Amidst turmoil for almost a year, Worldline announced on Friday 13 September that its CEO Gilles Grapinet, in charge since 2013, would be stepping down on 30 September.
This exit is accompanied by a new warning regarding its results: the European leader in payment services has recorded worse than expected results, particularly in Australia and New Zealand. The stock market has not taken this into account. The price fell by more than 14% on Friday, closing at a record low of 7.20 euros, a sign of strong investor distrust.
The group specifies that the applications “internal and external” will be examined for the appointment of a new CEO, under the supervision of Belgian Wilfried Verstraete, former head of the credit insurer Euler Hermes, appointed president in June to succeed Bernard Bourigeaud, who died on December 14, 2023.
In the meantime, Marc-Henri Desportes, Deputy Managing Director and Head of Commercial Services, will act as interim COO. “The board of directors made the right decision, although we would have preferred it to have come sooner”Say hello to Nicolas Ceron, partner at the investment fund Bluebell Capital Partners.
Stock market storm
The British activist fund, which had already intervened in France in the past on Danone, had launched a campaign to demand changes in Worldline’s governance in December 2023, two months after the stock market storm weathered by the payments company. On October 25, 2023, in fact, its share price plummeted by more than 60% during the session, following the publication of its third quarter accounts full of bad news: unprecedented for a CAC 40 company, which was expelled from the star track shortly after.
That day, around €4 billion of market value had been wiped out, or twice the payments specialist’s current capitalisation of €2 billion, which is also the value of the former Atos subsidiary when it went public in June 2014.
Grapinet has since set about putting things right by launching a savings plan in February that will result in a maximum reduction of 8% for its 18,000 employees worldwide (including around 4,000 in France), a story of lower fixed costs that have become too high in a less buoyant macroeconomic environment. But the board of directors, significantly restructured in June, has deemed that Thierry Breton’s former right-hand man, who had already headed Worldline when the company was a subsidiary of Atos, was no longer the right man for the job.
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