €350m (around $406m) in its stock market debut, down from the "€400m" figure it floated in September.

OVH claims it is the fifth largest cloud provider in Europe and has frequently talked up the demand for data sovereignty by European clients, a regulatory concern for many orgs concerned about the impact of data protection laws on the dominant US cloud firms.

Last month OVH Groupe SAS said the IPO would value the firm at around $4.7bn. The privately owned company, which trades as OVHcloud, said the offering on Euronext Paris was planned to "raise up to €400m through the issuance of new shares."

However, according to a fresh statement by the firm seen by The Reg, the IPO plans now value the firm at around €3.5bn-€3.74bn ($4bn-$4.3bn), with a set price range of €18.50-20 per share for the flotation.

Yann Leca, CFO, told Reuters this afternoon that the investment would be "more than enough" to finance OVHcloud's growth plans until 2025.

Documents it issued in September confirmed the company had received a commitment from its insurers to the tune of $58m following fire damage at its Strasbourg data centre.

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In May, OVHcloud outlined a three-point plan designed to avoid a repeat of the loss of data and services resulting from March's fire.

The plan, named "Hyper Resilience", relies on a combinations of a revamped approach to internal backups, external customer back-ups and a new policy of fail-over between three data centres per region.

The fire took place on 10 March and destroyed the SBG2 hall of the Strasbourg data centre, damaged SBG1 badly, and led to a massive effort to clean salvageable kit so it could be installed in the remaining three data centres at Strasbourg, or moved to other OVH facilities. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

Founder and chairman Octave Klaba said two uninterruptible power supplies units were the likely cause of the fire. By 14 April OVHcloud was still struggling to bring all customers affected by the fire back online – a situation described by Klaba as a "real nightmare."

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

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