France’s OVHcloud about to announce IPO plan

French cloud computing services provider OVHcloud is about to set out its plan to list the company’s shares on Euronext’s Paris stock exchange, a source close to the matter said, confirming an earlier report by weekly JDD.

The announcement will include a timetable for the initial public offering (IPO), which would be one of France’s biggest this year and could value the company at several billion euros, according to several analysts, the source said.

JDD reported that OVHcloud would make the announcement on Monday.

Founded by Octave Klaba in 1999, OVHcloud competes mostly with U.S. firms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, which dominate the market.

Based in Roubaix near Belgium, OVHcloud employs 2,450 people and has 32 data centres worldwide. It generated 600 million euros ($726 million) in sales in 2019.

In March, a fire destroyed one of OVHcloud’s four data centres in Strasbourg, in eastern France, disrupting millions of websites, knocking out government agencies’ portals, banks, shops, news websites and a chunk of the .FR web space, according to internet monitors.

The incident occurred shortly after OVHcloud announced plans for a potential initial public offering of its shares. Reuters